Achieving optimal SQL Server performance on vSphere has been a constant focus here at VMware; I’ve published past performance studies with vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 which showed excellent performance up to the maximum VM size supported at the time.
Since then, there have been quite a few changes! While this study uses a similar test methodology, it features an updated hypervisor (vSphere 6.5), database engine (SQL Server 2016), OLTP benchmark (DVD Store 3), and CPUs (Intel Xeon v4 processors with 24 cores per socket, codenamed Broadwell-EX).
The new tests show large SQL Server databases continue to run extremely efficiently, achieving great performance on vSphere 6.5. Following our best practices was all that was necessary to achieve this scalability – which reminds me, don’t forget to check out Niran’s new SQL Server on vSphere best practices guide, which was also just updated.
In addition to performance, power consumption was measured on each ESXi host. This allowed for a comparison of Host Power Management (HPM) policies within vSphere, performance per watt of each host, and power draw under stress versus idle:
Additionally, this new study compares a virtual file-based disk (VMDK) on VMware’s native Virtual Machine File System (VMFS 5) to a physical Raw Device Mapping (RDM). I added this test for two reasons: first, it has been several years since they have been compared; and second, customer feedback from VMworld sessions indicates this is still a debate that comes up in IT shops, particularly with regard to deploying database workloads such as SQL Server and Oracle.
For more details and the test results, download the paper: Performance Characterization of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 6.5