Will SQL Performance Better In A VM?

A question came up that during my 24 Hours of PASS presentation a while back. The question was “Is performance of SQL Server 2012 is better in Virtual environment than the Physical?”. Now I actually get questions like this all the time when giving presentations.

Thankfully for me, this is one of those times where the answer is very straight forward. Performance on a virtual machine won’t ever be better than when using like physical hardware. The reason for this is that the hypervisor will add a small amount of performance overhead to the virtual machine. In modern hypervisors this overhead is typically very small, usually 1-2% but that does mean that the physical server will run a little bit better.

A perfectly normal follow up question would be, why should be bother setting up SQL Servers as virtual machines? The answer to this isn’t as easy to answer. If your SQL Server, and more specifically the application and your users can live with the slight performance hit that you get by being within a virtual machine then keep virtualizing those SQL Servers. However if you have an application which is very sensitive to performance problems, virtualizing the database for that application probably isn’t the best of ideas.

Hopefully this helps dispel some myths.

Denny

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