sql 2012 Physical or Virtual?

[davetherave2]

So am currently playing my favourite game at work. (How much can I get away with specing a server), this time I have to make sure I get it right so currently looking to upgrade our production environment of SQL 2000/2005 servers from their flagging out of warranty hardware and wanted some advice on if my thinking is still valid or out of date these days.

So I have always been a firm believer that SQL should live on it's own physical box with nothing else being installed on it. But with moving most of our server infrastructure to VM and the sql boxes pretty much being the only servers left on their own kit is it worth virtualizing them as well or should they still be left on their own physical boxes.

With the cost of licensing for SQL 2012 being a touch OTT for my liking it means my plans of having a 12 core (2x CPU) server is being scuppered due to the SQL licensing costs being between £15K-20K for just the standard license. (I almost fell of my seat when I was told how much the enterprise license was)

So I guess this then leads me onto the next question is MS SQL still the preferred DB of choice for a .NET environment or would something like an Oracle/MySQL or some other solution be a better product these days?

I have only ever used and admin'd a MS SQL environment so going to something else will need to have quick learning curve and allow existing MS SQL databases to be imported into.

Thanks in advance for any help on this matter.

 

[davetherave2]

The main server that this will be replacing is an old hp system with 2 xeons 3.6ghz(2+2), 4gb ram which is getting absolutely hammered all day every day. the cpu usage is very rarely below 80% and requires regular reboots due to indexing services and other sql services failing to function correctly and is progressively getting worse and worse as the server is asked to do more and more hence the upgrade. It is the mission critical server for the business which is why i want to make sure the purchase is right. The current server I am speccing out is 2x 6core xeons, 128gb ram, 10gb nic (depending on cost possibly a second will be added), 10tb sas storage(raid 50).

But due to licensing SQL2012 i may have to drop one of the xeons otherwise i am going to have to put it into a hyper V environment to ensure it is only using the 6 cores which seems silly. I am currently setting up a test environment on an i7 system with 16gb of ram to see how one of our databases performs.

The alternative is to get a new esx host to add to our existing vm environment and have this solely dedicated to sql and nothing else.

We have some sql 2005 servers in the vm using the bare minimum to keep them running at a decent level but they are not being utilised to much so they seem to be performing well but the intention is to bring all these disperate servers into one sql box.

I guess the next thing is then reporting services as we currently replicate via log shipping our databases to another physical server which I presume would need to be licensed as well although I guess we could just use a 2 core license for this. (amazing what springs to mind at 3am)

I think I may have to put some more thought into this.

 

[davetherave2]

The issue I have is that MS seem to have priced out the mid sized company that requires upgrades to their SQL infrastructure.

The fact that you need to license it on cores vs physical processors is really prohibative. I just see it as another way for MS to make more money out of their business customers due to poorer sales in other divsions within the company. (rant over)

I think due to budget constraints it may be something that is delayed yet again and actually get a decent budget that covers all the licensing requirements and hardware requirements rather than doing it half hearted. (the powers that be are not going to be happy about that)