The performance capabilities of virtual shared-memory systems still lead to the impression that the use of VSM is purely academic, providing conceptual simplicity at the expense of performance. The heaviness of the VSM implementation itself, especially the underlying consistency model, often leads to this conclusion. The other acceptance-limiting factor is due to the operating system, particularly if the functional enrichment introduced by the VSM subsystem is not an integral part of the overall design. The authors describe the design and implementation of the Peace parallel operating-system family-in particular, the message-passing kernel-and its VSM subsystem, Vote. They discuss the performance figures of Vote and the kernel, showing that high performance with software-based VSM implementations is no longer wishful thinking.