Key benefits and savings with Hypervisors

At DSP we’re always thinking about how to help your business save money and make money, looking at the benefits and savings from technology and what it could mean for you. So One of our Microsoft SQL Server Consultants has put together some key points on Hypervisors, about the saving they can provide and some of the other benefits:

• Cost Reduction — This comes in the form of both CapEx reductions, from hardware and hardware-based software licensing, and OpEx reductions, from improved manageability, shorter app development cycles, improved QA, etc. This can lead to significant savings in both the short and long term.

• Near 100% Reliable Disaster Recoverability — Historical recovery from a disaster is lacking. VMware virtualization provides near 100% recoverability, keeping all your data and critical apps safe from disaster.

• Product Release Cycle Optimization — Fast and complete environment cloning; isolated test environments; quick server provisioning; improved development server management, etc. Allowing you to keep up to date with ease so you never have to miss out.

• High Availability (HA) — HA for business critical workloads is not a nicety, it is critical. With Hypervisors and VMware HA works with or in place of traditional HA tools, giving you the ultimate in High availability for all your critical workloads.

• Application/DB License Optimization — Load up the hardware with more Oracle or other workloads without paying for more hardware-based licenses; co - mingle pre-production and production workloads on the same servers; optimize DR licensing.

• Production Error Capture — if there is a production problem, you can create a snapshot (after a brief down) to capture the reproducible error state. That production capture can then be triaged and diagnosed in a safe environment.

• Security Considerations — Complete isolation between systems on the same host; smaller attack target footprint; processor-based VM security assist; randomisation of executable locations; Dynamic Binary Translation; zero-based memory; storage isolation between VM’s that prevents wide-scale data corruption; virtual switches less vulnerable to MAC spoofing, random frame, and other types of attacks. All leading to a much safer and secure environment.

• Depenancies on SAN – SAN technologies are expensive. Both to procure and manage. When you introduce SAN into your Data solution, your force a collaboration between your windows team, SQL team and storage team. If the collaboration between these teams is not strong, this can leave a disjointed solution for implementation and management. Often to make full realisation of a SAN – this isn’t dedicated to a SQL workload and essentially this is where problems occur in terms of mixed workload, SAN stress and incorrect sizing.

o SQL 2012 and VMware 5.1 have made advances that remove the dependency for HA on SAN. VMware 5.1 allows vmotion between servers with only local or direct attached storage. Reducing the SAN Stress due to mixed workload and incorrect sizing.