SQL Server is a pretty common database platform that deserves consideration as a candidate for virtualization. Here’s a short story and question that I ran across.
One of my daily activities is scanning the messages from listservs that are related to technology in higher education and to products that we use at my employer. Today, one of the message threads was discussing the pros and cons of running the Microsoft SQL Server that supports a popular administrative system on a virtual machine. Some respondents indicated that they feel that running this workload in a virtual environment wouldn’t make sense for their needs while others felt that a properly architected virtual environment was appropriate. One respondent made it a point to say that “you definitely don’t want to virtualize on Hyper-V.”
I’m not sure I agree. As long as the environment is well-constructed, has the availability mechanisms that make sense for the organization and can support the needs of the SQL Server, would Hyper-V really be a bad choice? After all, many organizations are using Hyper-v with great success.
Disclaimer: We are running vSphere at my employer, but I run Hyper-V in my lab. We’re using vSphere because we need some features that aren’t in Hyper-V. However, if we didn’t need those features, I would question the need to spend the money we do on VMware on an annual basis.
What do you think? Can Hyper-V do the job? Are any of you using Hyper-V and virtualizing SQL Server with it?