December 15, 2010 at 7:27 am
I’m looking for advice on consolidating several SQL servers into one.
Currently we have 9 different servers running various versions of SQL (2005 & 2008) – approx 17 databases, to support various ERPs.
We would like to consolidate them for 1) failover/high availability 2) reduced licensing costs and later down the road we would probably like to look a load balancing.
I have available to me 2 blade servers (16 cores, lots of ram).
My questions it how to best consolidate the databases?
My thought is to create a single windows server VM, and allocate 100% of those two blade servers to it – that solves failover at the server level. I have no doubt that one of those blades can perform as well or better than my individual servers (which typically only have 2 CPUs and 4GB of ram)
My plan is to then move each SQL server to the new server as its own instance – am I correct in assuming that will allow me to maintain different versions? The ERPs don’t always support the same version at the same time. Also, How many instances can SQL server support?
Any other thoughts that might help me?
December 15, 2010 at 8:01 am
On those two blades I would setup 2 ESX or ESXi hosts in High Availability mode with SAN/NAS storage.
But make sure you setup > 2GB trunk (depends on the volume of bandwidth you expect) in the blade switches. And have separate vlans dedicated to this cluster.
In SAN/NAS setup separate Luns for
data
logs
indexes
backups
Quorum
Create 2 node windows cluster (each node in separate vm host) and then create sql server cluster.
December 15, 2010 at 8:02 am
AlexSQLForums (12/15/2010)
On those two blades I would setup 2 ESX or ESXi hosts in High Availability mode with SAN/NAS storage.But make sure you setup > 2GB trunk (depends on the volume of bandwidth you expect) in the blade switches. And have separate vlans dedicated to this cluster.
In SAN/NAS setup separate Luns for
data
logs
indexes
backups
Quorum
Create 2 node windows cluster (each node in separate vm host) and then create sql server cluster.
Are these blades under the same chassis? If yes that's the only downside to this setup is that if the power goes out in the chassis then you can kiss this all goodbye.
December 15, 2010 at 8:42 am
Yes - same chassis, but with redundant power supply and a back-up generator power to the server room.
December 15, 2010 at 10:53 am
I think you can also create a VMWare ESX Server farm with those 2 blade servers (or add them to the existing farm) . Then create VMguests and setup a VMware cluster with the VMs. Later migrate the SQL Server instances onto those VMguests.
VMware has inbuilt High availability feature for the VMGuests which failovers all the VMs Automtically or manually in case of a host failure. In this way whole server is failoved over. In this way you needn't worry about the SQL Server dependencies on the Windows server files or registry entries, SSIS Packages etc.. which will not be failed over automatically by using the SQL Server failover clustering.
Usually it is not recommended to put High performance\Mission Critical production SQL Servers on VMs because you can get only 80% of performance when comapared to the SQL Servers running on the Physical servers.
But before consolidation the SQL Instances, you need to check their resource utilization on their current boxes in order to configure the Physical host or for placing them on the hosts.
Also check the licensing info for the SQL Servers runing on VMs
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/pricing-licensing-faq.aspx
Thank You,
Best Regards,
SQLBuddy.
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