How to Baseline Your Physical SQL Server System - Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware - page 320

Table 10.4 ESXTOP Counters
Before you virtualize your first mission-critical database—whether it's being migrated
or being freshly provisioned—you should benchmark your vSphere environment while
collecting the preceding metrics. This will give you assurance that your vSphere
infrastructure is operating as expected, is likely to support the SQL database workloads,
and that at least at the infrastructure level the performance is acceptable. This will also
give you a baseline of the core vSphere environment performance that can be used as a
comparison when you have put your databases on top of it. Any issues that come out of
this baselining and benchmarking exercise can be resolved before the first real SQL
Server database is ever migrated, which can save a lot of time and effort at a later stage.
The following tools can be used to help you benchmark your vSphere environment:
SQLIOsim — http://support.microsoft.com/?id=231619 .
IOBlazer — http://labs.vmware.com/flings/ioblazer .