Current data indicates that database applications running on individual physical servers represent a large consolidation opportunity. Over 50 percent of these database applications run on two-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) machines, and in 90 percent of the cases transaction rates are under 20 transactions per second. CPU utilization averages less than 10 percent and approaches 20 percent at peak levels. As might be expected, I/O and data transfer rates are also low. Not surprisingly, many such database applications have been successfully migrated to virtual machines running on VMware ESX Server systems (for a link to further reading, see "Customer Success Stories Featuring ESX Server" in "References").
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.
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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.
Read the whitepaper, here.