VMware's Hemant Gaidhani recently published this white paper, Microsoft SQL Server and VMware Virtual Infrastructure, covering best practices for virtualizing your SQL Server workloads.
Hemant will be our guest on the VMware Communities Roundtable podcast tomorrow, Wednesday, April 1, at noon PDT / 3pm EDT. I believe Europe and the US are now back in sync with respect to summer time, but you can always check a time zone calculator.
You can dial in, join the chat, and get streaming audio here. Your homework assignment is read Hemant's paper and come with questions.
I suggested that Hemant pretend that I was interviewing him with a little Q&A to get you interested if you're not sure if you want to read the whole white paper (it's about 20 pages, and dense enough to reward re-reading, but a lot of it is bullet point tips that can be consumed in small chunks). Hemant used the occasion to start up his brand new blog. Check out the whole interview there: VMware Communities: Hemant Gaidhani's Virtualization World.
What’s the most common mistake you come across when virtualizing SQL Server?
Storage configuration is critical to any successful database
deployment, especially in virtual environments where you may
consolidate many different SQL Server VMs on a single ESX host. The
storage must be sized adequately to handle IO requirements for all the
VMs consolidated on the ESX host. Most SQL Server performance issues in
virtual environments can be traced to improper storage configuration.It is critical that you follow best practice guidelines specific to
Microsoft SQL Server and other vendor products in your environment as
well as VMware Infrastructure best practice guidelines. In general,
best practices in physical environments also apply to deployments on
VMware Infrastructure without any changes.
