Production SQL on VMWare

[PAz]

Is anyone doing this?

If so, how big are the SQL boxes you are running on VMWare?

I've played with it in the past but never got the same level of performance as with a dedicated physical box. Our VMWare estate is easily powerful enough to handle it.

 

[PAz]

Thanks for the replies. As I said I know our hardware can handle it; both SAN and the host servers.

The problem is exactly as you pointed out Knubje - in theory its fine but I'm really struggling to find any real examples of organisations running intensive SQL boxes on VMWare in a shared environment.

I run dev SQL on VMWare and its absolutely fine, its just the jump to prod thats always scary.

 

[PAz]

We have huge production MS and Oracle DB's running SQL on VMware. I'm talking in the region of 50/60TB.

As most have said already it all comes down to IOPS and CPU cycles / availability. We do throw hardware at it and our server hardware is dedicated to SQL running on ESXi. It probably helps too that the backend storage is running out of FlashCache (NetApp) for the most highly utilised DB's.

Essentially you would need to know the characteristics of the DB in question, is it random small size KB I/O or big sequential read / writes, etc. Once you've got that trended you can work out fairly quickly the IOPS required on the backend.

Cool! So you've dedicated hosts and SAN purely for virtualised SQL?