David, Lutz,
Thank you both for sharing your thoughts on this. I agree that checking out I/O performance is the first thing I should do, if that is as "bad" as I think it will be I guess I'm gonna have my answer immediately.
LutzM (12/22/2010)
If you virtualize under the current scenario you're facing the risk of even more users being kicked out and even lower application response time.
Lutz, that sounds like you're saying that generally speaking, virtualizing a SQL Server will impact performance and that it's all a question of whether it will slow it down enough to be noticeable or not. Did I interpret this correctly ?
Unfortunately, having the app recoded (the correct word should be fixed or repaired :)) or replacing it is not an option. We just need to make the best we can with it at least for now.
There's a process that we need to run mid-morning every day, it runs for about 35 minutes. This is 35 minutes every day where nobody can do anything with the system because they'll just get timed out on transactions.
On a 30GB database I had a 15GB transaction log and it wouldn't go a day without expanding when I was backing it up every 12 hours. I think that falls well into the high I/O category 😀