David Morse

David Morse is a member of the VMware Performance Engineering Group. He has 20 years of benchmarking experience between VMware, Dell, and NCR. He has led benchmarking teams which were responsible for numerous benchmark leadership positions. Since 1999, he has held a variety of roles within the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), including chairing the Open Systems Steering Committee and serving on the Board of Directors. David has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of South Carolina and is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE).

Recent Posts

Fujitsu Skylake to Cascade Lake Graph

First VMmark 3.1 Publications, Featuring New Cascade Lake Processors

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VMmark is a free tool used by hardware vendors and others to measure the performance, scalability, and power consumption of virtualization platforms.  If you’re unfamiliar with VMmark 3.x, each tile is a grouping of 19 virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously running diverse workloads commonly found in today’s data centers, including a scalable Web simulation, an E-commerce Read more...

SQL Server Performance of VMware Cloud on AWS

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In the past, I’ve always benchmarked performance of SQL Server VMs on vSphere with “on-premises” infrastructure.  Given the skyrocketing interest in the cloud, I was very excited to get my hands on VMware Cloud on AWS – just in time for Amazon’s AWS Summit! A key question our customers have is: how well do applications Read more...
Generational SQL Server VM Database Performance

Updated – SQL Server VM Performance with vSphere 6.5, October 2017

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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 Read more...
Generational SQL Server DB Host Power and Performance/watt

SQL Server VM Performance with VMware vSphere 6.5

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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 Read more...

VMware vCloud Air Database Performance Scalability with SQL Server

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Previous posts have shown vSphere can easily handle running Microsoft SQL Server on four-socket servers with large numbers of cores—with vSphere 5.5 on Westmere-EX and more recently with vSphere 6 on Ivy Bridge-EX.  We recently ran similar tests on vCloud Air to measure how these enterprise databases with mission critical performance requirements perform in a Read more...
Generational performance improvement from old study to new study

SQL Server VM Performance on VMware vSphere 6

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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 Read more...
8 x 8 vCPU VM throughput

Monster Performance with SQL Server VMs on vSphere 5.5

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VMware vSphere provides an ideal platform for customers to virtualize their business-critical applications, including databases, ERP systems, email servers, and even newly emerging technologies such as Hadoop.  I’ve been focusing on the first one (databases), specifically Microsoft SQL Server, one of the most widely deployed database platforms in the world.  Many organizations have dozens or Read more...