With the combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 it has now become possible to run SQL Server on up to 256 Cores. Multi-core x64 systems continue to decrease in price, more customers are using 24, 32 or >64 CPU core systems.

In this session, I will talk about the lessons we have learned and the methodology we follow when diagnosing and resolving issues with real customer  workloads running on 64 and 128 logical cores. You will see some interesting real-life bottlenecks and get an insight into how we resolve them and what sort of numbers are achievable on a big SQL Server box.