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3 Test system configuration
To conduct the system testing detailed in this paper we created the SQL Server® test system as shown
in Figure 1.
Figure 1 – Test System Configuration
Some key design details in the test system configuration:
 We Installed and configured SQL Server® 2008 R2 in a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual
machine (SQLDBVM01) hosted on the VMware ESXi 4.1 server. A Dell PowerEdge R710 server
was used to run VMware ESXi server software.
o The SQL Server® virtual machine was configured to use two virtual CPUs and 24GB of
reserved memory.
o The two local disks installed in the R710 server were configured as a RAID1 set. ESX
was installed onto these disks, and the guest virtual machine OS disk partitions where
also hosted within the VMFS file system on these disks.
 A second VMware ESX 4.1 server (INFRA) was used to host a group of four Windows 2008 R2
workload simulation virtual machines, with each running an instance of Quest Benchmark
Factory.