I published a new white paper this week on running SQL Server in a VM. The paper focuses on the performance of a large (well 100 GB) version of the DVD Store when running on 64-bit SQL Server 2005. I started this testing just after ESX Server 3.5 was finished and made available, and I believe that it is the first paper with performance numbers of SQL on ESX 3.5 (Please correct me if there are some!). In addition to the paper we had a web chat on Tues on the topic. And I have setup a wiki page to collect SQL on VMware resources and serve as a central place to host threads.

A couple of interesting notes, well at least interesting in a kind of really geeky way:

The first performance study on VMware that Dell published was a paper by Dave Jaffe and I on VMotion performance. We used a 1 GB version of the DVD Store database on SQL Server 2000 as the test VM. So this test really is an update in some ways to that paper. Same basic conclusion regarding VMotion with SQL Server - it is very hard to measure or detect the impact to DB performance of a VMotion.

This study was similar in many ways to the testing that Kong Yang and I did late last year on Exchange 2007. Key difference is that SQL Server is much easier to test! Exchange and LoadGen have extremely time consuming requirements to setup and initialize testing, but the DVD Store on SQL Server can be created and loaded in a much shorter time, and includes cleanup or resetting scripts that are also very fast.

Todd