Porting snort on ESX Server

Hi,
  I am currently working on a project to port snort on ESX server
(http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/) so that it can run natively
on ESX server (as opposed to snort running in guest OS virtual
machine).
As a part of performance study, I am considering comparing snort
performance in three scenarios:
1. Snort running on native linux (RHEL4)
2. Snort running in virtual machine on ESX server ( RHEL4 as guest OS)
3. Snort running natively on ESX server.

In current experimental setup, I have modified the libpcap sources to
develop ESX specific implementation (pcap-esx.c) to provide data link
access on ESX. Please note that at this point of time, my focus is
more on testing network I/O efficiency rather than snort as a full
fledges IDS since I am using ESX specific data link access calls in
libpcap.

Right now I can think of comparing snort performance in these 3
scenarios on the basis of packet drop rate and CPU utilization at high
network load on the same hardware setup.I would really appreciate if I
can get some inputs/suggestions on other factors which would serve as
good becnhmark for comparison in above described scenarios. Any other
suggestion about performance testing are welcome. Thanks !

Regards,
Sachin

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