paul.knibbs (2/23/2012)
Of course, with your new setup, if you have a major physical drive failure you still need to reinstall whatever host OS you're using and put VirtualBox back on it... 🙂I've never been too convinced of the benefits of virtualisation for something as memory and disk intensive as SQL server, though. I suppose these days, with the actual databases often residing on SANs, that gets rid of the disk argument, but what about RAM?
True, but reinstalling a host is easy. Reinstalling WHS is a pain as it doesn't pick up the drives with the data, so they have to be copied off on another machine, added to WHS, copied back.
If you don't think virtualization works for SQL Server, you either have a) very busy SQL Servers, or b) you still think about slow virtual machines when we had 4GB limits on x86. Both the SQLServerCentral database servers (clustered) run in VMs, with 24GB allocated to each. The host machine has more RAM, and we rarely find performance issues or stresses from inside the VMs. I have dozens of friends, in real, live, large, corporate production environments running SQL Server in VMs.