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Audience and Scope
This white paper is intended for customers, partners, solution architects, storage administrators, and database
administrators who are evaluating, planning a consolidation and/or virtualization strategy. It provides an overview of
various considerations and reference architectures for consolidated and virtualized SQL Server 2008 R2
deployments.
Today’s Challenges
IT organizations face an enormous challenge to keep operations running around the clock with increasing demand
and growing complexity, to the point that it becomes difficult for employees to request resources to fulfill their tasks.
This has lead to circumventing the IT standards and procedures to get the job done faster, which in turn has lead to
server sprawl especially at the database tier. Database applications are typically implemented in a three four-tier
environment; web-tier, application-tier and database-tier. The tiered architecture allows compartmentalization of
applications and separation of resources. Hardware at each tier provides a specific function and requires a specific
set of tools to manage and maintain. All of the components are connected via a network, in most cases Ethernet.
This separation of resources provides an easy way for employees to bypass and deploy database servers for test
and development without the IT department’s oversight and management.
and development without the IT department’s oversight and management.
The apparent benefit of three-tire architectures like ease of deployment and development can easily be
overshadowed by potential challenges such as incompatibility issues that may arise during deployment to
production, security vulnerabilities due to different security and patching requirements, and the operating costs
associated with large number of servers including support, licenses, power and cooling. Hence servers that were
deployed for a specific project that is no longer economical. As the reliability and performance aspects of industry
standard x86 server platforms have improved, along with the maturity of virtualization technologies on x86, many
organizations are considering virtualization and consolidation for their IT.
Consideration for Consolidation
Consolidation projects are typically started to achieve specific goals such as creating room for new applications
while reducing operating expenditure. These goals can be broadly grouped into the following categories:
●
Standardization and centralization
●
Improve floor space and power efficiency
●
Reduce the number of management domains IT agility
This paper will focus on consolidation strategies for typical online transaction processing (OLTP) applications
based on SQL Server.
Some general traits that make an application a good candidate for consolidation are low machine resource
utilization, moderate performance requirements, little active development, and low maintenance costs. Another
factor to consider is the impact on the application’s network and I/O latency, because both the network and storage
factor to consider is the impact on the application’s network and I/O latency, because both the network and storage
resources become shared as part of consolidation.
The Solution: SQL Server Consolidation Using Cisco Unified Computing System With
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
Cisco Unified Computing System Solution Overview
Cisco Unified Computing System™ is the first converged data center platform that combines industry-standard,
x86-architecture servers with networking and storage access into a single converged system. The system is