SQL Server is Movin' On Up!

At last week's WinHEC in Los Angeles, SQL GM Quentin Clark joined Windows Server VP Bill Laing on stage, to announce our upcoming support for more than 64 logical processors, the current limit in Windows and SQL Server. This expanded scale-up capability is planned to be released in SQL Server code named "Kilimanjaro", when running on top of Windows Server 2008 R2.

We expect to support up to 256 logical processors in this release, though that's a soft limit. The hard limits are much higher than this, but we won't support what we can't test. You'll likely see this 256LP soft ceiling get higher in each release, now that we've finally done the heavy lifting of raising the roof on Windows and SQL Server.

The keynote demo (@33:26), which Bill and Quentin did together, went well. Many thanks to our friends at HP and IBM for all their support and for the use of these great servers.

In case you're wondering, a logical processor is a sub-unit of a physical processor/socket/package. Typically today an LP means a core, but it can also mean a hardware thread (nee hyper-threading).

-David Powell