The last year has seen some interesting developments around
making the virtual database more than just an outpost for testing and development
gurus. Real advancements in technology, licensing and software are making
large, virtualized production databases increasingly common. This means that
virtualization has emerged as a viable platform that’s able to meet the
computing needs of enterprise businesses.
Naturally, there are some naysayers who feel that
virtualized platforms will not perform as fast and efficiently as a physical database
server, and that shared resources will never handle input output (I/O)
intensive processes effectively. Based on NaviSite’s years of experience working
in the cloud space, we believe virtualized platforms have evolved to meet
nearly all enterprise computing needs. Consider the following three factors
that allow virtual databases to meet the computing demands of the enterprise:
New Technology: Today’s
enterprise virtualized platforms utilize a state-of-the-art SAN, offering
increased I/O. Recent enhancements in virtualization software now support
greater resource allocation in memory, CPU and disk. Furthermore, to take
advantage of these enhanced resources, many database vendors are addressing the
resource contention issues with new software.
For instance, Microsoft has added Resource Governor, which enables
customers to define which workloads can take what percent of performance on any
given virtualized resource. According to
Microsoft’s whitepaper
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on HP ProLiant
DL980, “Resource Governor in SQL Server 2012 brings more performance
assurance and scale by increasing the maximum number of resource pools to 64
(from 20), adding a new maximum capacity setting on CPU utilization, and
allowing affinity of resource pools to CPU schedulers and NUMA nodes.”
New Licensing: Many of the major database vendors have changed
their licensing roles to support virtualization. Some vendors, such as Microsoft, are now offering both unlimited
virtualization for private cloud (license the CPUs and put as many virtualized databases
as you need on the platform) and individual virtual server licenses (license
only the vCPUs you build out for an individual database server). These new licensing models have greatly
simplified usage reporting and can help avoid a nasty license audit. Of course, if you wanted to avoid the
licensing models altogether, there have been significant enhancements in the
Open Source database market, leading to increased functionality and enhanced
user support on many NoSQL products.
New Database Software:
Many of the exciting developments in the virtualization of databases are taking
place within the database software itself. The major database software vendors
have recently released new editions that have been written specifically to
address the needs of virtualized database environments. These new editions
feature better support of virtualized clusters, along with increased failover
options, new administration tools for mirroring support (even across different
geographic platforms) and the aforementioned resource toolsets to keep the
database from running amok on a private cloud. Additionally, they have
addressed some of the constraints around backups with new backup tools, the
ability to split backups and even backup to third party cloud storage.
So, for those still on the fence about putting the production
database in the cloud, I urge you to take a fresh look at the new technologies
and software advancements made over the past two years. There will surely be
more advances to come. Let’s just hope the machines don’t become too self-aware!
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