August 21, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Very simple question.
I used to work for a big, big company. But changed job recently and on my new role, I was asked to provide advice on our soon to be deployed, SQL server infrastructure. I never worried about picking the servers before, the IT dpt dit, but I know by facts VMware was giving us some performance issues and we trusted our million dollars dbs to Veritas and Microsoft SQL clustering instead. It work really good and still I believe it does.
Back to my new job and role, the consultant company pretty much says VMware HA features are far better than an actual MS-SQL cluster (2 nodes, active passive) which I strongly disagree. So, I thought having an "impartial" feedback here may confirm or deny some of my statements, based on other experiences, of course, not books or theory.
I do not want to start a heated debate about the topic, but get some opinions, hopefully from people that have had some real exposure to both products.
--What my bosses want --
HA for our MS-SQL databases
--What the proposal is ---
Deploy VMware and move all databases there.
--What I am suggesting ---
A hybrid model. One or two MS-SQL instances running on VMs; deploy 80% of our databases there. Plus a real Microsoft two node cluster, with only 2 or 4 mission critical databases on it, including our most important database, which is over of 1TB of size.
Comments and opinions are welcome.
Thanks in advance,
August 23, 2012 at 2:55 pm
My stand on it would be, who's going to be supporting the configuration?
If it's you, and you aren't familiar with / comfortable with setting up VMWare and managing it (I'd presume the consultants would be doing the initial setup but will the bosses keep paying their fees?) then go with the SQL cluster.
Really, to some extent, it's nothing more than one cluster solution over another. Either way, a catastrophic server failure will still result in some downtime, either while SQL switches hosts, or while the VMWare switches hosts.
Jason
August 28, 2012 at 4:04 pm
Virtualisation is performed for consolidation purposes not performance, not every sql server is a suitable virtualisation candidate, this must be remembered when deciding what to virtualise
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