Database Reference
In-Depth Information
have no easy way to reallocate resource to meet the business current demands
Without virtualization, it is inefficient and very costly to have physical servers
dedicated to a particular purpose that cannot easily be reprovisioned as the business
needs them.
As Charles Darwin stated, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the
most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Our ability to help our business
adapt to change quickly is critical to ensuring your company stays competitive.
Living in the New World Order as a SQL Server DBA
It's Cyber Monday, the busiest online shopping day of the year. As you think about last
year, you remember how much of a nightmare it was. Users were calling the support
lines unable to process orders; it was taking minutes to transverse the online catalogue
instead of seconds. Customers were leaving your site to go elsewhere to shop because
of the slow response times. There was just so little you could do as all the performance
problems tumbled down upon you like an avalanche, bringing your database to its knees
—which in turn was bringing your business to its knees.
However, this year you are ready—you have a new secret weapon. You convinced your
company to virtualize your production database. You took the risk to adopt a new
computing paradigm, breaking your database from the chains of the physical server.
Hot-Add CPU
Everything has been going great. Now the real test is about to happen. At midnight, the
shopping begins. Your marketing department has come up with some great deals, and
people are coming to the site in volumes that far exceeded last year.
You notice the database is fully utilizing the four vCPUs (virtual CPUs) you allocated
and could even use more. Think of a virtual CPU as a physical CPU. Even though the
physical host has 16 physical CPUs, you could choose to assign a particular virtual
machine one or more of them.
You want to avoid what happened last year and decide to give the database another
vCPU. You right-click and allocate another vCPU to the virtual machine housing the
database. As you can see in
Figure 1.1
, you will notice a slight degradation in
performance as the database virtual machine adds the additional vCPU, but then
performance takes off again as the database is fully able to utilize the additional CPU to
process transactions.
