2 Consolidation of Microsoft SQL Server Instances on the IBM System x3850 X5 with Microsoft Hyper-V
Introduction
There are a number of factors that drive an organization’s consolidation effort. Some of the
key areas that the industry is seeing include:
Improving business continuity and IT flexibility
Maximizing capital investment in hardware
Standardization and centralization of compute resources
Saving money on space, power, and cooling
As an organization’s IT environments become increasingly dynamic, IT administrators must
find new ways to maintain and improve business continuity, as well as remain flexible and able
to respond to the changing needs of the organization. Server consolidation has been around
a long time, but has taken a key role in helping IT staff maintain this dynamic environment.
The newest high-performance servers from IBM, the System x3850 X5, have a
state-of-the-art design to maximize hardware acceleration of a virtualized environment. Using
virtualization technology such as Microsoft Hyper-V, IT administrators can maximize their
investment in System x® server platforms, increasing utilization to optimal levels for each
hardware resource.
Migrating physical production servers into a virtual machine significantly eases the tasks such
as moving between physical hosts, load balancing during seasonal demand spikes, or
replacing old hardware as part of the IT life cycle. Many of these same benefits also lend to
an improved disaster recovery (DR) plan, allowing rapid redeployment of virtual machines in
the event of a catastrophic failure.
Server consolidation scenarios improve system utilization, maximizing your return on
investment. However, finding the best way to place multiple compute tasks on a single
physical server has proved challenging for years. Several methods have been utilized, such
as application silos (keeping similar applications on a single server) or running multiple
instances of a given application (such as SQL Server). Virtualization goes a step further by
giving administrators the ability to run multiple virtual standalone servers with their own
operating system instances and providing applications to an encapsulated environment on a
single physical server.
Initially, only smaller low-resource established servers were virtualized. As comfort with
virtualization has grown, along with system capacity and virtual machine performance, more
challenging workloads are now being considered. Business continuity plans are increasingly
leveraging virtualization to meet the objectives of minimizing downtime and maximizing
flexibility.
One example of high-performance consolidation taking place is with SQL Server. Database
server consolidation can take one of several separate paths:
A single database server instance running multiple databases
Multiple database server instances running multiple databases
Virtualization of a complete operating system and SQL environments in a virtual machine
Two additional benefits of server virtualization can be quickly realized as well. First,
centralized and standardized computing resources can improve manageability, simplify
documenting procedures, and streamline training. Second, reducing the number of physical
servers needed to support your environment can result in significant savings in datacenter
space with fewer physical servers to power and cool.