February 14, 2018 at 11:09 am
I'm not in the position of changing hardware very frequently. For the most part, the teams I've been on give responsibility for the hardware/infrastructure to the Systems/Networking team. However, we are moving data centers (DC) and upgrading to new hardware at the new DC. We have a variety of SQL Servers, from 2005 to 2016. I know there are some upgrade steps, that's the least of my worries. Where I'm seeking input is regarding the structure of the new servers. I was suggesting a more traditional cluster with AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AOAG) to give us some HA and direction towards DR. The Infrastructure System Admin is more inclined to turn the 2 servers into a VMWare virtual. One of the comments was that the way VMWare handles votes in the quorum will allow for better/truer reporting of problems in the cluster. We have conflicts of thought internally on setting this up as a more traditional WSFC with SQL AlwaysOn AvailabilityGroup (AOAG), or setting this up with VMWare vSphere and then AOAG on top of that. Senior Network Admins believe the VM structure will give better handling of High Availability and future DR, but wants me to “choose”.
The first step in our migration is consolidating 10 instances that currently run on a SQL 2014 cluster, where 3 run on one node and the other instances run on the other node. Not a good HA solution and resources stack up when having to be shared on one node. Currently these run on some older Dell R910s.
The new server specs are pretty much as follows and will be running SQL Server 2016:
2 new Dell FC630s ,
- each with 32 cores (2x Intel Xeon E5-2697A),
- 1TB of RAM,
- 10Gb Network Fabric,
- 2 x 400GB SSD RAID1,
connected to Compellent Storage.
After that is up an running, there are another 20 instances to get off of old hardware onto the new hardware. Most are very light,small instances (100GB or less).
Looking for some input and thoughts on this.
Thanks in advance for your input.
February 14, 2018 at 7:57 pm
Hi,
There is another option - use AOAG on top of VMWare boxes.
February 15, 2018 at 4:35 pm
Thanks Evgeny
That is one of the 2 options presented, yes. What I don't know enough of is how VM is going to impact an ever growing data load, AOAG, replication and the data warehouse. I seem to recall in a blog some warnings on VM clustering and AOAG if things are not handled just right. That's one of the missing links I don't have, and was hoping for some input (and need to find that post again to see if there was relevance to it).
kDBAjan
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