The study by ESG Labs, demonstrates performance, scalability, and low overhead of Hyper-V can be used to reduce costs and improve the manageability, flexibility, and availability of SQL Server workloads. Through their testing, ESG Lab confirmed that the performance and scalability of Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V makes it possible to consolidate a tier-1 database application workload with confidence. With the ability to allocate up to 64 vCPUs, processor heavy workloads previously not considered for virtualization can now leverage the scalability potential of Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V. ESG Labs measured a six times performance improvement with five-time faster response times for a CPU intensive OLTP workload with a 75,000 customer database.

Key points:

• With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V’s new support for up to 64 vCPUs, ESG Lab took an existing SQL Server 2012 OLTP workload that was previously vCPU limited and increased the performance by six times, while the average transaction response times improved by five times.
• Manageably-low Hyper-V overhead of 6.3% was recorded when comparing SQL Server 2012 OLTP workload performance of a physical server to a virtual machine configured with the same number of virtual CPU cores and the same amount of RAM.

ESG Labs SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 Two Page Summary Report:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/7/E/77EF2440-B3D6-4CFB-B7DE-1CB4518F4810/ESG-Lab-Summary-WS2012-HyperV-and-SQL2012.pdf

ESG Labs SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 Full Report:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/C/1/CC16C89A-E289-4217-B2D8-7DD37A4285B8/ESG-Lab-Validation-WS2012-HyperV-and-SQL2012.pdf