SQL Consolidation on the
Internal Cloud

SQL Needs a Better Consolidation Platform

Database consolidation is not new. IT departments have been undertaking database consolidation projects for many years, hoping to rein in the costs associated with rapidly increasing number and size of databases supporting a multitude of applications.

Unfortunately, conventional database consolidation solutions are painful and require significant tradeoffs. Whether consolidating multiple database instances on a shared OS image, or consolidating multiple logical databases on a shared database instance, you risk loss of configuration, fault, OS, and resource isolation. Inevitably consolidation requires significant lead time and overhead to prepare all databases to run on the shared environment and can negatively impact database availability and performance.

Consolidate SQL on Your Internal Cloud to Cut Costs by 50%

Free your databases from the constraints of static, dedicated infrastructure to:

Not only match, but exceed the performance of physical servers: More than 95% of database instances running on vSphere will match the performance achieved on physical servers. Each Virtual Machine can scale to 8 vCPU, 256 GB of memory, and support large IO intensive applications. In addition, vSphere maximizes the performance achieved from physical hosts by enabling multiple databases to efficiently share the large capacity of new multicore servers.

Reduce hardware and software costs by more than 50%: Databases are among the most over-provisioned applications in the datacenter, with average CPU utilization close to 5%. Because of this massive over-provisioning, databases have tremendous consolidation potential. On average, VMware customers are able to consolidate their databases by a ratio of 4X to 20X. By consolidating, customers not only reduce their hardware footprint, but also consolidate their expensive database licenses and realize tremendous cost savings on software.

Accelerate Application Delivery and Guarantee QoS

Accelerate application delivery: Provision new databases on demand from pre-configured virtual appliances. Test multi-tier applications quickly and efficiently by rapidly and simply cloning production databases. Automate release cycles with VMware Stage Manager. Deploy standard, pre-configured databases at the click of a button, ensuring consistency across production databases and minimizing manual configuration overhead and configuration drift.

Guarantee application Quality of Service: Ensure application QoS by automatically providing the right levels of availability and scalability with VMware Application vServices. Databases are very hard to size on physical servers. With VMware, right-size your databases by scaling dynamically to meet instantaneous throughput requirements. Provide the right levels of availability with VMware Fault Tolerance, VMware High Availability, VMotion, and Disaster Recovery solutions. Reduce the need for complex and expensive database-specific mirroring or clustering solutions.

Leverage full Microsoft support

Microsoft officially supports VMware ESX for running Microsoft Windows and major applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server. VMware ESX was the first hypervisor to be validated under the Microsoft Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), providing customers who run Windows Server and Microsoft applications with cooperative support from Microsoft and VMware. Customers can now run Exchange on vSphere with the peace of mind that they will receive the same level of support they received on physical servers.

New Microsoft licensing enables efficient use of VMotion. Microsoft licensing has recently been modified to allow customers to reassign licenses between physical servers as frequently as desired. This new licensing flexibility enables efficient use of VMotion for Windows Server and major applications including Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server.

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