High Performance SQL Server Workloads on Hyper-V Whitepaper

A new whitepaper detailing high performance SQL workloads running in Hyper-V R2 virtual machines.  The paper can be downloaded here...  Below are a few highlights/examples from the paper.

Dedicated Passthough LUN’s vs VHD’s

Figure 3: I/O and disk latency for dedicated pass-through disks versus VHDs

Multi-Instance Throughput: Native versus Virtual (16 core server)

The results of this test are summarized as follows:

• Slightly higher logical processor utilization is required to achieve the same throughput with virtualization due to minimal additional processor overhead.
• Native instances and virtual instances achieve the same level of scalability.
• I/O performance of ~5 percent for pass-through disks is greater than fixed-size VHDs as shown in Figure 3. Note that pass-through disks have an approximately one millisecond lower latency as compared to fixed-size VHDs.

Figure 4: Multi-Instance throughput: native instances versus virtual instances (16 cores)

Taylor Brown Hyper-V Enterprise Deployment Team taylorb@microsoft.com https://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb