Back in March, I published a performance study of SQL Server performance with vSphere 6.5 across multiple processor generations. Since then, Intel has released a brand-new processor architecture: the Xeon Scalable platform, formerly known as Skylake.
Our team was fortunate enough to get early access to a server with these new processors inside – just in time for generating data that we presented to customers at VMworld 2017.
Each Xeon Platinum 8180 processor has 28 physical cores (pCores), and with four processors in the server, there was a whopping 112 pCores on one physical host!
As you can see, that extra horsepower provides nice database server performance scaling:
For more details and the test results, take a look at the updated paper:
Performance Characterization of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 6.5