Virtualized SQL Server

re: Virtualized SQL Server

Carl Federl — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:22:26 GMT

"SQL Server Performance in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment" is located at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/SQLServerWorkloads.pdf

The benchmark seem un-realistic as only one VM is running at a time, when the expected deployment is multiple VMs running simultaneously.

What is needed for the benchmark:

On the hardware, run the benchmarks with Windows 64byte with multiple SQL Server instances, that is, no VMWare.

Run the same benchmarks on the same hardware with VMware ESX Server systems and 2, 4 and 8 VMs

Comments ?

re: Virtualized SQL Server

TG — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:45:36 GMT

We run several SQL 2000 and 2005 instances under VMWare Server on a couple of hosts. Using MS SQLIO simulator on the host vs inside a VM on a RAID10 SAS dual-quadcore host, I'd say we are getting about 80% of the potential disk I/O ability of the host. This kind of ratio also held true under older SCSI RAID host servers tested.

This 80% is an acceptable trade-off to us for the manageability and ease of portability of the VM to other hosts. Stability has been excellent.

In a purely performance-driven environment,of course, I'd not run it virtualized.

re: Virtualized SQL Server

Wynand — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:02:49 GMT

When one chooses to store data one of the primary goals is to access the data quickly and return the result set in a acceptable time frame. So one major goal is performance throughput. I still find it hard to understand that some engineers believe that SQL server in a VM outperforms "physical" SQL servers , and TG's comments backup up the point quite well to an extend. `if you except the performance loss then it is fine but when you don't then don't even consider it. `i am still new at the VM realm and do not believe to run high end SQL server platforms in a VM environment .. maybe my mind will change or be forcefully changed one day but till then starting to talk about SQL servers processing 1000's of batches per second the only virtual component in our environment is the cluster name :-)

re: Virtualized SQL Server

Andrew_Fryer — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:34:39 GMT

Wynand

Since I wrote this post the SQL CAT team have produced a whitepaper on running SQL Server over hyper-V, http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/9/4/d948f981-926e-40fa-a026-5bfcf076d9b9/SQL2008inHyperV2008.docx.

one of the scenario is four vm's all running SQL Sevrer on one physical box.

Clearly this isn't the right approach for high performance vldb environements but how may sql servers are like that of the hundreds of thousands out there, and how manby could be rationalised in some way either by using instances or through virtualisation.

re: Virtualized SQL Server

Brian T Langdon — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:43:37 GMT

Applications and servers (such as SQL Server) are supported when running within operating systems which pass the SVVP requirements in a third-party virtualization software product. VMWare’s ESX Server is considered a SVVP qualified virtualization product when running Server 2000 SP4, 2003 SP2, or 2008. The supporting reference is below:

http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/results.aspx?&bCatID=1521&cpID=0&avc=0&ava=0&avq=0&OR=1&PGS=25&ready=0

re: Virtualized SQL Server

Andrew_Fryer — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:33:31 GMT

Brian

Thbnaks for this this post is past it's sell by date and I have an updated post ..

http://blogs.technet.com/andrew/archive/2008/11/08/sql-server-2008-at-teched.aspx

which echoes your point

Andrew