January 26, 2011 at 12:16 pm
We have a VM with Windows 2008 64-bit and SQL 2008 SP1-64 bit and 6GB of RAM. It hosts the databases for a VMware Farm.
However, this VM run expremely sluggishly at 80-100 percent processor untilization, SQLServer taking up most of it, as will as 5.1 GB of RAM out of the 6. The larger of the two databases is 17GB. I would think that a 64-bit server with 6GB of RAM should be able to handle this in stride. What might be going on?
Is there this much performace penalty from running SQL in a VM rather than bare metal?
Is there something in the SQL or VM configuration we've missed?
Is this DB much busier than I think? How can I measure this?
January 26, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Start with Performance Monitor to see what SQL Server is doing with resources.
6 GB of RAM is pretty light for a 64-bit server. I'm used to those being much heavier on RAM. You might be running into an issue with the OS and SQL Server fighting for resources.
Perf Mon is the right place to start, regardless of what else might be going on.
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January 26, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Perfmon should be your starting point to see if you are having any resource bottlenecks and possible causes.
Thank You,
Best Regards,
SQLBuddy
January 27, 2011 at 2:28 am
Keep this in mind though (depending on VMWare version):
http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/12/using-perfmon-in-a-windows-vm.html
You can often get inaccurate results...
January 28, 2011 at 8:15 am
dan-572483 (1/26/2011)
We have a VM with Windows 2008 64-bit and SQL 2008 SP1-64 bit and 6GB of RAM. It hosts the databases for a VMware Farm.However, this VM run expremely sluggishly at 80-100 percent processor untilization, SQLServer taking up most of it, as will as 5.1 GB of RAM out of the 6. The larger of the two databases is 17GB. I would think that a 64-bit server with 6GB of RAM should be able to handle this in stride. What might be going on?
Is there this much performace penalty from running SQL in a VM rather than bare metal?
Is there something in the SQL or VM configuration we've missed?
Is this DB much busier than I think? How can I measure this?
What edition\version of VMWare are you using to host the VM?
How many virtual CPUs are assigned to the VM?
Have you assigned the lock pages in memory policy to the sql server service account?
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January 28, 2011 at 2:36 pm
What edition\version of VMWare are you using to host the VM?
How many virtual CPUs are assigned to the VM?
Have you assigned the lock pages in memory policy to the sql server service account?
VMWare 4.1
Two virtual 2GHz Xeon processors
Lock memory pages was not set. I just set it, but I read that SQL 2008 Standard Edition requires SP1 Cumulative Update 2 to use the Lock Memory Pages function (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918483). Is it imperitive to install CU2?
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