hey anthonypark,

thanks for the reply. and yes, you have a point. the single-vCPU limitation is a significant limitation. Obviously for high performance loads, this would be critical. But how high?I realize this would be subjective based on each individual circumstance.

Obviously, I'm no expert on mssql. But if, availability is paramount, I believe there are work- arounds. Not all sql processes would be cpu-bound. I suppose statement compiles, index and other hash computations, function execution would take up cpu load above the normal process overhead. Your point tells me, BI and datawarehouse applications will be inappropriate for FT. Still, you can pre-compile statements and leave ETF functions off FT enabled servers as ETF is not a FT critical anyway.

I would assume, more often than not, your bottlenecks would be in  disk I/O and network throughput. I also found, that database servers tend to be more memory greedy. But these do not have apparent limitations on FT.

I have multiple SQL servers running on ESX3.5, with varying degrees of load. Each with 2 vCPU's and some 2-4GB of RAM. None have hit performance issues so far. On the other hand, I have not maintained transaction counts so I can't tell what level of performance I'm hitting.

If you have an existing VM running SQL server, would you put in on FT?