May 8, 2015 at 7:32 am
In our organization we are 99+% virtual in our North American region. Currently our environment is all company-owned assets in a third-party data center, but we do have plans to implement . Our environment includes somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 servers performing workloads which include (but are not limited to) domain controllers, exchange servers, file servers, print, servers, RDS servers, application servers, and SQL servers. Of the 200, I only manage about 30 SQL servers mixed between production, dev, and test environments and all of them are virtual.
Although a lot of processing and analysis is done on the data that we do have, none of our databases are big (our largest being about 100GB). Even though I notice some performance degradation we don't have any workloads heavy enough to dictate a physical server. Having moved to this environment from a 100% physical environment at my previous company, I find that (in our case at least) the benefits of virtualization outweigh any of the quirks or perceived performance loss that come along with it. It certainly makes disaster recovery easier with a combination of SQL backups, server snapshots, and off-site synchronization. It also makes scaling up a SQL server ridiculously easy (right click->Add RAM) compared to having to spec out hardware and making sure there's a slot open for it.
I'd certainly be the first person to implement a physical server if I thought it was warranted, but I'd need some pretty solid evidence to not virtualize something.
-G
May 8, 2015 at 7:34 am
A thought just occurred to me.
It may not be a straight case of moving physical servers over to virtual...
Here, we have a datacentre license for windows so provisioning a new server costs us £0 in licensing and effectively £0 in hardware because the hosts we already bought have twice the available resource than we actually use.
In the past, if we installed a new application that had a small SQL Server database behind it, we would add that database to an existing database server. So 10 applications might only use 1 instance of SQL Server on 1 physical machine.
Now, because it's so cheap (or effectively free even) to set up a VM, those same 10 applications will instead be 10 virtual servers each running sql server express edition. This gives us much more flexibility etc - even server reboots don't affect more than just 1 application etc etc.
so although the fact that virtualisation now appears to make up >50% of our SQL Server instances, many of those virtual instances would not have existed at all if it were not for the cost effective and simple nature of spamming our vmware hosts with millions of cheap/free express instances. So for some of us at least, it's not necesarily a simple story of migrating x% of our estate to virtualisation, it's more a case of extending our estate with a large number of VMs.
So I think saying x% of all SQL Server instances are now virtualised is somewhat misleading in that it makes physical instances seem more outmoded than maybe they really are.
Ben
^ Thats me!
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May 8, 2015 at 7:37 am
25 DB Servers (12 SQL, 13 Oracle) only 2 of which are physical. That is until our next upgrade cycle for that application, planned for next year, when we'll be 100% virtual.
May 8, 2015 at 7:42 am
Cypress-Fairbanks ISD (Houston, TX) has 2 MS*SQL DB's, both of which reside on "real" servers. The "application" servers, however, are all virtual. There are 6 for the Finance DB, and 6 for the Student DB. We currently run SQL2008, but are planning to upgrade 06/2016.
May 8, 2015 at 7:49 am
100% primary and DR
May 8, 2015 at 7:49 am
100% dev, test, UAT, prod. Over 200 instances.
May 8, 2015 at 7:55 am
We only have 2 physical servers left that are in use. Which puts us at 78% virtual
May 8, 2015 at 7:59 am
We had 1 Physical Dev Server which was switched off today 😀
so 100% Virtual across all servers. 50% of which are in Azure
May 8, 2015 at 8:57 am
All of our SQL Servers are on VMs except one. That one will be moved over to a VM this year and the box retired.
May 8, 2015 at 9:00 am
Like several people who have already replied, we should be 100% virtual by the end of the year, once the last couple of servers are replaced in a few months.
May 8, 2015 at 9:07 am
Currently 20% virtualized - 1 SQL Server virtualized (dev) and 4 physical (db/etl, cube, report servers, qa)
Future 100% (this Summer) all virtualized
note: virtualizing all is an IT initiative to consolidate hardware/save space/hardware money plus using Microsoft SQL Server High Density licensing ('SQL Server private cloud') to save licensing cost
May 8, 2015 at 9:25 am
Departmental Production Server, Departmental test server, and an application specific MSSQL server are all virtualized. So 100% (3/3) MSSQL Server installations are all virtualized.
May 8, 2015 at 10:54 am
...My suspicion is that the percentage of SQL Servers is much lower than that of other workloads ...
Sounds like those of us here on SQL Server Central are doing the opposite of your suspicions.
Our Dev & QA environments are 100% Virtual
Overall we are 65% Virtual, with the plan to be 100% virtual by the end of the year.
J DBA
May 8, 2015 at 11:05 am
bazmunro (5/7/2015)
100%That's the truth.
Nice. Any metric on absolute numbers? 1 or 1000?
May 8, 2015 at 11:06 am
PhilipC (5/8/2015)
0%for this reason " it's the human concerns or lack of confidence that prevents virtualization."
Senior Management at the company I work for just ignore the fact of visualization and I've talked about it until I'm blue in the face. It's a joke really as none of the servers are running a high work-load and licensing costs could come down dramatically.
They don't believe in it? Worried about performance? Any "reasons" they give you that make any sense?
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