SSD SAMSUNG passthrough on ESX 5.1 for SQL usage

[RobinEFloyd]

Is there any performance gain to passthrough a temporary drive via configuration/passthrough rather than creating a datastore and attaching it to the VM?   The numbers using the datastore when testing Crystal Benchmarks are way off from testing with direct hardware access.   Also, I see one ICH9  SATA controller (vmhba0) in the passthrough settings in advanced, but not the second one (vmhba32).  It is a 2 port controller, and on the physical board itself I only see 2 SATA ports, so the second virtual port may be masked.   This is a PowerEdge T710 server.

I am setting up a logfile/temp location for SQL and want the random write access to be fast as possible.

Thanks,

Robin.

[JPM300]

What kind of performance do you get if you make that SSD a datastore and put the SQL vmdk on it?

Typically you are going to see about a 10% overhead when birtulizing SQL but there is ways to mitigate this.  However by virtulizing SQL you now have HA for your SQL and possibly Dr with SRM without having to purchase SQL enterprise and setup a SQL cluster or always on cluster.  The saving it quiet large if your RPO can handle a short outage.