Poor Performance from MSSQL after P2V

[AllenKyle]

I'm a bit new to ESX and had an experienced friend of mine help me get our san/server combo up and running recently. Here's what we've got and what we've done.

2x Dell R900's. 4x hex core processors, 128GB RAM, 2x 73GB mirrored drives.

Equallogic SAN with 16x 1TB SATA drives. Connected via iSCSI using two QLogic HBA's in each server and 2 Force10 S25 Gigabit switches set to 1000 full duplex with 9000 MTU. The SAN is a single RAID50 with 2 hot spares. 2 VMFS stores were created at 1TB each. Servers were balanced across them based on size and activity. We've also set the SAN to snapshot to the servers 3x daily (which goes quick)

We've got 7 servers running across both of them.

2x Terminal Servers

1x Exchange Server

1x Database Server (MSSQL)

1x Phone System Server

2x Domain Controllers

Everything works pretty well overall. Exchange seems a little slower, but our SQL app has lost about 40% on performance. Nothing appears to be red-lined but SQL queries just seem a great deal slower. Users complain about the app freezing up when others are running large reports and such. I've been reading up on best practices for SQL in ESX but I'm finding a lot of misinformation and contradiction. Has anyone here gone through the same issue and found a solid solution for increasing performance? Any advice would be useful. Also, keep in mind that I'm a VM noob at this point, so any articles with instructions would be awesome. Thanks.

[AllenKyle]

I finally found the solution for this issue. I built a new clean VM and migrated the database over to it. Worked like a champ. No special configuration needed. Also didn't need the iSCSI initiator or anything along those lines. Runs perfectly fast over the standard set up. I did put the whole VM on to it's own LUN, but I'm confident that I could put it on the LUN with the other VM's and it wouldn't make a huge difference. The new VM has 3 drives in Windows. OS, Data and Logs. I just set the DB's up accordingly. Thanks again everyone for the great input. -Allen

[RParker]

No special configuration needed. Also didn't need the iSCSI initiator or anything along those lines.

OK, so what we learned is that the BEST practices are what they have been for years, START with a FRESH VM, install as new and migrate the data. That's not new at all. Those solutions have ALWAYS been there, but now your latest testing only proves that is the most effective method. P2V is great, to get the data over to ESX as a trial, but like ANY Windows install, if you start to have problems reinstall is the only viable option.

Thats always been the case.