How Virtualized?

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  • Well, this number is a bit skewed relative the general population, I'm sure, but the clients I work with are 90+% virtualized. In my case, we're a managed service/private cloud provider, so we have a lot of say in the process, and we're quite partial to virtualized servers.

    The increased flexibility of being able to change the underlying hardware (relatively) easily tends to far outweigh any slight performance drops relative to bare metal.

    Having said that, we haven't really seen much of a performance drop in virtual servers relative to physical ones, especially with the latest versions of hypervisors (we're a VMware shop), and definitely not enough to offset the flexibility.

    Of course, many of our clients are small-to-medium-but-rapidly-growing, which makes the flexibility that much more important. Still, we have some decently resource-intensive workloads running smoothly as virtual servers (12+ cores, 512 GB RAM, all-flash arrays, etc.)

    With steady, not-growing, resource-intensive workloads, physical definitely still has its place, although that place is getting smaller.

    It'll be interesting to see the distribution of virtualization percentages out there!

  • 100%

    That's the truth.

  • 100% for our developers. About 30 servers.

    100% for our hosted and SaaS solutions. 6 servers.

    80% (estimate) for our 'install at customer sites'. About 200 servers.

    It is so much easier to setup, install and maintain, move etc.., The only customers that are not v are ones that already had a physical one set up and had lots of spare capacity so not need to set up a new server.

    We run exclusively with Hyper-V, but I know some of our customers use VMWare. None that I know of use open source options.

    As long as we don't go with 1 v-cpu (even on the smallest one) we do not encounter any performance issues.

  • For a company our size, we have a *lot* of specialized line-of-business software in addition to infrastructure.

    15 physical servers / +-48 virtual machines

    Of the physical servers

    7 VM Hosts

    1 File server

    1 Domain controller

    1 SQL Server / ERP System server

    1 24-bay JBOD backup server (full)

    1 8-bay makeshift SAN for additional storage for the backup server

    1 70-bay 2-node scale-out file server cluster (counted as 2 physical servers)

    Three of our SQL Server workloads run on virtual machines, one on physical.

  • 100 %

    Dev and production. SQL thru to even a few plain win7 VM's for dev or remote admin purposes

  • 100%, both production and development. Mainly because our company did not have the budget to upgrade SQL Server (2000), so we continue to have Windows 2003 virtual servers within Windows 2008 R2 Hypervisor Host.

  • 0%

    for this reason " it's the human concerns or lack of confidence that prevents virtualization."

    Senior Management at the company I work for just ignore the fact of visualization and I've talked about it until I'm blue in the face. It's a joke really as none of the servers are running a high work-load and licensing costs could come down dramatically.

  • 40 servers, all virtual.

  • 100% of DEV, TEST, UAT and PROD servers. (about 50 of them).Mission critical running under VMware HA.

  • My clients vary.

    Myself? I use hosted services, have one physical server but heavily use VMs for development (including clients).

    Gaz

    -- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

  • 100% virtual, that includes Oracle as well as SQL. Main reasons - more efficient use of hardware (blade servers and shared storage), easier server management (e.g. varying resources such as memory and CPUs), easier disaster recovery. These days, apart from some very specialist requirements, it's a no-brainer.

  • we have, at last count, over 80 SQL instances. I don't know what they all are but these are what I do know;

    Physical db servers (MSSQL):

    3 bi database servers, 2 of which are a cluster.

    2 application servers (active/passive)

    2 application servers (in a cluster)

    + 3x Informix SQL Servers but they don't count for toffees 😉

    so that's 5(?) instances over 7 machines. I'm not the main DBA here, just a developer who helps out ocassionally so I don't have access to see the full picture.

    so far as I am aware the rest of the ~80+ instances are virtualised.

    that 80+ includes our dev/test environments plus some of our own application servers but is mostly made up of out-of-the-box software solutions from 3rd party vendors who install sql server as their back end so with those types of thing we normally install the whole package onto its own VM.

    we use vmware exclusively.

    Ben

    ^ Thats me!

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  • Of the 25 main sql servers I work with only 5 are physical and they are all production servers. Dev and Test are 100% virtual.

    File and print servers are all virtual. VMWare is the choice here.

    Of the users probably 80 to 85% are on virtual machines, mainly RDS and some PC over IP using cheaper Wyse or Devon boxes instead of desktop PC.

    What I really like about it is when I need more CPU or disk space on a virtual server the tech team can supply it in minutes without having to buy tin.

  • 100% on our entire server infrastructure including email and archiving platforms.

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