VMware just published a very interesting whitepaper describing benchmarks of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition SP2 on a four-way HP ProLiant DL 585 with ESX Server 3.0:
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This paper describes transaction processing workload performance in virtual machines using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and VMware Infrastructure 3. This performance study was conducted at the HP Strategic Alliances Engineering (SAE) lab in Cupertino. The primary goal is to prove that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 can successfully handle enterprise-level transaction-processing workloads when running inside VMware virtual machines. To facilitate planning for server consolidation, this study presents sizing data and data on system resource utilization at various load levels for uniprocessor (UP) virtual machines, two-way SMP virtual machines, and four-way SMP virtual machines. This study also compares the performance of UP, two-way, and four-way SMP virtual machines across 32-bit and 64-bit virtual environments…
Read the whole paper at the source.
It’s worth to note that Microsoft supports SQL Server inside third party virtual machines, while Oracle is not: the company preferred to develop its own hypervisor to control how customers embrace virtualization rather than officially supporting VMware environments.
Is it just a case today VMware publishes a paper about SQL Server?