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Author Archives: David Morse

About David Morse

David Morse is a member of the VMware Performance Engineering Group. He has 19 years of benchmarking experience at 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).

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 (like SQL Server) perform in our cloud?  Well, I’m happy to report that the answer is great!

VMware Cloud on AWS Environment

First, here is a screenshot of what my vSphere-powered Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) looks like:vSphere Client - VMware Cloud on AWSThis screenshot shows several notable items:

  • The HTML5-based vSphere Client interface should be very familiar to vSphere administrators, making the move to the cloud extremely easy
  • This SDDC instance was auto-provisioned with 4 ESXi hosts and 2TB of memory, all of which were pre-configured with vSAN storage and NSX networking.
    • Each host is configured with two CPUs (Intel Xeon Processor E5-2686 v4); each socket contains 18 cores running at 2.3GHz, resulting in 144 physical cores in the cluster. For more information, see the VMware Cloud on AWS Technical Overview
  • Virtual machines are provisioned within the customer workload resource pool, and vSphere DRS automatically handles balancing the VMs across the compute cluster.

Benchmark Methodology

To measure SQL Server database performance, I used HammerDB, an open-source database load testing and benchmarking tool.  It implements a TPC-C like workload, and reports throughput in TPM (Transactions Per Minute).

To measure how well performance scaled in this cloud, I started with a single 8 vCPU, 32GB RAM VM for the SQL Server database.  To drive the workload, I created a 4 vCPU, 4GB RAM HammerDB driver VM.  I then cloned these VMs to measure 2 database VMs being driven simultaneously:HammerDB and SQL Server VMs in VMware Cloud on AWS

I then doubled the number of VMs again to 4, 8, and finally 16.  As with any benchmark, these VMs were completely driven up to saturation (100% load) – “pedal to the metal”!

Results

So, how did the results look?  Well, here is a graph of each VM count and the resulting database performance:

As you can see, database performance scaled great; when running 16 8-vCPU VMs, VMware Cloud on AWS was able to sustain 6.7 million database TPM!

I’ll be detailing these benchmarks more in an upcoming whitepaper, but wanted to share these results right away.  If you have any questions or feedback, please leave me a comment!

UPDATE (07/25/2018): The whitepaper detailing these results is now available here.

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 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:

Generational SQL Server VM Database Performance

Generational SQL Server VM Database Performance

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

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 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).

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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 cloud environment. The tests show that SQL Server databases scale very well on vCloud Air with a variety of virtual machine (VM) counts and virtual CPU (vCPU) sizes.

The benchmark tests were run with vCloud Air using their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subscription-based service.  This is a very compelling hybrid cloud service that allows for an on-premises vSphere infrastructure to be expanded into the public cloud in a secure and scalable way. The underlying host hardware consisted of two 8-core CPUs for a total of 16 physical cores, which meant that the maximum number of vCPUs was 16 (although additional processors were available via Hyper-Threading, they were not utilized).

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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 virtual machine (VM) quantities were tested to show that vSphere can handle hundreds of thousands of online transaction processing (OLTP) database operations per minute.

DVD Store 2.1, an open-source OLTP database stress tool, was the workload used to stress the VMs.  The first experiment in the paper was a generational performance comparison between the old and new setups; as you can see, there is a dramatic increase in throughput, even though the size of each VM has doubled from 8 vCPUs per VM to 16:

Generational performance improvement from old study to new study

There are also tests using CPU affinity to show the performance differences between physical cores and logical processors (Hyper-Threads), the benefit of “right-sizing” virtual machines, and measuring the impact of the advanced Latency Sensitivity setting. 

For more details and the test results, please download the whitepaper: Performance Characterization of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 6.

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 even hundreds of instances deployed in their environments. Consolidating these deployments onto modern multi-socket, multi-core, multi-threaded server hardware is an increasingly attractive proposition for IT administrators.

Achieving optimal SQL Server performance has been a continual focus for VMware; with current vSphere 5.x releases, VMware supports much larger “monster” virtual machines that can scale up to 64 virtual CPUs and 1 TB of RAM, including exposing virtual NUMA architecture to the guest. In fact, the main goal of this blog and accompanying whitepaper is to refresh a 2009 study that demonstrated SQL performance on vSphere 4, given the marked technology advancements on both the software and hardware fronts.

These tests show that large SQL Server 2012 databases run extremely efficiently with VMware, achieving great performance in a variety of virtual machine configurations with only minor tunings to SQL Server and the vSphere ESXi host. These tunings and other best practices for fully optimizing large virtual machines for SQL Server databases are presented in the paper.

One test in the paper shows the maximum host throughput achieved with different numbers of virtual CPUs per VM. This was measured starting with 8 vCPUs per VM, then doubled to 16, then 32, and finally 64 (the maximum supported with vSphere 5.5).  DVD Store, which is a popular database tool and a key workload of the VMmark benchmark, was used to stress the VMs.  Here is a graph from the paper showing the 8 vCPU x 8 VMs case, which achieved an aggregate of 493,804 opm (operations per minute) on the host:

8 x 8 vCPU VM throughput

There are also tests using CPU affinity to show the performance differences between physical cores and logical processors (Hyper-Threads), the impact of various virtual NUMA (vNUMA) topologies, and experiments with the Latency Sensitivity advanced setting.

For more details and the test results, please download the whitepaper: Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 5.5.