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When running SQL Server inside virtual machines (VMs), it is recommended to start with the VMware document Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere for performance and scalability. This guide provides guidance for configuring SQL Server, the operating system, and virtual machines for best performance on VMware.
For more tuning recommendations and best practices regarding VMware vSphere, VMware ESXi, and PowerStore, see the Dell PowerStore: Virtualization Integration white paper and the Dell PowerStore Virtualization Infrastructure Guide at Dell.com/powerstoredocs.
Snapshots are a great way to protect SQL Server virtual machines and are encouraged whenever possible to provide an additional recovery point to SQL Server backups. However, taking snapshots on VMDK disks can result in a decrease in performance and sometimes lengthy maintenance procedures to maintain snapshot copies, coalesce, and delete.
vVol snapshots are offloaded to PowerStore, using hardware snapshot capabilities. This process removes the traditional issues of VMDK snapshot performance and maintenance. There is no performance penalty for vVols that contain snapshots. In addition, there are no lengthy maintenance procedures.
Also, Dell Technologies has tested the performance of VMware vVols and VMDKs. In our SQL Server workload testing, the performance has been proven to be equal on volumes without snapshots. On volumes that contain snapshots, the performance on vVols is superior. Therefore, vVols are recommended when running SQL Server workloads to provide superior snapshot performance.
A complete discussion of vVols vs VMDK disks is in the VMware article Understanding Virtual Volumes.
PowerStore Metro Volume allows synchronous replication of VMFS datastores in a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC). This enables vSphere stretched cluster capabilities within or across sites. It can also be used to accelerate VM migrations. One of the challenges with migrating SQL Server virtual machines can be the time it takes to perform a storage migration due to data size. Metro Volume can be used to accelerate migrations between sites, in addition to high availability and fault tolerance. For complete details on PowerStore Metro Volume, see the Dell PowerStore: Metro Volume white paper.