Virtualized MS SQL Guests, performance, and sizing of opponents

Hello all,.

Sorry it's long, I just wanted to paint the picture of what is my environment and what questions arise.  If you do not read this, reply and help, THANKS!

I need to comment on everything that you the VMware Pros out there on the execution of MS SQL databases and other applications in VMware ESX 4.  We are a VMware shop for 7 years now, and we have grown and lived several improvements.  I'm a PCV, were about the only administrator of our environment all the time.  I am not however a SQL DBA, so consider myself pretty ignorant when it comes to tuning and work with databases, including MS SQL, but I'm not a total noob.  This creates friction with the suppliers and the app guys pretty constantly.

I go through the usual routine on every two months everything physical with all of our application servers more frequent and from VMware for small servers as print servers.  So far, however, we have always managed to continue to virtualize and grow.  But every day, I get the usual routine of the people app and the types of non-technical on adding MORE CPU and RAM whenever one has the impression of slowness.  Sometimes, they come to me right out of the box and want 8 CPUS and 8 GB of ram on each new server, but 2 weeks after moving into production, I look at the performance numbers and see 5% use cpu and 3 GB of memory consumed.  There are several clubs who dope for a few hours, while a report is run, and if the numbers show have been bottlenecking I'll add resources.  Usually I insists that they start small and try to properly size a box, but it often a case of me vs from the crowd and I am forced to 'give way '.

I have a few allies, but I'm increasingly outnumbered we grew up.  I read manuals and white papers and understand the majority of the documentation there.  I made my own trials and experimentation with different settings and you have a pretty good environment from my point of view.  I saw several very busy servers works amazingly well, that explains why we continue to stay virtual.  However, I have seen times where the environment does not play as well as I expect and there is always room for improvement.  I feel this overpopulation and with allowance contribute in a number of cases.

I have 3 blade environments, but in this case I will reduce it to 2 of the hosts and give a quick overview of what we are running.

The first is a picture of blade HP c3000 with 8 bl460 they are dual quad core boxes intel, with 32G RAM, connections FC 4 G and 1 G Ethernet.

The second is an array of HP with 4 bl680c c7000 blade they are six quad core boxes intel with connections of CF 40 G RAM 8 G and 10 G Ethernet to each.

My SAN is a compellent, its got about 64 disks, in the 4 speakers (shelves of disks) 1/2 are CF disks as low is SATA.  Evaluation tests show flow depends on factors of the configuration of the machine virtual, but in general, 150 - 200 MB/s, so I have flow test and I can get IOPS / s about 3000-4000 or more when my settings are suitable for PAHO es / s.  Some tools report different, so there is always a margin for manoeuvre.

Add us new c7000 knives so I just started to migrate, but before the upgrade, I had on the boxes of 8 x 8way 113vms, 275 GB of RAM, distribution, and allocated 260 of vcpu.  With 256 physical RAM G, we used the 275G, not a too terrible of a stipend, however I had to plead to upgrade of physical of 192 ram when ballooning began to cause me misery.  However, I think having 64 physical CPU and allocate virtual CPU 260 seems a little strong but the values overall ready and fresh total CPU overhead of the army are not too bad, but we occaisonal spikes.

Now for the moment "get to the point" I once again was faced with the mantra "we cannot virtualize MS SQL.  I agree that the physical servers run faster when you perform evaluation tests.  In particular, Direct Attached Storage.  However, we officially run several databases on vm and some on physical boxes, and Yes, both have performance problems.  I made several assessment tests, myself and even have developed a few tricks that can make my SAN smoking with performance, if I sacrifice a small fault tolerance in the setup of the hard.  What I do have are a ton of virtualization MS SQL experience to go with it.  Again, I saw several boxes of db work fine and work to the satisfaction of users and administrators.  The problem often resolves around the question «when to go» physical

Several types of dba and app vendors of times have all at one time or another wailed that virtualization has been the cause of the problem.  Only after a few painful weeks/months to go back jump through hoops (and "give in" to an increase in resources in the face of irrational) try to prove to them that I have given enough resources and performance was tolerable limits, they do dig and find that their problem was a configuration problem lame.  It HAPPENED SEVERAL TIMES and is quite frustrating!

I would like some comments and experiences of those who have the knowledge to direct me to the answers that I have to myself with arms when these questions arise again and again.  I searched a few good doc and white papers for the execution of the db on VMware, the calibration of the volumes, number of CPU, RAM considerations, Ops ARE / s and flow but never really happened upward with the news of the real world.

Thanks again for your comments and for reading this novel!

Good mug shot!

SQL is a difficult to virtualize, load but it is possible, don't forget you can have big, animated virtual computer in your environment, but it will affect the ratio of grouping.

Even if you get 2 boxes SQL occupied on a slide, even when taking into account the addition of VMware license cost, it can still work cheaper.

Storage plan as it was physical - do not use of RDM, but you don't want to make use of the additional vSCSI adapters and with a low number of VM data warehouses and the correct RAID type for the data (so separate volumes for OS/data/logs/Tempdb/Backup)

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