server consolidation with SQL Server 2008

1. Introduction

As companies use more and more applications to manage business processes, provide new services, and gain an observation of business performance, the number of application servers and data storage servers required to support these applications is significantly increased. In many companies, the cost of hardware and the cost of deploying and maintaining multiple servers within the company are major financial and logistical budgets.

At the same time, improvements in hardware and software technology mean that modern IT systems can handle a lot more work than before. This has led to the consolidation of software services onto fewer physical servers, making more use of less hardware. This lowers the costs associated with purchasing and maintaining servers and enables more efficient and efficient IT infrastructure management.

The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 feature introduces the following three key areas of the server consolidation vision:

· Flexibility: A SQL Server 2008 consolidation solution can consist of multiple databases in a separate instance of SQL Server on a physical computer, or multiple instances of SQL Server on one physical computer, or multiple virtual servers on a physical computer. By supporting all of these consolidation methods, SQL Server 2008 enables companies to choose the appropriate isolation level based on the required performance. SQL Server 2008 also provides several tools for porting data and databases to a consolidated server.

· Management capabilities: Although the primary goal of server consolidation is to reduce hardware and license costs, you can use it to centrally manage functionality. SQL Server 2008 provides a suite of tools to manage, monitor, and fail-check the merged data system. These tools allow you to centrally manage your merge servers, and you can combine management features for separate servers.

· Scalability and performance: When you merge data systems to fewer servers, each of these servers increases the workload. Higher-performance hardware solves some of the problems, but when some processors on the merge server use a disproportionate amount of resources, you encounter problems and it can cause performance degradation for other processors. You will also encounter a situation where the processor locks up resources and prevents other processors from completing their work. SQL Server 2008 has performance tuning features that can help you solve these problems.

2. Flexibility

Selecting a server consolidation policy for the database server has a number of considerations to consider. Key factors to consider when deciding on the best consolidation strategy for your data services include:

· Hardware resources: Each consolidation method has a different impact on the use of hardware resources, and you should consider whether 32-bit or 64-bit hardware can provide the best performance and scalability for your solution.

· Workload isolation: When the goal of a merge is to reduce the number of servers as much as possible, you should dissect the workloads that are performed by different database applications and consider whether they should be isolated based on performance reasons.

· Application Compatibility: Some applications may have special requirements for data access protocols, collections, or other configuration options that are incompatible with other applications.

· Management capability: Consolidation simplifies management by centralizing the resources needed to manage them. However, you must consider the impact of maintenance work, such as backup and index management on the merge system. You must also consider the security implications of merging, because an operator with administrative privileges on a database system may not need to have administrative privileges on other database systems.

· Effectiveness: Your consolidation strategy may affect your choice of highly effective solutions. For example, database mirroring provides a single database-level fail-aid protection, while a server cluster protects the entire server.

· Security: In some cases, the database application may be carefully quarantined based on security considerations. For example, an application might require a feature that is available on the database server, such as the common language runtime (common language RUNTIME,CLR) integration or database Mail. If you isolate the database, you can use the required functionality to maintain a minimal surface for other database applications.

When you design a consolidation solution with so many factors to consider, you need to be flexible so that you can choose the one that best suits your specific needs. SQL Server 2008 provides some consolidation methods that allow you to create an ideal solution for your data service by blending and matching choices.