Understand Database Workloads

The SQL Server database platform can support a very wide variety of applications. Before deploying
SQL
Server on vSphere, you must understand the database workload requirements of the applications
that
your SQL Servers will support. Each application will have different requirements for capacity,
performance, and availability, and consequently, each database should be designed to optimally
support
those requirements. Many organizations classify databases into multiple management tiers, using
application requirements to define service level agreements (SLAs). The classification of a database
server will often dictate the resources allocated to it.
ier 1 databases) are considered absolutely
essential to your companys core operations. Mission critical databases and the applications they
support often have SLAs that require very high levels of performance and availability. SQL Server
virtual machines running mission critical databases might require more careful resource allocation
(CPU, memory, disk) to achieve optimal performance. They might also be candidates for database
mirroring or failover clustering.
usy only during specific periods for such tasks as reporting,
batch jobs, and application integration or ETL workloads. These databases and applications might be
essential to your companys operations, but they have much less stringent requirements for
performance and availability. They may, nonetheless, have other very stringent business
requirements, such as data validation and audit trails.

adversely affect your companys real-time operations if there is an outage. You can tolerate such
databases and applications being down for extended periods.
Resource needs for SQL Server deployments are defined in terms of CPU, memory, disk and network
I/O, user connections, transaction throughput, query execution efficiency/latencies, and database
size.
Some customers have established targets for system utilization on hosts running SQL Server, such as
80% CPU utilization, leaving enough headroom for any usage spikes.
Understanding database workloads and how to allocate resources to meet service levels helps you to
define appropriate virtual machine configurations for individual SQL Server databases. Because you
can

consolidate multiple workloads on a single vSphere host, this characterization also helps you to
design a
vSphere and storage hardware configuration that provides the resources you need to deploy multiple
workloads successfully on vSphere.