June 20, 2011 at 1:56 pm
My previous company did not virtualize SQL Server databases hardly at all.
Our experience was more along the lines of virtualizing other services: IIS; brute force sound file servers/services; miscellaneous application functions that could be redundant web services, scripts, or never-ending ACCESS applications to perform conversion / logging functions; etc.
Our successes were mixed but mostly because the initial implementation was "on the cheap" and just about as poorly planned and communicated (again - by management) as it was possible to be!
The project was revisited when I became IT Director and we had a much more skillful System Admin/Engineer on board, and we eliminated most of the issues (after purchasing a better SAN, and beefing up our older cluster array).
I'd say virtualization is here to stay and the long-term TCO payback can be significant; howerver, as Scott pointed out, good communication and planning are key; to that I'd add - not over-reaching and focusing on a good balance of applying virtualization where it can bring the best ROI and inflict the least pain on administrators/support people who are on the front lines of servicing vendor and customer relationships.
June 22, 2011 at 9:07 am
Fantastic article! I to have just made the conversion to a fully virtual environment, and had the same anxiety that you faced. I have not had to change anything about my back up routine, still just use Red Gate back up tool and it all works fine. Also, the biggest adjustment for me so far has been coming to grips with how it necessitates a change in your way of thinking towards performance counters and monitoring. Moving into the VM and SAN environments changes how you have to look at things like Buffer Caching and Disk read and write times. The SAN has a huge buffer of its own that really seems to help out these counters although they do not reflect it in perfmon. I have had my QA, Dev and Test environments in the virtual world for almost a year and we finally made the jump on our production servers and I have not regretted it for a second!
June 22, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Anthony McBroom (6/22/2011)
Fantastic article! I to have just made the conversion to a fully virtual environment, and had the same anxiety that you faced. I have not had to change anything about my back up routine, still just use Red Gate back up tool and it all works fine. Also, the biggest adjustment for me so far has been coming to grips with how it necessitates a change in your way of thinking towards performance counters and monitoring. Moving into the VM and SAN environments changes how you have to look at things like Buffer Caching and Disk read and write times. The SAN has a huge buffer of its own that really seems to help out these counters although they do not reflect it in perfmon. I have had my QA, Dev and Test environments in the virtual world for almost a year and we finally made the jump on our production servers and I have not regretted it for a second!
Thanks Anthony! It feels good to know that I was able to hit a nerve with the article and accurately as possible explain systemic problems and process with virtualization. You bring up a great point with mentioning how virtualization affects performance monitoring. Just today Confio provided a webinar on that exact subject. DBAs who work in virtual environments will need to get used to looking at VM counters in Perfmon and also demand access to vSphere. If they don't then they aren't seeing the big picture.
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