Database Reference
In-Depth Information
about reducing risk and not compromising on SLAs. Virtualize, but without compromise.
There is no need to compromise on predictability of performance, quality of service,
availability, manageability, or response times. Your storage architecture plays a big
part in ensuring your SQL databases will perform as expected. As we said earlier, your
database is just an extension of your storage. We will show you how to optimize your
storage design for manageability without compromising its performance.
Believe it or not, as big of advocates as we are about virtualizing SQL Server, we have
told customers in meetings that now is not the right time for this database to be
virtualized. This has nothing to do with the capability of vSphere or virtualization, but
more to do with the ability of the organization to properly operate critical SQL systems
and virtualize them successfully, or because they are not able or willing to invest
appropriately to make the project a success. If you aren't willing to take a methodical
and careful approach to virtualization projects for business-critical applications, in a
way that increases the chances of success, then it's not worth doing. Understand,
document, and ensure requirements can be met through good design and followed by
testing and validation. It is worth doing, and it is worth “Doing It Right!”
Principle 5: Keep it standardized and simple (KISS)
This brings us to the final principle. Having a standardized and simplified design will
allow your environment and databases to be more manageable as the numbers scale
while maintaining acceptable performance (see Principle 4). If you have a small number
of standardized templates that fit the majority of your database requirements and follow
a building-block approach, this is very easy to scale and easy for your database
administrators to manage. We'll use the KISS principle (Keep It Standardized and
Simple) throughout this chapter, even as we dive into the details. Once you've made a
design decision, you should standardize on that decision across all your VM templates.
Then when you build from those templates, you'll know that the settings will always be
applied.
SQL Server Database and Guest OS Storage Design
