Ill try to answer but a lot of this is simply "It depends"
1) Would I setup six big SQL boxes on the described hardware.
It depends.
What it depends on is a few different factors 1) Disk subsystem with SQL's heavy IO disk configuration is going to be key. There are many factors to conceder in this scenario and I wont go through them all but it is a conditional yes in this case, I don't see the hardware or memory or vmotion time to be a particular bottleneck as long as you have all the right configuration to avoid bottlenecks
2) Performance troubleshooting
Again a complicated answer, your ratio's are alright but i would spend a lot of time in the normal places both inside the VM and the VIC itself, while there are more links in the chain there are many ways to get hints at some of those links
On VM:
Id be looking at the normal system metrics, CPU, RAM, Page file. As well as disk metrics such as Physical Disk sec/reads and sec/writes as well as SQL buffer cache hit ration and Target Server memory to balance memory usage on the system. A lot of these will give you hints to disk/memory/CPU bottlenecks
On host:
Overall CPU, Active memory and memory ballooning are all key to watch
These are SOME of the basics, sometimes your disk subsystem adds some features to watch as well and there may be more key ones to look at (In my examples I know networking 99.999 percent of the time is not a bottleneck either on the front end or my ISCSI network ... but on others it may be sometimes a problem therefore something more to look at)
Hope that gives you some insight
Jered Rassier
##If you have found my post has answered your question or helpful please mark it as such##
##If you have found my post has answered your question or helpful please mark it as such##
