vSphere is an industry-leading virtualization platform that enables customers to build private clouds for running enterprise applications such as SQL server databases. Customers can expect near-native performance from their virtualized SQL databases when running in a vSphere environment. VMware vCenter Server, the management component of vSphere, uses a database to store and organize information related to vSphere-based virtual environments. This database can be implemented using SQL server. Based on the previous VMware performance studies involving SQL databases, it is reasonable to expect the performance of a virtualized SQL Server-based vCenter database to be similar to that in native.
A study was conducted in the VMware performance engineering lab to validate the assumption. The results of the study show that:
- The most resource-intensive operations of a virtualized SQL Server-based vCenter database perform at a level comparable to that in native environment.
- A SQL Server-based vCenter database managing a vSphere virtual environment of any scale can be virtualized on vSphere.
- SQL databases, in general, perform at a near-native level when virtualized on vSphere 4.1.
Complete details of the experiments and their results can be found in this technical document.
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