Not too many people know about the intricacies of virtualization CPU scheduling and its impact on the performance of the VMs, so application owners out there – listen up! I’ve written about Ready Time (VMware ESXi) / Wait Time Per Dispatch (Microsoft Hyper-V) in the past, but a different challenge arises with VMs that have large vCPU count…
Category: VMWare
Retrofit a VM with the VMware Paravirtual SCSI Driver
For those of you with your mission-critical servers already virtualized on a VMware-based virtual infrastructure, are you using the VMware Paravirtual SCSI driver to boost your I/O performance by an average of 12%? I use it for all of my I/O intensive virtual machines, including SQL Server and Oracle VMs, and you should too! By…
Lock Pages in Memory in SQL Server on VMware – Why or Why Not
Two weeks ago I presented my session entitled “Squeezing Top Performance from Your Virtualized SQL Server” at the SQL PASS Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. One comment that I made during my presentation that seemed to spark some debates is how I normally enable the ‘Lock Pages in Memory’ feature of SQL Server as part…
CPU Overcommitment and Its Impact on SQL Server Performance on VMware
In the early days of virtualization, the core focus of virtualization was primarily consolidation. You could achieve quite high consolidation ratios, with some even as great as 20 to 1. This consolidation worked great for applications like file and print servers, development workloads, or other very lightly used servers. The virtualized servers that hold these…
Create a portable virtual machine with OVF or OVA
Today a great client asked me how to export a VM to an OVF or OVA so he could transport the VM to another environment. That’s a great question! It had been a while since I have done this so I researched the best way on vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 to perform this. Things have…
Why Your DBAs Need Access to VMware vCenter
Your DBAs need direct access to VMware vCenter. Shocking, eh? At a minimum, they need read-only access to the performance statistics for their virtual machines hosting their database server, as well as the host that they reside upon. I consider a requirement for all DBAs to have vCenter performance statistics access in environments where I…
SQL Server 2012 on VMware vSphere
Microsoft recently released SQL Server 2012 to the wild just a couple of weeks ago. Even though this release is in its infancy, organizations and their database administrators should immediately begin to explore and plan for the adoption of this release into their corporate technology roadmap. Multiple features in this release are individually tremendous, and…
Adding LUNs In VMware – A Cautionary Tale
Over the last 10 years plus of being a DBA I’ve performed LUN manipulation tasks on dozens of occasions with no errors or problems. Other than adding new disks to Windows 2003 clusters I’ve never had to take SQL Server offline to perform these tasks either. A simple request I needed a new drive to…