TheSQLGuru (7/27/2012)
1) the "disk" configuration you gave us is almost useless from an "is it configured well" perspective because you gave us no idea about the underlying IO subsystem configuration other than RAID type. A 1000MB "disk" could be a single 7200RPM SATA drive shared by lots of other stuff or it could be a slice of a 3-PAR 1000-spindle SAN that can support 300K IOPS. You, as the SQL Server DBA, simply MUST know EXACTLY what underlies each of your "disks" and also know anything else that might share the same IO pieces-parts.2) VMWare can support MASSIVE amounts of RAM, CPU and IO now. IIRC 2TB RAM, 32vCPUs and a system was benchmarked at 1MILLION IOPS on the IO side. I assure you that a properly configured VMWare system can support your 300GB database with a few hundreds or a few thousands of concurrent users. I note that that doesn't actually mean your database and applications can support that! :hehe:
1) Well thats all I've been told so far and since I don't get to make the call (just provide input) I'm not so sure knowing more about the plan would result in any changes being made should it turn out that one or more of those decisiosns are bad. As far as knowing whats under the hood, pro-VM admins (at least in my experience) seem to take a "you don't need to know because VM is no different then non-VM" approach to the whole thing. I guess they figure if you know exactly whats behind the VW screen it might skew your perception of how its relaly performing. All I can do is make my reocmendations and show the metrics for our existing setup (Server + SANS storage) and maker recomendations on what changes shoudl be made from that for the new system.
2) I have read from pro-VM SQL gurus that running SQL Server on VMis fine so long as its done right and under the right scenario. My concern is, as you light heartidly joked about, that the app which uses the DB is not optimized to work with large DB's and so any additonal action taken that can impact performance will be magnified.
Thanks
Kindest Regards,
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