I guess I made some assumptions that might not be obvious to all readers.

You’re absolutely right, performance through the VM would not be acceptable. I/O would be slow not least because your two VMs and the larger OS are all sharing a single disk. But further, I wouldn’t run MySQL on a laptop or other single disk machine anyway.

The purpose of the article here is to create a virtual environment or sandbox within which an admin play around. You can pull the levers and turn the dials, and get comfortable with how all the moving parts work.

For production use you’d have two separate servers with their own disk subsystem or shared storage.

-Sean

Perhaps for webserver load I could see it working fine but DB I/O? Seems like that might be a stretch.