Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 is a powerful
virtualization technology that can be used by corporate IT to consolidate under-utilized servers, lowering TCO and maintaining or improving Quality of Service. Through a series of test scenarios that are representative of SQL Server application fundamentals, this document provides best practice recommendations on running SQL Server in Windows Hyper-V environment.
Based on hypervisor technology, the Hyper-V virtualization feature in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system is a thin layer of software between the hardware and the operating system that allows multiple operating systems to run, unmodified, on a host computer at the same time. Hyper-V is a powerful virtualization technology that can be used by corporate IT to consolidate under-utilized servers, lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintaining or improving quality of service (QoS). Hyper-V opens more potential development and test environment types that otherwise might be constrained by hardware availability.
It is challenging enough in general to right-size the hardware to consolidate current workloads and provide headroom for growth. Adding virtualization to the mix increases the potential capacity planning challenges. The goal of this document is to help address these by focusing on two key areas of running Microsoft® SQL Server® in a Hyper-V environment:
This white paper describes a series of test configurations we ran, which represented a variety of possible scenarios involving SQL Server running in Hyper-V. The paper discusses our results and observations, and it also presents our recommendations. Our test results showed that SQL Server 2008 on Hyper-V provides stable performance and scalability. We believe Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is a solid platform for SQL Server 2008 for the appropriate workload. It is practical to run production workloads under a Hyper-V environment, as long as the workload is within the capacity of your Hyper-V guest virtual machine.
To learn more and to download the above best practices white paper please visit: Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Virtualization Environment Downloads Page
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