Roger L Reid (4/22/2009)
Drew, the thing that confuses me about sites like the one you describe - which I know are perfectly common - is how they manage the licensing - both logistically, and the cost!My SQL Server is heavyweight piece of hardware - 128 GB memory, 8x2 core, multi-channel io, Equalogics array - with multiple instances on it and most database packed into a single instance (we add multiple instances only when a 3rd party product has unreasonable demands like "must have server adm" or "keeps flushing the whole datacache").
The was MS licenses, that keeps the license cost low. Splitting that across 4 2x2 core machines would be twice the cost. Unless your virtual 2003 servers are all on one box - I sense they aren't - doesn't that waste a lot of licensing money?
That's what I never understand about sites that don't have this consolidated. We have a strong culture of centralization and consolidation, and we were doing client/server databases long before MS took over the Windows port of Sybase SQL Server, so we never fell into that "SQL Servers everywhere", but I know it's a real common issue.
Consolidation makes a lot of sense, but there is still one problem with it: proper resource management and allocation. Even with your resources one still needs to ensure that one database/application will not end up hogging all resources at the expense of all others. Having individual instances makes resource management easier and more efficient by making it possible to define min/max memory and CPU-mapping per instance.
In SQL 2008 Enterprise Ed there is something called Resource Governor which I think addresses this problem, but there is nothing else like it that I am aware of.
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