Virtualization for Database Development

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Virtualization for Database Development

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Grant Fritchey

Posted Monday, April 07, 2008 11:43 PM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Virtualization for Database Development

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"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood..." Theodore Roosevelt
The Scary DBA
Author of: SQL Server 2012 Query Performance Tuning
SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled
and
SQL Server Execution Plans

Product Evangelist for Red Gate Software

Post #481301

ALZDBA

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 1:49 AM

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Thank you for sharing your struggles ...

Especially the fact that despite the warnings we give, people confirm them not to be a problem (again and again) until they are actually confronted with these warnings and then hell breaks out.

I'm no longer feeling alone w00t

Johan

     Jul 13

Don't drive faster than your guardian angel can fly ...
but keeping both feet on the ground won't get you anywhere w00t

- How to post Performance Problems
- How to post data/code to get the best help

- How to prevent a sore throat after hours of presenting ppt ?

"press F1 for solution", "press shift+F1 for urgent solution" BigGrin

Need a bit of Powershell? How about this

Who am I ? Sometimes this is me but most of the time this is me Hehe

Post #481330

Grant Fritchey

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 5:35 AM

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The thing is, I think we could have made it work. But the expectations were so unrealistic that while we had functionality, we didn't have perfection. Sans perfections, they pulled the plug. After a while I got some of the feeling that Cassandra must have had when dealing with the Greeks.

----------------------------------------------------
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood..." Theodore Roosevelt
The Scary DBA
Author of: SQL Server 2012 Query Performance Tuning
SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled
and
SQL Server Execution Plans

Product Evangelist for Red Gate Software

Post #481429

ALZDBA

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 5:46 AM

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Did they pull the plug only for the virtualisation part or for the full ad-hoc regression test infrastructure(s) ?

Johan

     Jul 13

Don't drive faster than your guardian angel can fly ...
but keeping both feet on the ground won't get you anywhere w00t

Need a bit of Powershell? How about this

Who am I ? Sometimes this is me but most of the time this is me Hehe

Post #481440

Grant Fritchey

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 5:57 AM

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Just for the virtualizations. We already do resets from production as a part of our QA testing. We were just hoping to incorporate a similar process into an automated development methodology. No joy.

----------------------------------------------------
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood..." Theodore Roosevelt
The Scary DBA
Author of: SQL Server 2012 Query Performance Tuning
SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled
and
SQL Server Execution Plans

Product Evangelist for Red Gate Software

Post #481447

Pete T-366679

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 7:34 AM

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Thank you for the interesting article! I'm just starting to try and get real virtualization going as a development environment and have run into similar issues, too. Since we're still "trying out" utilizing VMs to develop and test things, we also are working against a very limited budget. I.e., VMware Server (free), old retired server hardware (CPU, RAM, and disk storage definitely limit what all we can do), and then trying to get everyone on the same page.

It would be nice if there was a better (free) way to manage everything, too....as we don't have the resources now to go with one of the relatively expensive management tools.

Either way, it's a good learning experience and we're starting to see how powerful it can be. Thanks for the idea of versioning the VMs with source code software, too!

Post #481526

DBSlave

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 9:00 AM

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What were the key factors make to choose virtualized OS (VMware) vs. virtualized SQL (instance)? VMware will introduce some perform overhead, as well as extra admin effort. On the other hand, if using SQL instance, to deploy a standard SQL instance could be a easy routine process.

Post #481633

Grant Fritchey

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 10:30 AM

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Yu Yang (4/8/2008)

The virtual systems represented complete application environments, not just databases and database servers. The trick was to keep all the servers integrated with a particular version of the functioning software including the database code and the servers, BizTalk, client code, etc. Talking about deploying any one database or creating new instances for deploying databases is easy. The hard part was coordinating that process with all the other servers. The parts that we got to work, worked well because everything, all code, moved together. Does that make it a bit more clear?

----------------------------------------------------
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood..." Theodore Roosevelt
The Scary DBA
Author of: SQL Server 2012 Query Performance Tuning
SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled
and
SQL Server Execution Plans

Product Evangelist for Red Gate Software

Post #481724

Patrick-388961

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 10:47 AM

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Grant,

Sorry to hear of your experience with VMware. I recently helped delploy VMware in production. The company had nearly 50 physical SQL Servers, almost all use SQL Enterprise version and under utilized. Two big SQL2000 Servers were in a Active/passive Cluster.

We elliminated the need for all Enterprise versions and clustering by employing VMware. We greatly reduced the amount of hardware and expensive liscensing of the Enterprise version (much was not really needed). VMware will spin up a new SQL box if a hardware failure occurs on another.

Patrick.

Post #481731

Grant Fritchey

Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 11:17 AM

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It was basically functional. The key issues, apart from deployment issues & some performance, were around how we could manage the virtual versions of AD. It apparently wasn't surmountable.

----------------------------------------------------
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood..." Theodore Roosevelt
The Scary DBA
Author of: SQL Server 2012 Query Performance Tuning
SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled
and
SQL Server Execution Plans

Product Evangelist for Red Gate Software

Post #481749

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