Design, Deploy and Optimize SQL Server. Thurs 15:00

Scott Sayler - responsible for VMware relationship with Microsoft SQL

- The approach is similar to that adopted for Exchange and Sharepoint;
- Global stats from IDC - 9% of x86 servers run SQL, 4% run Oracle, so database is a significant volume of workloads
- Like most other VMs, SQL servers are generally over provisioned and organisations need to think about the licencing implications of this
- SQL 2008 R2 on Windows 2008 can scale to 256 cores (suggesting here that its enterprise class!);
- Benefits of databases on VMware
- increase hardware utilization
- no application change implications
- consolidate SQL licences
- rapidly respond to changing workload requirements (hot add of resource is possible with SQL 2008)
- ESXi 4 overhead is less than 10%
- overcommit is possible on processor, but not recommended for SQL

Comparison with SQL Scale Up Consolidation:
- If the OS has problems you loose all SQL instances - ie SPOF
- If SQL has a problem you loose all SQL instances - ie another SPOF
- Load balancing is not possible across nodes (i.e. DRS can only handle the location of the whole stack, not each individual instances
- Apps need to be remediated, maintained etc., at the same time and at the same speed causing peaks in mainteinance workloads and conflict across users agreeing when to have outages
- (Comment - VMware not mentioning the benefits of licence consolidation in this section!)
- OS can be a bottleneck

Licencing Advice:
- think of using SQL Enterprise Data Centre edition licencing

Host Best Practice:
- CPU - don't over commit pCPUs - vCPU count should be lower than pCPU count
- Memory - don't over commit memory; use SQL min / max server memory settings; - memory allocation to the guest should match peak requirements
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