We have used SQL Server Express – various versions without issue. However we have an install on a VMware machine and there are severe performance issues. I have contacted VMware and Microsoft – Microsoft don't explicitly support Express as its a free version. The problem is that as the database get larger, the performance gap between a physical machine and VMware gets much larger. VM is currently about 5 times slower than a physical machine of similar spec with a 4GB SQL Server 2008 R2 Express install (limit 10GB). There is a huge VMware service taking over 1GB of the 3.5 GB Memeory available on the VM. I'm looking for resources to try to find if performace can be improved. Links, comments much appreciated.
SQL Server 2008 R2 Express and VMware
performancesql-server-2008sql-server-express
Best Answer
It is quite possible that the "huge vmware service" you are seeing is due to memory ballooning which would occur in the case of physical memory shortage on your ESX host. The observed periods of full system utilization while it is not doing anything are in turn probably wait times for swap I/O to occur on the ESX host side. While ESX is swapping pages in or out (again, due to memory shortage) it would halt the guest, thus leaving only a few cycles for actual processing.