Jeff Mlakar talks about things you want to look at if you’re running SQL Server on VMware:
In a virtual data center CPU is spread across many guest VMs. This is one of the key drivers behind the effort to virtualize – CPU cores mostly sit unused. For example, we can take a host with maybe 48 cores and virtualize many machines that present logically with > 48 cores. The hypervisor can swap in and our cores as it needs based on what the guest VMs are doing. If the baseline for a guest VM is only 10% CPU usage then this is easy. However, when an intense application like SQL Server is virtualized it must have CPU available otherwise performance will suffer noticeably.
Generally for CPU on a guest VM:
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Reservations on CPU are not often possible but consider them if you data center allows for it.
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You want more cores than sockets. So if you are aiming for 8 cores you want something like 2 sockets with 4 cores each instead of 8 sockets with 1 core each.
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If priority can be given to the SQL VM for CPU then change the Shares Resource Allocation from normal to high.
Click through for more helpful hints.