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.
VM-Template best practice
Here are 2 great articles of best practices for creating templates for virtual machines. I’m referring them here as my own bookmarks:
VM Template best practices (Windows)
VM Template best practices (Linux)
One thing I learned is that you already can create thin provisioned disks in VMware ESX 3.5:
vmkfstools -c 20G -d thin /vmfs/volumes/datastore/virtualmachine_name/virtualmachine_disk1.vmdk
Big thanks to lraikhman
