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I am starting to plan a migration of SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Ed. to 2017 (edition TBD). One of the more important tasks assigned to me is to determine the specs for the new VMWare hardware my employer will be purchasing.

To do so, I need gather information about the current workload (on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with SQL failover clustering on 5+ year-old hardware) and translate that to virtualized performance on new hardware - a VMware host which will use SQL Server 2017 and, probably, Availability Groups.

I've set up a PerfMon data collector based off of a blog post by David Klee ( link ) which will start tonight at midnight as a starting point but am still trying to wrap my head around the analysis...

i.e. "How do I take the PerfMon results from the workload running on the old hardware and translate that into requirements for new hardware ?".

Apart from PerfMon what are my other options for right-sizing the new hardware?

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    I wrote a whitepaper for Google a while back about doing this with cloud VMs, but the process is applicable to any set of new hardware.
    – Erik Reasonable Rates Darling
    Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 23:08
  • @sp_BlitzErik - as much as I enjoyed reading your whitepaper the process outlined therein is dependent upon already having a new environment to test in. What I am trying (and probably failing) to convey in my post is a need to calculate something along the lines of old_server = A (Avg. % CPU GHz @ system + internal + external clock speeds AS Overall Used CPU GHz) * B (consumed GB RAM @ _MHz), so new_server requires _GHz CPU and _GB RAM @ _MHz (+ math to compensate for improvements in technology). My guess, though, is that if this were possible someone would have packaged a solution already.
    – SQL_Deadwood
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 4:21
  • You don't necessarily need new hardware to test on, though. You can run all these tests on your current hardware -- measure your wait stats -- and figure out which ones you want to reduce on new hardware.
    – Erik Reasonable Rates Darling
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 16:26
  • @sp_BlitzErik I get what you're saying. There are just many, many things wrong with this server and not enough time to fix them to truly uncover bottlenecks that aren't related to misconfigurations or poor design choices at all the various layers. It's... frightening.
    – SQL_Deadwood
    Commented Apr 10, 2018 at 17:13

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Please try Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit. This will give you current inventory and workloads. At least run this tool for 24 hours to collect overall performance. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7826

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