SQL Server 2008 on Hyper-V - Best Practices and Performance Considerations

 

SQL Server 2008 on Hyper-V - Best Practices and Performance Considerations

Thinking of running SQL 2008?  Thinking of virtualising it?  Well, it’s good news that SQL 2008 is supported by Microsoft, running on Hyper-V, or any other SVVP certified virtualisation solution.  The question remains however, should you virtualise SQL?

Well, I guess the answer to that is, it depends.  Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 supports up to 64GB RAM per VM, and 4 vCPUs per VM, so, you can, in effect, create some incredibly powerful virtual workloads, but the question still remains, would you virtualise it?  Well, there are some benchmarks being produced right now for SQL 2008 on Hyper-V, and the stats are impressive.

“Pass-Through Disks I/O Overhead – SQLIO - I/O overhead used to be a challenge in virtualized environments. It could be a showstopper for I/O intensive applications like SQL Server. With Hyper-V, the technology is different. To understand the best-case scenario, our first test scenario looked at I/O overhead using the most optimized I/O configuration – dedicated pass-through disks. We chose pass-through disk configuration because it has the shortest code path from host to I/O subsystem. In the tests, the same number of physical spindles was allocated to the root partition and the guest virtual machine. Through repeated tests of various random and sequential I/O, we found the I/O overhead of Hyper-V using pass-through disks is from none to minimal”

I’ve taken the exert above from the whitepaper, found below.  There are benchmarks, graphs and allsorts of useful info in there – definitely worth a read.  So, if you do choose to virtualise SQL, here is that whitepaper – even if you aren’t virtualising SQL, it still contains a useful set of hints and tips around Hyper-V in general…

• SQL Server 2008 on Hyper-V - Best Practices & Performance

virtualboy. : SQL Server 2008 on Hyper-V - Best Practices and Performance Considerations