SQL anywhere and virtualization requirements

[#1]

We develop an application that uses Sql Anywhere 11.0.1 as the database. Database size can be anywhere from 5GB to 25GB. My task has been to come up with specs for the application to run in a virtual environment. I'm not a virtual expert, but I do know there are many different ways to virtualize. We have small, medium and large/enterprise customers that use our application. We have tested extensively on physical hardware and specifically RAID and mulitple SSD drives, so we know what performance can/should be. We have recommended specs built for physical hardware.

I read through many of the posts regarding MS SQL Server regarding virtualization(since I didn't find a lot specifically geared toward SQLanywhere). There are a number of ways to allow access to the DB (through shared storage on SAN, local storage on host machine, or possibly having multiple instances of the DB to share the load). So, my question is it plausible(from an industry standpoint) to not necessarily give VM requirements on our spec sheet, but have some fine print about DB performance "gotcha's" if running in a VM.

thanks for your thoughts

[justin_willey]

Our experience agrees with what everyone else is saying - Bill Aumen's comments about people believing sales spiel, and Breck's re "Something-for-Nothing" are horribly familiar.

From our particular prespective the big pitfalls are:

• Disk connectivity: direct - good, Fibre Channel - good, iSCSI - terrible, if any real load
• Sharing with badly behaved / greedy applications on other VMs

For heavily loaded systems we insist on dedicated CPU, RAM and disk resources for the VM.