We want an economical solution that is resillient and offers some redundancy RAID where we could keep a spare drive or two on hand. We want to get our feet wet with virtualization by migrating our Exchange install and then upgrading it on the virualized environment.
Doug — wow, ouch, no, I would not call that resilient. Consider picking up a shared storage environment. You can just boot up the guests on another host. Start with the web apps with lower storage throughput requirements. Hope that helps! G-man — thanks, glad you like the work! Your email address will not be published. Don't subscribe All Replies to my comments Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.
You can also subscribe without commenting. Post Comment. Want to advertise here and reach my savvy readers? Last Updated February 9, Brent Ozar. Leave new K. Is this always a good idea? What are some things I need to think about? Check out this tip to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of virtualizing SQL Server. You will need to consider at least two paths before deciding to virtualize any of your SQL Servers. The first path is to think about why you are virtualizing your systems; consider the advantages and disadvantages a virtual environment provides.
Some of these advantages and disadvantages are systemic to a specific vendor and others are systemic to virtualization. For either one of these paths you'll most likely need to argue against virtualization as opposed to arguing for virtualization. This is a general observation, but I've found that virtualization provides so many benefits outside the SQL Server environment that your company has already decided to implement the technology.
I have witnessed one large company refusing to virtualize but, since their competitors are virtualizing, it won't be long before they begin implementation.
I'm going to purposely ignore the advantages of virtualization as they pertain to the datacenter and instead focus on the advantages for the SQL Server DBA.
There is some overlap, but I want to address specifically how virtualization helps you and your SQL Server environment. I won't be able to cover everything, your mileage may vary depending on what features you implement and what vendor you use. Still, I want to provide a decent overview so let's take a look. By provisioning I'm referring to the capability of dynamically assigning additional resources to a VM instance.
I cannot overstate the beauty of being able to add GB to a dying LUN without downtime and without the user even knowing its happened. You want another 3 GB of memory - no problem. The process really is a thing of beauty. It helps us DBAs focus on other things and it gives me a sense of confidence that I can provide additional resources to the instance on a moment's notice.
This is what virtualization was created to do and there are advantages. I'm a big recycler and I hate waste. I guess that's why I gain weight because I always have to finish what's on my plate.
I just can't stand throwing away food. I apply this same OCD to my servers. Virtualization frees me by allowing me to think about this less often notice I didn't say ever. Ballooning is the method by which VM moves around memory. Ballooning will add memory to your VM if you need it and take it away if it doesn't assuming you are not using lock pages in memory.
VM is especially helpful for those once-a-year-I-demand-everything budget applications. We recently had a request for 14 new SQL Servers seriously! They all ran the same application, used the same databases, and had the same configuration. The only difference was they were in different geographic locations. In the past this might have been a nightmare manual process subject to countless possible misconfigurations.
Instead, in the virtual world, the VM team cloned one system 13 times. All I had to do was go to each system and update the servername to reflect the new name.
More about that next. Provisioning is the double-edged sword of virtualization. We build anywhere from 4 to 10 new servers every month. We decommission some servers, but most are brand new and many still including test and development environments. Server sprawl and how to handle, manage and license the sprawl will be a serious issue going into and beyond.
We do try to consolidate on a shared server when possible, but most systems don't fit into that model. The list of validated configurations may be updated as vendors submit changes through this program. Are other versions of Windows supported to be used as guest operating system? A3: Yes. As documented at the following SVVP website, products that have passed the SVVP requirements for the latest released version of Windows Server are considered supported on all earlier versions of Windows Server that are still supported per Lifecycle Matrix.
Server Virtualization. When running SQL Server on a guest operating system, the version of SQL Server must be supported on the version of the guest operating system, according to the requirements that are listed in the respective SQL Server product documentation.
For more information about the hardware and software requirements for SQL Server, visit the following pages on docs:. SQL Server Hardware and software requirements. SQL Server and Hardware and software requirements. Q4: Are SQL Server features such as database mirroring supported to run in a virtualization environment?
Any feature or usage that is not stated in this article or in the SQL Server product documentation is assumed to be supported in a virtualization environment by using the same restrictions and support as a bare metal hardware environment. Microsoft has an integrated solution designed specifically to provide a cost-effective, high-performance, and flexible virtualization framework for your SQL Server environment.
With SQL Server running in a Hyper-V infrastructure that is monitored using System Center, your administrators have the tools available to realize the maximum advantage from virtualization. May 10,
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