Setting VMware memory settings to improve SQL Server Performance

There is a VMware setting which you can set which should give you a small but noticeable performance improvement in SQL Server performance when that SQL Server is running within a VMware Virtual Machine.

This setting is the Large Pages setting.  This will allow the SQL Server to allocate memory from the host in 2 Meg chunks instead of 4k chunks.  This has been shown to provide up to a 6% performance improvement in performance, however your mileage may very.

This setting can be found by editing the Hosts Advanced Settings on the Configuration tab.  The setting is Mem.AllocGuestLargePage.

Denny