Comments on: Why Your Sysadmin Wants To Virtualize Your Servers

By: Iain Knight

Iain Knight — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:04:28 +0000

We have a large VM production implementation > 300 servers with over 70 SQL servers including production. Included in this is data warehousing with servers > tb databases. As long as you are sensible on what you put on each ESX cluster so that you are giving performance and resources to machines that need it and not just trying to stack as many VMs over as few physical clusters you can make this work. I think one of the major benefits that is not really mentioned in the article is the flexibility when it comes to DR. We use san replication to our offsite DC for our critical applications and servers. We are able to get our environment up and running in a relative short space of time. Especially when comparing to maintaining multiple physical environments and relying on backup restore techniques which can fraught with problems related to patch levels etc.
Also worth mentioning is the ability to clone machines into a test environment like lab manager and isolate them from your production environment. I was very skeptical about running SQL server in production in VMware but i have not been able to find substantial evidence that performance is necessarily degraded if you plan your infrastructure carefully.

By: Evan

Evan — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:43:19 +0000

I have a home DNS and other IT infestructure running. Since I have a local webserver here, I have been running more and more into the “large scale” issues of constant uptime, etc. This has been “brought home” by haivng to move around my main server (a repurposed laptop) in order to clean carpets (of all things). Do you know if I’ll get similar functionality benefits from the free offerings from VMWare, (the lousy performant) VirtualPC, or other? I’d love to be able to migrate on the fly to a desktop or wireless laptop in an emergency without incurring downtime to possible Google crawls, etc.

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:01:39 +0000

Richard – absolutely, that’s one of the drawbacks I’ll talk about in my disadvantages post on Thursday.

By: Richard Fryar

Richard Fryar — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:52:14 +0000

We have a mixed environment, using VMWare for dev servers and reporting services, as well as most other (non-SQL) servers.

One advantage of using physical servers is multipathing. The current release of ESX does not support multipathing and this can make a big difference to performance. I understand that the next release will include a basic round-robin algorithm, so it will be interesting to see what impact that has.