I've been doing my homework the last 2 days and got some information over a 48 hours period from Perfmon. Some numbers are encouraging while others raise some concerns.

Available MBytes: 8934, Our server has 32 Gigs and we set SQL Server to use a maximum of 20. Since I always have over 8 Gigs available I can only assume that my SQL Server uses all the 20 Gigs I assigned to it, which is normal, and that other apps and the OS use about 4 Gigs which means I could give more memory to SQL.

Pagefiles % Usage. Now that is interesting because for some reason our tech people created 2 pagefiles on 2 separate partitions that are on the same drive. The interesting thing is that one of them shows an average usage of 4.46% while the other is as 0.25%. How can the pagefiles be used while I have almost 9 GB of RAM available ? Should I conclude from this that the 20 Gigs I gave SQL Server isn't enough and that it has to use the pagefiles ?

Cache hit ratio: 99.9%, looks good there.

As for I/O's, I don't know yet how to interpret this, I'm gonna have to learn about that in the next few days but the numbers are very low so I think it's good.

On the database disk.

Avg Disk Sec/Read: 0.0014

Avg Disk Sec/Write: 0.0050

Disk reads/Sec: 7.49

Disk writes/Sec: 4.51

On the logs disk

Avg Disk Sec/Read: 0.0010

Avg Disk Sec/Write: 0.0044

Disk reads/Sec: 0.9

Disk writes/Sec: 6.8

% processor time.

799.35% for 8 CPU's. So it looks like my CPU's never go idle and at first I thought I had a big bottleneck here but my average processor queue length is at 0.04 with a max of 13. I'm not sure I interpret this correctly but it seems to me that hardly anything ever waits for the CPU although it used 100% of the time. I'll have to run a check on this but I think the antivirus on the server is responsible for that, it probably uses the CPU all the time but releasing it to other processes when required.

If I'm right on the processor time and if I can reduce the amount of pagefile usage by increasing memory available to SQL it looks to me like I wouldn't have any problems running this in a virtual machine.