Bert Scalzo is an Oracle guru at Quest Software. I’d call him one of my colleagues, but he’s way better than me and it’d be an insult to him. He knows a heck of a lot about benchmarking – he’s even written a book about database benchmarking.
Yesterday he wrote a blog post about running Oracle on VMware. Here’s my favorite line:
“I was able to easily modify all the default settings across the board to obtain that 440% improvement for the TPC-C OLTP benchmark (your mileage will of course vary). See below how the response time for 300 concurrent users decreased from 1080 ms to 200.”
Cha-ching. It’s like performance tuning anything else: if you install SQL Server with the defaults, you’re going to end up with the binaries, data, log files, and TempDB all on the system drive. That’s a performance problem, right? Well, VMware is the same way. If you install SQL using the defaults, and you install VMware using the defaults, you’re not going to get very good performance. But the more time and effort you put into performance tuning and design, the better your results will be.
