What I Did Last Summer or SAP HANA on VMware vSphere Performance Testing

The stuff that I have been working on for most of this year was made public in a press release just before the Thanksgiving break a couple of weeks ago.  SAP's HANA database, an in-memory high performance wonder, has been officially blessed to run on VMware vSphere 5.1 for test and development by SAP.

I wrote the official VMware blog that was posted on the same day as the press release and it does a pretty good job of covering the basics of the announcement.

An additional really cool thing that happened was HP announced on the same day their plans to ship a HANA appliance based on vSphere and loaded with HANA VMs soon.

My specific role in this has been pretty interesting.  I've been working with SAP to test the performance of HANA on vSphere.  The goal was to show that HANA in a vSphere VM could perform almost as good as HANA on native hardware.  By running lots of tests with several different workloads over many months we were able to show that performance was pretty good.  I'll be able to share more details on the performance soon.

I'm continuing the work on performance testing HANA on vSphere to cover more scenarios and some new workloads.  Should be lots of fun.