Power Profile BIOS Setting

How to Ensure Top Hardware Performance

We have been seeing some poor performance in SAP Business One when running in a virtualized environment on new Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant host servers. We have determined that these performance issues have been due to a BIOS setting on the servers hosting the virtual machines. There is a power profile setting in the BIOS that defaults to a balanced mode on these servers. This setting should be updated to the maximum performance setting to allow the virtual machines to perform as expected.

As an example of the impact, we ran a SQL query in both modes on one of our test servers and when in balanced mode the query took 34 seconds to run. When changing the setting back to performance mode the query time was reduced to 12 seconds.

Please check the BIOS power profile settings on any Hyper-V and VMware host servers in your environment and ensure that it is set to Maximum Performance mode for HP servers or Performance for Dell servers (other servers may also have the same issue). For more information please see this knowledge base article. This article describes the issue in a VMware environment but the same applies to Hyper-V.

There is also a Windows power management setting that defaults to 'Balanced' and it is recommended that it be changed to 'Performance' on both the virtual host servers and the virtual machines. This setting does not have the same performance impact as the BIOS setting but it may also help improve the overall performance of SAP Business One and SQL Server in your environment.