Scalability and performance of SAP transactions in a virtual environment is important for customers in situations where they experience increasing workloads to accommodate additional users and new parts of the business that migrate to SAP during a phased deployment. Part of this growth can include a scenario where a customer starts with smaller ESX hosts and during hardware refresh cycles acquire newer larger servers. It would be reassuring to know that as the SAP workload grows and is moved to the newer larger ESX hosts, scalability of the workload is not compromised. This is demonstrated in the following paper that documents a proof of concept conducted by HP, Intel, SAP, SUSE, and VMware:
The paper shows how a three-tier SAP workload linearly scales (better than 90 percent of full linear scalability) from a two-socket Intel Xeon processor 5600 series-based server to an eight-socket Intel Xeon processor 7500 series-based server. The final large configuration consisted of an 8-way, 128 GB virtual machine running a MaxDB database and Central Instance and fourteen 4-way, 16 GB virtual machines running SAP dialog instances.
