One of the most basic capacity considerations involved while planning to move SQL workloads to a virtual environment is to understand the maximum capacity of a single Virtual Machine (VM.

Many times questions arises in mind like “what is the max memory which a VM supports?”

Look at what one of the leading platform VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus offers for a single VM -

These are pretty heavy numbers, and good enough to handle a tough SQL workload.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V also looks really promising [The RTM bits are scheduled to be released by Aug 12]

64 vCPUs per VM is really impressive and some other numbers which impressed me with Windows Server 2012 Hyper- V are -

Active VMs per Host  - 1,024

Maximum cluster nodes – 64 and Maximum VMs in a cluster – 4,000

Both VMware and Microsoft improved a lot when it comes to capacity per VM and thats really a good news.

Conclusion

Capacity limitation is not anymore a reason for you to move your SQL workloads to a virtual world. Come on in,the water is warm !!!