Yesterday I talked about using the Windows Core 2012 Server edition of windows as a host operating system for Hyper-V enabled virtual machines as SQL Server hosts. The Intel hardware now provides excellent performance running with this kind of configuration; so performance is no longer as much of a factor against virtual machines as in days of old.
Ok, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. So, why would you use virtual operating systems to host your SQL Server Installations? The answer can be summed up in one word; flexibility.
Because your host operating system is a virtual machine, it is possible to move your SQL Server service from one host to another with little downtime. Why would you do that? Load balancing, applying updates requiring reboot, failover are a few of the reasons.
I have worked on servers where a restart can take between one to two minutes to complete the post cycle at startup. If you add the sometimes required Windows update deployment at shutdown or startup, you could be offline for a few minutes. In many environments this is unacceptable. A virtual machine helps with this situation again due to the flexibility available to you. There are many ways to use them so that your downtime is reduced to a few seconds.
What’s your opinion of VMs? Are they production ready in your environment? Share your thoughts here or email to
btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben