Link: SQL Server Performance in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment
This paper describes transaction processing workload performance in virtual machines using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and VMware Infrastructure 3. This performance study was conducted at the HP Strategic Alliances Engineering (SAE) lab in Cupertino. The primary goal is to prove that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can successfully handle enterprise-level transaction-processing workloads when running inside VMware virtual machines. To facilitate planning for server consolidation, this study presents sizing data and data on system resource utilization at various load levels for uniprocessor (UP) virtual machines, two-way SMP virtual machines, and four-way SMP virtual machines. This study also compares the performance of UP, two-way, and four-way SMP virtual machines across 32-bit and 64-bit virtual environments.This performance study clearly demonstrates that VMware Infrastructure 3 provides an excellent production-ready virtualization platform for customers looking to deploy Microsoft SQL Server inside virtual machines. Furthermore, together with virtualization-based distributed infrastructure services such as VMotion, VMware High Availability, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware Infrastructure 3 can provide increased serviceability, efficiency, and reliability for your SQL Server deployments. This should offer transformative cost savings to your dynamic data center. …
ESX Server also has impressive isolation characteristics when one virtual CPU gets stressed:
The transaction throughput shown in these results represents the highest steady-state throughput achievable for the virtual machine until its CPU resources are saturated. However, note that while the CPU resources inside the virtual machine were exhausted, the physical CPU resources used on the ESX Server host were only used corresponding to the number of virtual CPUs because of the excellent isolation capability offered by VMware ESX Server. In other words, for UP virtual machines, only 13 percent of total physical CPU resources were utilized. Likewise, for 2-VCPU virtual machine, total physical CPU utilization was about 29 percent, and for the 4-VCPU virtual machine, the maximum total physical CPU utilization was about 52 percent. This implies that configurations running multiple instances of SQL Server virtual machines can achieve higher transaction throughput rates than those running only a single instance. It is possible that the transaction throughput in a configuration with multiple instances may be limited by the IOPS that the storage can handle. In such a situation, you may want to configure storage adapter queue depths and ESX Server outstanding disk requests parameters to minimize any queued disk I/O requests.
If you’re interested in the topic of virtualizing databases (and who reading this blog isn’t, really? We are so much fun at dinner parties) be sure to check out Ten Reasons Why Oracle Databases Run Best on VMware.
