Transcription of Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server
1 Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012 1 1 Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server May 2013 Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012 2 2 Copyright Information 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is provided "as-is." Information and views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of using it. This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product.
2 You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes. You may modify this document for your internal, reference purposes. Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012 3 3 Table of Contents Introduction .. 6 Executive Summary .. 6 Target Audience .. 6 Scope .. 7 Why Virtualize SQL Server ? .. 8 Why Microsoft Virtualization and Management? .. 9 Fabric 11 Hardware Considerations .. 11 Scalability Maximums of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V .. 12 Microsoft Assessment and Planning 13 Compute Considerations.
3 13 Logical Processors on Hardware .. 14 Virtual Processor or Virtual CPU .. 15 Non-Uniform Memory Access Host Perspective .. 16 Root/Host Reserve .. 17 Page File Guidance .. 18 Storage Considerations .. 19 Storage Options for Hyper-V Virtual 19 Storage Protocols and Additional Features .. 23 Networking Considerations .. 31 Host Resiliency with NIC 31 Hyper-V Extensible Switch .. 32 Virtual LANs .. 34 Converged Networking through Data Center Bridging .. 34 Host Resiliency and Virtual Machine Agility .. 36 Host Clustering .. 36 Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012 4 4 Failover Clustering.
4 36 Cluster Shared Volumes .. 39 Clustering Recommendations .. 40 Virtual Machine Priority .. 41 Virtual Machine Affinity .. 42 Live Migration .. 42 Hyper-V Replica .. 44 Virtual Machine Configuration .. 45 Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit .. 45 SQL CPU Considerations .. 45 Non-Uniform Memory Access Virtual Machine Perspective .. 45 SQL Memory Considerations .. 47 Dynamic Memory .. 47 SQL Storage Considerations .. 50 Virtual Disks .. 50 Guest Storage .. 51 SQL Networking Considerations .. 53 Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue .. 53 Single Root I/O Virtualization.
5 54 56 QoS Bandwidth Management .. 57 SQL Server Resiliency .. 58 High Availability with Failover Clustering .. 58 High Availability with Guest Clustering .. 59 60 AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances .. 60 AlwaysOn Availability Groups .. 61 System Center 2012 SP1 .. 63 Comprehensive SQL Server Management .. 63 Virtual Machine Manager .. 64 Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012 5 5 Centralized Fabric Configuration .. 64 Virtual Machine Creation .. 65 Virtual Machine Deployment .. 71 Dynamic Optimization .. 72 Virtual Machine Priority and Affinity.
6 73 Availability 74 App Controller .. 76 Service Delivery and Automation .. 79 Service Manager .. 79 80 Cloud Services Process Pack .. 82 The IaaS Solution .. 82 Operations Manager .. 85 SQL Server 2012 Management 85 Data Protection Manager .. 87 Conclusion .. 90 Additional Resources .. 91 References .. 92 Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012 6 6 Introduction This guide provides high-level best Practices and considerations for deploying and Managing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on a Microsoft virtualization infrastructure.
7 The recommendations and guidance in this document aim to: Complement the architectural design of an organization s specific environment. Help organizations take advantage of the key platform features in SQL Server 2012 to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability. Executive Summary With the proliferation of applications in everyday use, enterprises have an increasing need for more instances of databases such as SQL Server . Most applications have their own set of database requirements, leading to the use of multiple versions of databases and to significant costs related to the databases and related hardware resources.
8 More importantly, the hardware deployed for databases is not fully utilized or there is a demand to scale up hardware resources to meet peak utilization on certain databases. Therefore, it has become important to control the cost of databases and related hardware resources, and to optimize and scale the use of hardware resources in different scenarios to provide better flexibility and maintain service level agreements (SLAs). An ideal solution to this problem is virtualization. Virtualization is fairly common now. Many organizations worldwide have moved beyond the nascent stage into being more advanced users of Server virtualization, specifically.
9 These organizations have gained benefits in the areas of costs, efficiency , operations, availability, agility, and resiliency. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 provide a host of new features that can be used to effectively virtualize demanding database workloads that previously were not considered for virtualization. This guide explains these new features in the context of how organizations should consider Virtualizing SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 and the benefits of Managing this virtualized environment with Microsoft System Center 2012.
10 Working together, these industry-leading products deliver an integrated platform with a low total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as mission-critical scale, performance , and availability. The platform also provides enhanced end-to-end security, management, and monitoring capabilities. Further, many organizations now want to go a step beyond and adopt an IT infrastructure that is optimized for and ready to work in the cloud. They need an IT infrastructure that can seamlessly span from a private to a public cloud. To achieve this goal, organizations require a common virtualization platform that can increase performance and efficiency across the infrastructure.
