VMware and SAP just recently completed a joint project that demonstrates the performance of SAP IQ 16 running in VMware vSphere® 5.5 virtual machines with VMware Virtual SAN as the storage backend.
Each node in the clustered multiplex maps to one virtual machine, making deployment from a common template a simple task. Once these virtual machines are configured into a cluster, they must all be provided access to shared storage. Virtual SAN fulfills this requirement easily. Every virtual machine hosted in a Virtual SAN cluster has ready access to the Virtual SAN datastore; creating and attaching virtual disks to all virtual machines in the multiplex is easy.
Performance requirements of an analytics workload running an SAP IQ Multiplex Server are easily met by the Virtual SAN datastore. The workload has a read-heavy I/O profile. The read cache portion of the SSD in each disk group holds large portions of the working set; this results in low latency read accesses. Write requests, for intermediate results, are deemed to be complete once they have been written to the write buffer in the SSD. This results in low latency for write operations as well. Low latency provided by SSDs and the ability to serve both read and write requests from data cached in SSDs are the key to the observed outstanding performance.
In summary, VMware vSphere with Virtual SAN storage is an exceptional platform for distributed database applications running on SAP IQ Multiplex Servers
For full details, you can find the paper published here:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-58998
https://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-27533
