SQL Server Consolidation

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Whether you are into virtualisation or not, most organisations want to reduce the number of SQL Server Servers they have (and some don’t even know how many they have).  So here’s a new white paper on consolidation for SQL Server 2008.

One of the questions I do get asked a lot about is virtualising databases as  a means of consolidation, specifically what the performance and what’s supported.

The support question is easy and the answer is here, In reality Microsoft support make best efforts to support virtualisation of its application servers including SQL Server, but this can often mean being asked by support to reproduce the problem in a physical environment to eliminate the virtual environment form the equation.  I would also add that SQL Server 2005 is supported on Virtual Server 2005.

No one seems to have done any work on virtual Database performance though and hopefully Microsoft will be able to do this when Hyper-V and SQL Server 2008 are released.  

In the meantime SQL Server 2008 is a good base for cutting down the servers as it has 2 new tools for keeping lots of databases on one server running smoothly:

  • Resource governor allows you allocate resources to applications and users on the fly
  • the performance data collector (aka Performance data warehouse) is a way of checking and maintaining performance over a longer period of time, by allowing counters to be saved toa special schema that you can report from.

Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008,resource governror,virtualisation