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Really.........we're opening up the VMWARE debate again? Thought this ship had left port like 5 years ago.
I do pretty much all installs where we have under 200 concurrent clients on VMWARE if the platform is Windows or Linux.
I have about 20 clients running their complete JDE infrastructure on VMWare and 75% of these are using SQL Server with no issues.
Heck I even have Oracle RAC on VMWare and it runs fine.
SQL Server can easily run well on any virtualization layer.
Colin
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Colin, I would say that there is always room for debate on most any topic. I happen to believe that in a typical environment, running the database virtualized can cause performance issues. I have seen all the VMware papers showing how a perfectly configured system can scale to a million IOPS but the real-world situation is that, without attention paid to a lot of settings and details, VMware adds overhead. Given that many SQL shops are understaffed and under budgeted (a large reason for the SQL choice to begin with) it is not unreasonable to say that too little attention is being paid to the SQL settings let alone the VMware settings and configuration that affects SQL Server.
Please note that the original poster is on 8.12. The latest this release could be obtained was sometime in 2008. Also note that the Vmware release that purported to fix acknowledged disk IO issues, 4.0, was not released until 2009, making it somewhat likely that the organization is on an older release of VMware, which could indeed cause performance issues with a database server.
I agree that one can run SQL Server on a properly configured VMware system that has been properly capacity planned. Whether that last part gets done 'properly' seems to be the issue.