Presenter – Kevin Kline (Quest Software)
What is Virtualization?
- Technology that allows a server to be decoupled from the physical hardware of the system.
- Lets you run one or more virtual machines independent of the physical hardware
- If you have VMWare Enterprise level products, you can receive support from Microsoft for a SQL instance on a VMWare VM.
Benefits of Virtualization
- Server Consolidation
- Disaster Recovery
- Legacy Apps
- Testing and QA
- Training
Drawbacks of Virtualization
- Overhead
- used to be 30-35% in original VMWare software
- now at 15% with newest software and processors
- Administration complexity
- VMs obfuscate troubleshooting efforts
- Performance monitoring and tuning
- Lag in hardware support
Strategies
- Planning for best Utilization
- How is it used?
- Type 1 (bare-metal) or Type 2 (hosted) Hypervisor
- Workload and performance?
- SLAs?
- Users?
- Availability and recovery?
Licensing Complexities
- Licensing
- Enterprise - $20K per physical cpu, unlimited instances in VMs
- Standard - $5K per license, each instance is a license
Virtualization Performance
- Where does overhead hit?
- Memory
- CPU
- Dick IO
- Driver Support
- How can I virtualize production SQL Server?
Best Practices for Virtualization
- Choose a Hardware-assisted virtualizing CPU
- Confirm and enable HAT and DEP
- Use the right drivers with synthetic devices
- Set pass-thru disks on the guest VM to offline using DISKPART or Volume Manager
- To prevent overhead in the Disk IO
- Only run server role for hypervisor only from the root of the OS
- Don’t use dynamic VHDs
- Stick to the best performing options
- Dedicated pass-through disks
- Fixed-size VHDs (to improve Disk IO)
- Can be expanded, but VM must be shut down
- Don’t use regular PerfMon counters, especially for CPU
- Instead, use:
- Specific Logical Processor counters