Please provide your tips and best practices for virtualizing SQL Server in VMWare ESX
I am interested in advanced configurations and settings.
Please provide reasoning behind your recommendations
Edit:
Just to clarify, I already have over 70 Virtual SQL servers in separate clusters using an ISCSI equallogic San –
What I am really looking for are those advanced configurations like:
How you configured your disks / RDM's
Do you make use of settings like
Mem.ShareScanGHz – http://communities.vmware.com/thread/143828 –
that are not well documented
Best Answer
Normally I hate linking to vendor whitepapers, but VMware's published a whitepaper on this that is surprisingly good:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/sql_server_virtual_bp.pdf
Everything in there is important, and I can vouch for a lot of 'em personally. Less virtual CPUs is really better than more: if you're not saturating 100% of a single CPU, then you don't want to add a second virtual CPU. It has to do with the way VMware CPU scheduling works.
The only thing that isn't explicitly defined in the doc is multipathing. With ESX 3.5 and earlier, you don't get true active/active multipathing for your SAN. If you need more than one HBA of bandwidth to a single virtual machine, it needs to stay as a physical machine until vSphere 4 comes out, and even then, you have to get the top-of-the-line edition in order to get true multipathing.