VMworld 2015 Europe: VAPP5165 - Extreme Performance Series Monster VM Database Performance

Mission-critical applications represent the last hurdle to organizations looking to migrate their data centers to the cloud. Although IT administrators realize the benefits of virtualization, they may be hesitant to virtualize applications such as databases because of their resource demands and an inexplicable fear about the underlying hypervisor preventing the infrastructure from meeting the SLAs of these applications. VMware vSphere, the industry's leading hypervisor platform, has been pushing the boundaries of infrastructure resources it can manage over various releases. Through its superior resource management capabilities, vSphere can easily scale horizontally to support many virtual machines (VMs) or vertically to support large VMs. vSphere 6 introduces the ability to run virtual machines with up to 128 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 4TB of RAM, allowing extreme resource-hungry applications such as databases to be run in VMs.

In this talk, the speakers will give an overview of key vSphere features such as CPU and NUMA schedulers, and memory managers that propel monster VMs. The speakers will share their benchmark results, experience gained, and lessons learned. A deep dive into Oracle and SQL Server scalability on vSphere 6 on a large, multi-core physical host (4 CPU, 1 TB RAM) will be presented. Finally, the speakers will provide best practices to the audience for undertaking such an exercise. This talk should alleviate any hesitation to migrate resource hungry, mission critical database applications to a private cloud.