Virtualizing SAP HANA with VMware in productive environments is not supported at this time, but according to Arne Arnold with SAP, based on his blog post of Nov 5,  http://www.saphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2013/11/05/just-a-matter-of-time-sap-hana-virtualized-in-production, they are working hard in that direction.

Clearly memory can be assigned to individual partitions with VMware and to a more limited extent, CPU resources may also be assigned although this may be a bit more limited in its effectiveness.  The issues that SAP will have to overcome, however, are inherent limitations in scalability of VMware partitions, I/O latency and potential contention between partitions for CPU resources.

As I discussed in my blog post late last year, http://saponpower.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/sap-performance-report-sponsored-by-hp-intel-and-vmware-shows-startling-results/, VMware 5.0 was proven, by VMware, HP and Intel, to have severe performance limitations and scalability constraints.  In the lab test, a single partition achieved only 62.5% scalability, overall, but what is more startling is the scalability between each measured interval…