SQL Server Customer Advisory Team - SQL Server Best Practices

Whitepapers

Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Environment - Best Practices and Performance Recommendations

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Lindsey.allen

3 Oct 2008 1:38 PM

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Published: October 2008

Writers: Lindsey Allen, Mike Ruthruff, Prem Mehra
Reviewers: Cindy Gross, Burzin Patel, Denny Lee, Michael Thomassy, Sanjay Mishra, Savitha Padmanabhan, Tony Voellm, Bob Ward

Based on hypervisor technology, the Hyper-V™ virtualization feature in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system is a thin layer of software between the hardware and the operating system that allows multiple operating systems to run, unmodified, on a host computer at the same time. Hyper-V is a powerful virtualization technology that can be used by corporate IT to consolidate under-utilized servers, lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintaining or improving quality of service (QoS). Hyper-V opens more potential development and test environment types that otherwise might be constrained by hardware availability. It is challenging enough in general to right-size the hardware to consolidate current workloads and provide headroom for growth. Adding virtualization to the mix increases the potential capacity planning challenges. The goal of this document is to help address these by focusing on two key areas of running Microsoft® SQL Server® in a Hyper-V environment:

System resource overhead imposed by running SQL Server in a Hyper-V environment
How well Hyper-V scales running SQL Server 2008

This white paper describes a series of test configurations we ran, which represented a variety of possible scenarios involving SQL Server running in Hyper-V. The paper discusses our results and observations, and it also presents our recommendations. Our test results showed that SQL Server 2008 on Hyper-V provides stable performance and scalability. We believe Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is a solid platform for SQL Server 2008 for the appropriate workload. It is practical to run production workloads under a Hyper-V environment, as long as the workload is within the capacity of your Hyper-V guest virtual machine.

For more information, please refer to the whitepaper Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Environment - Best Practices and Performance Recommendations.

Performance, SQL, Consolidation, Virtualization, OLTP

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