September 29, 2008 at 11:50 am
I'm not sure if this is the correct forum or not, if its not direct me into the correct one.
I was asked to write a proposal to get 3 physical servers in house to run SQL 2005, even though we currently have 3 VM Instances setup running SQL 2005 and we have some issues such as space and memory usage at times.
What is the "best practice" with SQL 2005, run it on a VM instance (VMWare) or a Phyiscal server?
Personally I would like to get phyiscal servers for our production environment, but before spending that kind of money on servers, I'm looking for some information on what is the best route to take.
My current VM Instances are configured with 20 gig of hd space and 2 gig of memory
I'm looking to get (at least my prod server) with at least 1 tb drive and 4 - 4 ghz cpu's.
We have 50 or so SharePoint databases which are being indexed, jobs running against them pretty much all day and with the limitations set on me on the VM Instance, I'm looking for this kind of hardware.
So, is a phyiscal server the recommended host for SQL server, or can a VM Instance hold with this kind of processing?
My current VM Instance bogs down at times. I'm just looking for some information, recommendations, etc on this. thanks
September 29, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I have had both good an bad experiences with it. Because the bad experiences were things like read/write buffers reporting back incorrectly, I am not comfortable using VMWare for a production SQL server anymore. It's great for development environments.
To add to this, MS support for using SQL on VMWare is "limited". It is only supported with pretty high-end support contracts - it is not covered by the regular MS SQL licensing. Even if you do have the appropriate support contract, MS is clear in the support contract that they can require you to eliminate the virtualization layer as a variable - basically tell you during a support call that you need to move to a physical environment so they can help you with the issue. It may be unlikely, but that's a bit scary. It lends itself to a couple of vendors pointing the revolving finger when you have a problem neither can or wants to solve.
I would recommend using Hyper-V for MS SQL virtualization at this point. At least it puts you in a one-vendor situation if there is a problem.
September 29, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Mike (9/29/2008)
My current VM Instances are configured with 20 gig of hd space and 2 gig of memory
wow as little as that. 20GB will just about home the OS, SQL and the backup software 😎
We have SQL VM's running on ESX3.5 and no problems at all. We do however have a Clarion SAN with over 15TB of storage at the back end. Our hosts are quad cpu dual core AMD's with over 30GB RAM in each. The VM is only as good as the hardware that underlies it. We also had a problem with a VM recently and received full support through MS (via our Vendor). The virtual technology should be transparent, as for using Hyper-V the best of british to you!
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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉
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