Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10. How to Baseline Your Physical SQL Server
System
“
Check it before you wreck it
.”
—Jeff Szastak
“
The bitterness of poor performance lasts long after the sweetness of a
cheap price is forgotten
.”
—Unknown
The title of this topic is
Virtualizing SQL Server on VMware: Doing IT Right
. An
essential part of “doing it right” is having a good understanding of the workload
characteristics and configuration of the existing physical source systems that are to be
virtualized. Remember that unlike in a physical environment, where it's common
practice to oversize the server, in a virtualized infrastructure it's important you “right-
size” the VM that houses your SQL Server database. You can always hot-plug a vCPU
and hot-add memory if more is needed.
Tip
As a DBA, it is very important you embrace this new way of managing the
environment, one where you right-size for today, knowing that in the future if you
need more resources, such as CPU, memory, and disk, they are just a click away.
In fact, oversizing VMs can actually degrade performance.
You can get this understanding of what is needed to properly configure the virtualized
environment by recording and analyzing a performance baseline of your existing
physical systems. This is one of the most critical success factors for physical-to-virtual
SQL Server migrations, so that you can prove the same or better performance
characteristics after virtualization.
Tip
It's very important to baseline your important physical systems. This is one of the
most important steps—if not
the
most important step—you need to take if you
want to properly virtualize your critical SQL Server databases.
This chapter covers both infrastructure and application baseline activities related to
SQL Server 2012 and provides you with the
why
,
when
,
what
, and
how
of measuring
