Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Now think of what would have happened to the customers on your site while you were
doing all this. They would be a click away from the competition. Fortunately, in the
virtual world, you have the ability to allocate memory as needed.
In this example, the database is in a virtual container that is sized for the normal needs
of the database 11 months out of the year. Cyber Monday happens only once a year, and
with virtualization you now have ability to give the database the additional resources it
needs, on the fly, thus ensuring your company's retail website can meet the special
demands of this very profitable shopping day. The best part is, everything we have
talked about could have been automated utilizing the tools within the VMware suite.
A Typical Power Company
A nor'easter is about to come barreling down (in Boston, we say “nor'easta”). For
those of you who have never experienced one, this is a snowstorm where the snow is
wet and heavy and comes at you sideways. Incidentally, as I am writing this chapter,
Hurricane Sandy is happening.
So you are a typical power company in the Northeast, and a bad storm has hit. In the
middle of the storm, one of your servers running critical support systems fails. Murphy's
Law has struck, and at the worst possible time, the system has crashed. The DBA is
called in. The restoration process starts, as you lose precious hours.
Wait, you wake up—this is just a bad dream. You live in the virtual world, and
VMware detects the server has gone down. The database virtual machine is restarted on
another physical server in the cluster. Within a few minutes, you are back up and
running.
Calls start flooding into your call center at a pace unheard of as tens of thousands of
users are losing power. In the virtual world, you are able to cycle down unneeded
virtual machines that are running noncritical applications to free up precious cycles
needed to help support the business-critical applications such as your database during
this critical time.
Virtualization makes your business agile in ways that were not possible before. The
examples in this chapter show you practical ways in which you can use virtualization to
make your business better respond to the challenges it will have to face now and in the
future. We have not begun to demonstrate the full power of virtualization, but as you can
see, this new paradigm of computing—this new world order—offers some major
advantages over the traditional computing paradigm our database have lived in up until
now.
Summary
In this chapter, we introduced you to a new world where all your SQL Server databases
