September 10, 2015 at 2:54 pm
I've inherited several SQL Server instances, all in VMware. We're in the process of shoring up the licensing, and one of the items we're looking at purchasing is the SA (software assurance) option, which includes "instance mobility" (the ability to migrate an instance to a new VM host more often than every 90 days). The understanding in IT is that this is part of our High Availability solution. Note that we're a smaller shop, and we able to shoulder a brief outage (<30 minutes) if it's rare, but at this point we're not in need of clustering or hot backups.
So here's my "I'm naïve about VM's" question, after researching things for the last week or so ....
Does SQL Server "failover" to a new VM host without any issues? I'm a little vague on VMware nomenclature, but I think this would be considered VMotion. My concern lies in the fact that I've read posts that VM Snapshots where VSS isn't enabled can cause corruption of an instance. If I understand the difference, snapshots are a copy of everything on the server (thinking, in serial order, where the database may not be quiesced with VSS), while VMotion is a copy of in-memory structures (less to copy, but the database still may not be quieseced) to another VM pointing at the same underlying storage. So I'm just looking to find if VMotion results in a stable instance of SQL Server. Does VSS also need to be in place for VMotion to work properly?
Thanks for the help in understanding this,
--=Chuck
June 7, 2016 at 10:42 pm
from your query you dont need any HA for SQL using cluster.
VM cluster it self provide the vMotion when one host is down , if that is been identified as down and lost the heart beat then it will automatically restart the VM to the other available host. it will be rebooted. so you will have few min downtime of your servers host in the problematic server.
snapshot it is not good idea to keep it for long as it will occup more space at the same time it will lead to a corruption for the snapshot you can refer the vmware article.
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