Recently I was requested to investigate the Cluster failures underlying a SQL Server 2012 Always On Availability Group. The topology was a two node Windows 2012 cluster with a file share tie breaker as part of the Majority Node and File share Quorum model. The cluster servers were VMware 5.1 Guests and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise was the
I thought it would useful to highlight to readers that there can be differences in what a VM Guest performance counters show verses similar counters presented by the VMware performance charts. The following articles provide an insight into some of the discrepancies you may face.
On numerous occasions I’ve had customers complain about intermittent SQL Server performance only to find that the root cause was not the workload generated by the SQL Server VM but that the VMware environment was oversubscribed and was not providing sufficient CPU resources to the SQL Server when required.