September 13, 2010 at 4:59 am
We have a number of instances of SQL Express 2008 R2 installed and have (in general) been delighted with this offering. Especially the 10GB database size limit. However in one case it was an install in VMware. No problems had arrisen from the 2008 R2 installs elsewhere and the vmWare 2005 express installs had appeared to be well behaved as well. Like a lamb to the slaughter we upgraded a 2005 Express VMware VM to 2008 R2 at first it seemed fine, then the users complained of poor performance. The database was now above 4GB so no going back. Performance was degrading, we noted the VM only had 512 ram, reconfigured to 3GB and the machine ground to a halt: literally - more than 1 user could not log on. A simple query would MAX the processor to 100% for 2 or 3 seconds. No stored procedure was a standout as a bad performer. Only one user could log in at a time. All indexes were rebuilt (took 4 hours!) still unusable performance. Move the machine to a single processor physical xp with 2GB ram and 8 users can now log on simultaneously CPU bumps along at 5-20%. This means that the VMware instance was performing 10 to 50 times worse than the physical machine. Is SQL 2008 R2 Express a no no on VMware?
September 13, 2010 at 5:03 am
PS We have contacted VMware and got no response. If there are any tweaks to the sytem we'd be happy to apply them. In the current economic climate being able to run SQL Express well has to be a major consideration in VM choice.
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