Last October, I blogged about SQL Server performance with vSphere 5.5 using a four-socket Intel Xeon processor E7 based host. Now that vSphere 6 is available, I’ve run an updated set of tests using this new release, on an even more powerful host, with Xeon E7 v2 processors. A variety of virtual CPU (vCPU) and virtual machine (VM) quantities were tested to show that vSphere can handle hundreds of thousands of online transaction processing (OLTP) database operations per minute.
DVD Store 2.1, an open-source OLTP database stress tool, was the workload used to stress the VMs. The first experiment in the paper was a generational performance comparison between the old and new setups; as you can see, there is a dramatic increase in throughput, even though the size of each VM has doubled from 8 vCPUs per VM to 16:
There are also tests using CPU affinity to show the performance differences between physical cores and logical processors (Hyper-Threads), the benefit of “right-sizing” virtual machines, and measuring the impact of the advanced Latency Sensitivity setting.
For more details and the test results, please download the whitepaper: Performance Characterization of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 6.