Virtualized SQL Server
I get more and more questions about SQL Server running in a Virtual machine so here’s 3 FAQs to start with…
1. Is there Support for SQL Server on non Microsoft Virtualization platforms (e.g.VMWare)? The definitive document on the is here. In summary Microsoft doesn’t test this or support it, unless you have premier support in which case “Microsoft will use commercially reasonable efforts to investigate potential issues with Microsoft software running together with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software”.
Of course the supported versions SQL Server (i.e.not 2000) and other Microsoft applications (Exchange, SharePoint etc.) will be fully supported on Hyper-V when Hyper-V is released.
2. How does licensing work? The exact terms are in this white paper, and in summary
- For processor licensing each physical or active virtual machine running SQL Server must have a processor license (the number of chips not the number of cores) for each processor the virtual machine uses. However if you have licensed enterprise edition for all of the processors on a physical machine you can run any number of SQL Server virtual machines on that box.
- For CAL licensing each physical or active virtual machine requires the server license. The exception to this is enterprise edition which just needs to be licensed per physical machine
Note that the licensing applies to SQL Server 2008 as well and to running SQL server on Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform in Windows Server 2008.
3. Performance. This is very easy to answer but not very helpful… Microsoft can’t test and publish how well SQL server performs on VMWare for example so I simply don’t know. On Hyper-V this can be done as soon as Hyper-V is released. There is always going to be some loss of performance and this will be the price you pay for improved manageability.
Finally don’t be put off by Virtual PC or VMWare demo’s you may have seen on laptops, you should get a better virtual experience using any virtualisation platform in a production environment, but the performance loss is going to vary depending on the physical infrastructure (SAN, number of Cores RAM etc.) and the workload you are virtualizing.
Update:
Since writing this post Microsoft has introduced the
Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). Essentially this means that the currently supported versions of SQL Server are now fully supported on Hyper-V, VMWare and other leading virtualisation platforms as part of this program.
