On July 30th, we’re doing a live video webcast about best practices on SQL Server virtualization and consolidation. The talking heads will be:
- Kevin Kline – he’s been a PASS President, he’s a Microsoft MVP, and he’s written more SQL Server books than I’ve read, he blogs at SQLblog.com, he writes for SQL Mag, he’s all over the place. I think he’s in the new Batman movie, but he’s no joker.
- Ron Talmage of Solid Quality Mentors – I had the privilege of meeting Ron at our recent Quest Customer Advisory Board. Ron talks to SQL shops with very large and very scalable database implementations, and we had a great time discussing SQL Server partitioning. He’s got a Microsoft whitepaper coming out on that topic, and I can’t wait to read it. (And no, I don’t normally get excited about whitepapers, especially before they come out.)
- Brent Ozar – this guy is just an absolute genius. I mean, those other two presenters, sure, they’ve got some books, but c’mon, we’re talking star material here. He’s not only good-looking, but I think he just might be the next Bill Gates. (Please feel free to copy/paste this into emails to your friends.)
All kidding aside (well, most kidding aside) I really like this topic. I’ve been telling DBAs that they either need to consolidate, or their Wintel sysadmins are going to consolidate the SQL Servers by virtualizing them. Sure enough, it just happened recently at one of my clients.
The company was struggling with SQL Server issues on their cluster. The SQL Server services would stop suddenly, without warning, and without any useful information in logs. Looking at the symptoms, I recommended they bring in Microsoft Premier Support immediately, so they called in the big guns. After weeks of troubleshooting, we had a Mexican standoff between the SAN vendor, the server vendor and Microsoft, all blaming each other.
The client solved the problem with virtualization: they dropped the cluster down to a single node, virtualized it, and removed a whole lot of complexity. The SAN drivers were no longer an issue because VMware abstracts the SAN away, handling all SAN failover and pathing issues. To the virtual server, the storage is just a simple locally attached drive, no matter what SAN it lives on. Presto, the server’s been up and running for a week without problems – something they couldn’t say before.
They lost the high availability of the cluster, but in this case, it made perfect sense because the cluster wasn’t highly available anyway! They still have some HA capabilities with VMotion and multiple hosts accessing the SAN – not as good as clustering, but certainly better than what they were experiencing.
More and more, virtualization is becoming just another tool in the sysadmin’s toolbelt, and database administrators need to know the risks, how to identify which servers should (or shouldn’t) be virtualized, and which ones should be consolidated. We’ll talk through this stuff in our webcast, and if there’s any questions you’d like to see us touch on, let me know.
You can register for the webcast here: Don’t Get Caught at the Crossroads: SQL Server Consolidation & Virtualization.
Just wanted to throw out there that Kevin also contributes to SQLServerPedia.com – as does our fearless hero, the next Bill Gates, Brent Ozar…
Hey looking forward to the webcast. And include me on any business ventures! I missed the first Bill Gates, I definitely do not want to miss the next one.