VMware vCenter & SQL server best practices [updated 15/4/09]
VMware vCenter & SQL : Best Practice
This month I started on a new project and I noticed again a different approach from a colleague to the vCenter/SQL/Physical/Virtual issue. And of course there has been written a lot about this issue but I couldn’t find my exact view anywhere else so I thought I’d open up a discussion here by presenting the Best Practice in my humble opinion.
There are 4 critical decisions you have to make concerning the vCenter server for your VI:
1. vCenter server : physical or virtual.
2. SQL Database (server) : locally or detached.
3. Redundancy options : make it redundant and if so; how?
4. License server : locally or detached.
Virtualize SQL Servers? VMware says you should!
I stumbled upon a nice white paper on the VMware blog concerning virtualizing SQL servers. The conclusion of the article (how surprising) is that in high workload scenario’s it can be really interesting and usefull to virtualize your Microsoft SQL database servers.
I really advise you to read the full article, because every situation is different but for those who are lazy:
Based on the test data presented in this paper, we can conclude that:
- As the number of virtual machines is increased ESX offers linear scaling of performance until the physical CPUs are saturated.
- Fairness in resource sharing makes ESX a robust platform for hosting and consolidating virtual machines running SQL Server workloads.
- While resources are available, the CPU load on the host has minimal impact on the performance of applications running in virtual machines on that host.
- Virtual machines get the resources they need when resources are not overcommitted. Resources not used by idle virtual machines are dynamically allocated to other virtual machines that need resources without affecting performance.
You can read the entire article here on the VMware Blog (VROOM section)
