Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The Virtual World
According to a VMware white paper titled “Virtualization Overview,” the term
virtualization “broadly describes the separation of a resource or request from the
underlying physical delivery of the service.” By creating this abstraction or decoupling
from the underlying physical hardware, a whole computing paradigm has emerged—a
world where a proposed change in the physical hardware in which your Microsoft SQL
Server database resides does not instantly send waves of anxiety to the DBA.
As you can see represented in
Figure 2.8
,
resources such as CPU, memory, network, and
disk are made available through the VMware virtualization layer (hypervisor). By
separating the physical resource request from the underlying hardware, you have truly
turned hardware into a commodity. Need more hardware? Purchase it, install the
hypervisor onto it, and move the VMs over to start using it. Does it matter if the original
server and the new one are from different manufacturers? No, it does not.
Figure 2.8
After virtualization.
In this new paradigm, hardware is truly a commodity. It's common practice every few
years to update your hardware as the newer hardware become available or your older
hardware becomes obsolete. No longer does this process require weeks of planning. As
Nike says, “Just do it.” No longer as a DBA do you have to sit down with your user
community to work out an outage window for when the database can come down to
support the hardware upgrade.
In this new paradigm, you are living in a shared environment. It's important that you
understand what you need for resources.
Chapter 10
,
“
How to Baseline Your Physical
