January 21, 2008 at 12:27 am
Hi Guys,
I'm not a h/w guy. Can I install my database server on the blade server? We are in SQL server 2000 SP4.
the infra guy told me that the blade server is not suitable for database, however my boss is suggesting me to put my database into the blade server.
appreciate if you could share with me your point of view.
Best Regards
January 21, 2008 at 5:02 am
depends on the blade
Things to consider:
Does the database has to share anything with other programs
Are the I/O capabilities sufficient (and not shared)?
Are the cpu(s) sufficient?
January 21, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Hi
I ran 2 Prod instances on IBM blade servers for the last 3 years. No problems, once we had the IO working nicely.
As the previous post suggests, check your IO , CPU, memory, etc; in other words all the normal capacity things you would for a DB server.
In our case the blade server farm was built originally with only half of the internal switches in use and therefore only half of the IO available; this caused issues but was a config issue not specifically a Blade issue.
Regards
Karl
January 21, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Karl has got it right - the single biggest issue I've seen with blade servers/centers is I/O. Older blade centers/chassis in particular usually came with way too few I/O paths, most newer blade centers/chassis are an entirely different animal with many having private PCI & I/O busses for each blade.
Another common scenario is for the blade center/blades to be virtualized as well...? Which is a whole other can of worms with a lot of pro's (no longer tied to specific hardware) & con's (no longer tied to specific hardware, performance)
Joe
January 22, 2008 at 4:39 am
Hi Joe,
I'm very interested with your statement below:
Another common scenario is for the blade center/blades to be virtualized as well...? Which is a whole other can of worms with a lot of pro's (no longer tied to specific hardware) & con's (no longer tied to specific hardware, performance)
What do you mean by blades to be virtualized? Any url that I could refer to? What is the pro's and con's?
P.S. We are using JS21 blade server.
Thanks
January 22, 2008 at 9:31 am
I have friends with Virtual SQL Servers (under vmware ESX) on blade servers. not sure if these are HP or IBM, but they are SAN connected to avoid IO issues and not allowed to float across blades.
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January 22, 2008 at 11:11 am
It's not unusual in todays world to see newer hardware installations try to take advantage of virtualization in one form or another (or converting from multiple physical machines to multiple vm's on fewer physical machines).
I'm not advocating virtualization for any particular circumstance and putting a database server on shared hardware can be an iffy proposition - on the other hand, I have seen virtualization used not to share the hardware but to break the dependency on particular piece of hardware. Vmotion from VMWare for example - lose a blade/chassis? Vmotion can bring up the vm on an entirely different piece of hardware in just a few seconds/minutes...
Good sources for more information about some of the more popular virtualization technologies are:
http://www.xensource.com (redirects to http://www.citrixxenserver.com/Pages/default.aspx)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/
However, a quick search for a "JS21 Blade" dropped me at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/js21e/index.html you're running a Power PC 970 chip on that blade... if you're going to be running Windows/SQL Server on that blade you're going to be virtualized.
Joe
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