SQL Server on a VM
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I am considering running SQL Server on a Hyper-V VM. I've heard pros and cons for both. It isn't a heavily accessed SQL server. Primarily, it hosts Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains 2010 and we have some tables that several spreadsheets use to grab some data.
Just wondering what the experience has been like...thanks...
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@garak0410 said:
I am considering running SQL Server on a Hyper-V VM. I've heard pros and cons for both. It isn't a heavily accessed SQL server. Primarily, it hosts Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains 2010 and we have some tables that several spreadsheets use to grab some data.
Just wondering what the experience has been like...thanks...
I have two SQL VM's and they run fine, mind you I don't have many people using them and they are on ESXi... so, not an exact comparison.
Also, at my last job, there were several SQL servers that were hammered and they stood up well. One was an older Epicor version (6?) and the other major one was the clinical software for 12 sites.
From my experience and what I have read about SQL VM's, I don't know why anyone wouldn't virtualise their SQL boxes
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I have one SQL VM running on Hyper-V Server 2012. It seems to work fine. Performance is slightly better then when it was on a physical host. Although that could be because we moved from Server 2003 to Server 2012 and from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2012.
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This is at one of my clients.
Designed and built (poorly IMO) by Epicor for their Prophet 21 system.
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If you are going to do it, make sure you have the RAM you need to do it, and the IOPs available to that VM so you will get the performance you are looking to achieve. You probably want to run some kind of benchmark on that server just to make sure whatever you may be using to host the VM can run the SQL Server and several other VMs.
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@NetworkNerd said:
If you are going to do it, make sure you have the RAM you need to do it, and the IOPs available to that VM so you will get the performance you are looking to achieve.
That's a physical issue rather than a virtualisation issue though, isn't it? You need the same amount of available RAM or available IOPS regardless of whether the box is physical or virtual. Isn't the only true issue that a hypervisor adds a small overhead which may impact performance? Apart from that very small overhead, what's the difference really?
I suspect when people complain about poor performance from virtualisation, their issue is actually that they are running on poorly specified or poorly configured hardware. Underpowered hardware is underpowered hardware - that's not a weakness of virtualisation, that's a physical problem.
I got an unbelievably massive quote for a pair of HP SANs running RAID 6. From the cost, it would be easy to assume that they would rock performance wise. But actually, when you looked into the figures, performance was very mediocre. My vendors reasoning seemed to be "it's ok, they've got 15k disks". I could understand a situation where you spend $20k+ on SANs and then went "oh, that's disappointing performance" and then blamed virtualisation, whereas the reality is that you just spent too much money on mediocre gear and would have been just as disappointed if you were running physical machines off the SAN.
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@Carnival-Boy you hit the proverbial nail there. People always do weird things like move from fast local disks to unnecessary SANs when virtualized get and believe that SANs are fast no matter how they are configured and assume their hardware issues are virtualization problems. People also confuse consolidation with virtualization which causes even more problems.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy you hit the proverbial nail there. People always do weird things like move from fast local disks to unnecessary SANs when virtualized get and believe that SANs are fast no matter how they are configured and assume their hardware issues are virtualization problems. People also confuse consolidation with virtualization which causes even more problems.
Sounds like my last job where pretty much everything had to run on our Xiotech (now Xio) SANS...before I left that job, we had moved to their ISE models (basically, a module of permanently installed, self-healing drives)...had some major firmware issues with them which I assume have been resolved.
