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Category Archives: Microsoft

Updated – Official SQL Server on vSphere best practices guide, March 2017

Microsoft SQL Server is the most virtualized enterprise mission critical application today. In recent years it has become a mainstream effort among VMware customers to virtualize critical databases to allow better agility and scale while increasing availability and operational efficiency.

The official best practices guide for virtualizing SQL Server is now updated with information regarding vSphere 6.5 and some new lessons learned in the past year.

A big Thank you! is due to:

Allan Hirt (Twitter @SQLHA) for keeping me honest on SQL Server nomenclature

David Klee (Twitter @Kleegeek) for his help reviewing this paper

Deji Akomolafe (Twitter @dejify) for his expertise and contribution

You can read the updated guide
here: http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/solutions/sql-server-on-vmware-best-practices-guide.pdf

As always, comments and feedback are welcome

Niran

Updated – Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere Availability and Recovery Options

3 Replies

Choosing the right availability configuration for your SQL Server on vSphere can be a bit confusing as there are more than a few options to choose from, questions such as: Should I use vSphere HA if i’m using AlwaysOn? What are the implications of running different availability configurations on vSphere, and what are the best practices?

This very popular guide called “Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere Availability and Recovery Options” which outlines the availability options and best practices for SQL Server on vSphere and tries to answer these question, is now updated with the latest information.

Download the guide here

As always, any feedback is welcome,

Niran

Top Ten things to consider when moving Business Critical Applications (BCA) to the Cloud (Part 2 of 3)

4 Replies

In the first part we looked at public, private and Hybrid Cloud and their characteristics. In this part we will look at the common characteristics of business critical applications. We will also look at how some of these characteristics relate to the different types of Cloud infrastructure.

Common Characteristics of Business Critical Applications (BCA):

Business critical applications typically have very stringent SLAs and have a direct impact on the business. These are the crown jewels of the business that need to be managed with utmost care to avoid loss of productivity, data and potential revenue. These are the major factors can have a direct impact on these applications such as the following:

Continue reading →

Updated: Microsoft SQL Server on vSphere Best Practices Guide

5 Replies

Microsoft SQL server is the most virtualized enterprise mission critical application today. In recent years it has become a mainstream effort among VMware customers to virtualize critical databases to allow better agility and scale while increasing availability and operational efficiency.

This guide, now named “Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere – Best Practices Guide” to reflect its focus on architecture and configurations of vSphere as well as SQL server for maximizing the benefits of virtualizing SQL server, is aimed at providing VMware customers and partners guidance on how to achieve best performance and efficiency with the latest versions of Microsoft SQL server and VMware vSphere.

In this guide there are also references to other VMware and third-party documents which we encourage the reader to consult for better understanding of the topics discussed.

Click here to download the guide.

Now Updated: Microsoft Exchange Server on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide

4 Replies

Microsoft Exchange Server is one of the mission critical applications most commonly virtualized on the vSphere platform. As customers become more comfortable and familiar with virtualization in general and the VMware vSphere virtualization platform in particular, they become more confident, enough to virtualize their Exchange Server environments. To help customers achieve success as they begin to virtualize their Microsoft Exchange Server infrastructure, VMware provides guidance and recommendations for designing, configuring and managing the infrastructure.

The Microsoft_Exchange_Server_2016_on_VMware_vSphere_Best_Practices_Guide contains VMware’s official prescriptive guidance and recommended practices for successfully running Microsoft Exchange Server on the VMware vSphere platform.

Continue reading →

Completely Disable Time Synchronization for your VM

4 Replies

Some administrative practices, like a bad habit, have more lives than the proverbial cat – they tend to stay around forever. It is, therefore, very comforting when one finds a problematic administrative practice that has not just been universally abandoned by administrators, but is also on the top of any junior administrator’s “configurations sure to get you dis-invited from the next user group meetup” list.

Take the case of the old practice of synchronizing a virtual machine’s clock with its host’s clock in a vSphere environment. That used to be “the thing to do” way back when. It was actually the default configuration option on the ESX platform in those days. Until everyone got wiser and the message went out to every admin far and wide that such configurations was no longer kosher. Even VMware got religious and stopped making that option the default behavior. Continue reading →

Hyper-threading doesn’t count for virtual SQL licensing

14 Replies

There’s a fair bit of confusion around licensing SQL that is virtualized and I have been getting questions from customers about this for a long time now. The confusion comes from a few statements in the Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Virtualization Licensing Guide guide which states:

“For customers using Intel’s hyper-threading technology to split a single, physical core into two separate threads of power, there are some additional factors that should be kept in mind when licensing individual VMs using the Per Core Model”

This states that there are special considerations for licensing virtualized SQL servers on a per-core model when Hyper-threading is enabled on the hypervisor host.

What is the per core model, you ask?

The per core model is when licensing the virtual CPUs of a virtual SQL server rather than the physical CPUs on the hyper-visor server. As stated in the doc: “Per Core Licensing Model: Purchase a core license for each virtual core (or virtual processor/virtual CPU/virtual thread) allocated to the VM, subject to a four core license minimum per VM).” Continue reading →

The debate about disabling Hyperthreading in virtualized Exchange server is over

3 Replies

Anyone that virtualized Exchange server in recent years had stumbled into this conundrum: should I disable Hyperthreading on the physical server or not?

The main cause of this confusion is conflicting recommendations coming from Microsoft and VMware on the subject, I am happy to say that this debate is finally over. As we at VMware have been saying all along, there is no need to disable Hyperthreading when virtualizing Exchange server; that recommendation was suitable only for physical servers and is irrelevant for virtual machines. Continue reading →

STO4452 – Virtual Volumes (VVOLS) a game changer for running Tier 1 Business Critical Databases

A Stronger Case For Virtualizing Exchange Server 2013 – Think “Performance”

17 Replies

VMware is glad to see that the Microsoft Exchange Server (and Performance) teams appear to have identified the prevalent cause of performance-related issues in an Exchange Server 2013 infrastructure. We have been aware for several years that Microsoft’s sizing recommendation for Exchange Server 2013 is the number one cause of every performance issue that have been reported to VMware since the release of Exchange Server 2013, and it is gratifying that Microsoft is acknowledging this as well.

In May of 2015, Microsoft released a blog post titled “Troubleshooting High CPU utilization issues in Exchange 2013” in which Microsoft acknowledged (for the first time, to our knowledge) that CPU over-sizing is one of the chief causes of performance issues on Exchange Server 2013. We wish to highlight the fact that the Exchange 2013 Server Role Requirements Calculator is the main culprit in this state of affair. One thing we noticed with the release of Exchange Server 2013 and its accompanying “Calculator” is the increase in the compute resources it recommends when compared to similar configuration in prior versions of Exchange Server. Continue reading →