Have you been investigating the benefits of virtualizing your SQL Server environment? Is the appeal of consolidating your SQL Server databases on fewer servers appealing but are you worried about the performance implications?
We recommend you give serious thought to virtualizing SQL Server using Microsoft Hyper-V.
Benefits of Virtualization
There are many benefits of virtualization including:
- Reduced hardware costs
- Reduced software costs. With Premium Edition licensing for Windows Server and SQL Server, you’re licensed to run multiple virtual database servers with a single license.
- Reduced operational and data center costs
- Increased flexibility
Advantages of Hyper-V
There are many vendors providing the software required to virtualize your environment. When you specifically intend to virtualize an end-to-end Microsoft environment, you should give careful consideration to using Microsoft Hyper-V. With SQL Server and Hyper-V, you gain advantages that other vendors cannot provide. For example:
- Performance: Hyper-V provides near native performance for SQL Server
- Extensive Monitoring Support/Management: When combined with Microsoft System Center, complete monitoring of both the physical and virtualized environments are available to administrators.
- High Availability Support: Hyper-V fully supports SQL Server Failover Clustering scenarios.
- Live Migration: Using Hyper-V as your virtualization framework, a server administrator can move a running virtual machine between different physical machines without disconnecting the users.
Try Something New!
Microsoft has an integrated solution designed specifically to provide a cost-effective, high-performance, and flexible virtualization framework for your SQL Server environment. With SQL Server running in a Hyper-V infrastructure that is monitored using System Center, your administrators have the tools available to realize the maximum advantage from virtualization.
