The PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter members sent me in a list of questions, and I covered ‘em in this webcast. Questions included:
- How do I get my virtual servers to run as fast as my physical ones?
- Is there a way to leverage VMware caching to improve performance?
- Should we cluster our virtual SQL Servers or use VMware HA?
- Why do VMware snapshots make my database mirrors fail over?
- Is disk and index fragmentation an issue in virtual servers?
- Will any cloud services let me bring my own virtual machine?
- How should we configure VMs to prepare them for SQL Server?
- How is multipathing configured?
- Should we set CPU reservations like we do memory reservations?
- Where do I start learning VMware?
The answers are all in this one-hour video, plus a couple dozen more questions asked by the live audience:
For more about virtualizing SQL Server, check out BrentOzar.com/go/virtual and my 3-hour SQL Server virtualization training.
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Timothy Batts August 10, 2012 | 12:17 pm
On VMware, do you prefer attaching storage directly to the SQL VM, or using virtual disks, or doesn’t it really matter as long as the physical spindles are not being shared with other guests?
Brent Ozar August 10, 2012 | 1:00 pm
Tim – I’m a big fan of using virtual disks (VMDK/VHD) to make management easier. People virtualize to save costs, and using VHDs/VMDKs makes life a lot simpler.
Timothy Batts August 10, 2012 | 1:05 pm
Thanks, Brent! Just wanted to make sure I’m not going to take a performance hit when they convert mine next week. I have seen performance improvements going the other way (converting VMDK to DAS) but that was on a Server 2003 box, and I suspect it may have been virtualization drivers that didn’t play nice with an OS that was not built in the least bit with virtualization in mind.
Pradeep August 11, 2012 | 4:31 pm
Learnt a whole lot. Awesome presentation. Thanks Brent!
Toine September 7, 2012 | 6:57 am
At 44:30 you say that you prefer one instance per host (which i totally agree with) but one of the reasons is that there isn’t any extra license cost involved. But with 2012 the licensing of virtual servers has changed quite a bit. Does this have any effect on your view or is it still to go with 1 instance per host or do you now suggest multiple instance per host in certain situations?
Brent Ozar September 7, 2012 | 6:59 am
Tolne – 2012′s licensing is actually even better. With 2012, if you license Enterprise Edition, you get unlimited virtualization again (as opposed to 2008R2, which only gave us 4 VMs). It’s even better!