Virtualising Analysis Services

Microsoft reckon that 7% of workloads are virtualised, so there’s still a lot of consolidation work to be done, but how high up the list should SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) be?

In order to answer this it’s important to understand what SSAS is there to do, which is to provide a high performance ad hoc query environment for quantative analysis.  To do this effectively SSAS needs RAM and CPU as well as good connectivity, so in many BI projects analysis services is installed on a dedicated server specifically tuned for the task.