Should I Install SQL Server on a Virtual Machine (such as Hyper-V or VMWare)?
- by Scott Whigham on March 13, 2009 3:19 AMIt's pretty rare that an amazingly awesome whitepaper comes out but one just hit the net. The article is written my Mark Pohto, a senior systems engineer in Microsoft IT with help from both Jimmy May and Ward Pond. This whitepaper is very, very much worth your time. Do you want to know what are the benefits of installing SQL Server on a virtualized server? Got it. What are the limitations of installing SQL Server 2008 on VMWare? Kinda got it - the whitepaper is really more Microsoft-friendly since it only technically covers Hyper-V but the same basic premises apply.
I won't copy/paste too much here but there are two places you should visit:
- Get the whitepaper: Word doc and online
- Read this similar-yet-different article from The Architecture Journal, Green IT in Practice: SQL Server Consolidation in Microsoft IT
- Read Ward Pond's blog entry about it since that's where I first learned of this (thanks, Ward! What's up with the weird disclaimer at the bottom though?)
Thanks for the link, Scott. I agree that Mark's paper is very amazing. Thanks for help spreading the word.
The new dislaimer is my latest response to fee- and advertising-based aggregators who are skimming my RSS feed. The latest incident involved my name in the URL and some very targeted SQL Server related advertisting, a combination which I feared might imply an endorsement on my part.
Since a) I don't do such endorsements and b) I'd never heard of the adverstisers, I was concerned that whatever modest credibility I've built was at risk.
Hence, the disclaimer.