Database Reference
In-Depth Information
talking about putting databases onto vSphere, so you are doing something right), the way
you approach the virtualization of databases is going to need to change. It needs to
change because the way you virtualize nondatabase workloads is different from how
you virtualize database workloads. When looking to virtualize large, complex, mission-
critical workloads, vSphere administrators need to slow down and work with the
individuals on other teams who have deep expertise in their respective knowledge
domain to create a trusted platform for these applications. Remember, this is a journey,
not something that is going to happen overnight. Also, you only get one shot to get this
right. You must take the time to understand the database and DBA requirements in order
to ensure success.
From the Trenches
When hosting these educational sessions, make sure you have representation from
all responsible parties. Make sure the DBAs, vSphere admins, SAN admins,
security admins, and network admins are all present. This ensures everyone is
hearing the same message and is able to use the same dialect.
The Responsibility Domain
We often meet with individuals who design for the highest availability possible for
items that fall into their responsibility domain. We have met DBAs who design highly
available clustered databases running on an enterprise flash disk with 10GB Ethernet;
however, the applications connecting to the databases are not cluster aware, or better
yet, they simply hold configuration information for another application. When we peel
back the layers, we find the metric reported to the business is database uptime, not
application end-to-end availability. As one customer told us, we cluster to protect
against administrative error. The business is unaware that a particular node may be
down for a month; we just show them that the database was up and able to accept
requests, which is why we have 99.999% uptime.
Is that what the business has asked for? Does the business know the true cost of that
uptime?
When it comes to the virtualization side of the house, any issue in the stack must be a
virtualization issue, right? VMware, we are the new network (depending on how long
you have been in IT will determine whether you find that funny). Virtualization
administrators do not have the ability to say, “vSphere was up, and the ESXi host was
up and ready to run workloads.”
For the combined team, when designing a virtual SQL Server infrastructure, start with
the business objectives in mind first. You can design a highly performing database that
chews up and spits out IOPS, has 99.9999% availability, is spanned across multiple
 
 
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