Better together 2012 sql server, windows server, and system center white paper final
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Transcript of Better together 2012 sql server, windows server, and system center white paper final
FURTHER. FORWARD. FASTER.
White Paper:
Better Together—SQL Server 2012, Windows
Server 2012, and System Center 2012 Delivering a complete data platform for modern datacenter
in the Cloud OS
Published: November 2012
Applies to: SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012
Author: Steve Heuring, Darmadi Komo
Reviewers: Ross Mistry, Bryan Smith
Introduction
Today’s organizations need the ability to seamlessly build, deploy, and manage
applications and services across on-premise, private, and public cloud environments. The
Windows Server® 2012 operating system, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012, and System
Center 2012 work together to provide a consistent, integrated platform across the entire
IT infrastructure. In this white paper, we will look at how these products work better
together to deliver across a range of IT requirements, from scale and performance, to
storage support and cloud management. We will also examine many of the powerful new
capabilities of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V™, and see why it continues to be the best
choice for virtualizing SQL Server workloads.
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Copyright
This document is provided “as is.” Information and views expressed in this
document, including URL and other Internet website references, may change
without notice. You bear the risk of using it.
This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual
property in any Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document for your
internal, reference purposes.
© 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
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Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1
Copyright ............................................................................................................. 2
Executive Summary ............................................................................................ 4
Better Scaling ...................................................................................................... 7
Better Performance ............................................................................................ 7
Better Availability ............................................................................................... 8
Better Networking .............................................................................................. 9
Better Storage Support ...................................................................................... 9
Better Management.......................................................................................... 10
Better Data Protection ..................................................................................... 12
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 13
Resources........................................................................................................... 14
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Executive Summary
This paper describes the many capabilities and benefits gained by running SQL Server
2012 software on the Windows Server 2012 operating system, and managing the
environment with System Center 2012. Working together, Microsoft’s industry-leading
products deliver an integrated low-TCO platform that offers mission-critical scale,
performance, and availability—combined with enhanced end-to-end security,
management, and development capabilities.
For traditional non-virtualized environment in on-premise data center, Windows Server
2012 provide the best platform for mission-critical SQL Server 2012 workloads (OLTP,
Data Warehousing, and BI):
Performance & Scalability: SQL Server 2012 can consume the operating system
max for both processors and memory. Windows Server 2012 supports 640
processors (cores) over a max of 64 sockets and up to 4 TB of RAM allowing SQL
Server applications to scale tremendously and satisfy most mission critical
applications. The new NIC Teaming feature in Windows Server 2012 allows 2 or
more network adapters to behave as a single, virtual device. This improves the
reliability of the networking subsystem – if one NIC dies, the other continues to
function – and allows the bandwidth available to each to be pooled for greater
total network throughput for SQL Server data. With SMB improvements in
Windows Server 2012, SQL Server can store database files on remote (SMB) file
shares providing customers with many more deployment options for their
database server storage. The new data de-duplication feature in Windows Server
2012 provides compression on steroids and deliver 30-90% storage savings for
FILESTREAM BLOBs and other external files in SQL Server applications.
Availability: SQL Server 2012 support for Windows Core Server which is
expected to eliminate the need for 50-60% of the OS-level patches. With
Windows Server 2012, the server admin can configure the SQL Server to run with
full support for graphical interfaces and then switch to run in Server Core mode.
Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) automates SQL Server cluster node maintenance
making the process easier, faster, more consistent and more reliable with
significant less downtime. With dynamic quorum management, the cluster can
dynamically reconfigure itself to keep running down to the last surviving node to
allow SQL Server AlwaysOn cluster to adjust the number of quorum votes
dynamically that are required to keep running while simplifying set up by as
much as 80%.
Today, organizations are also seeking a cloud-optimized IT infrastructure that can span
from private to public cloud. A common virtualization platform that increases efficiency
and performance across the infrastructure is essential to achieving this goal. Windows
Server 2012 Hyper-V offers the best virtualization platform for SQL Server 2012.
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When compared to VMware vSphere, Hyper-V offers a number of advantages for SQL
Server workloads:
Performance & Scalability: Hyper-V is better equipped to deploy mission critical
SQL Server workloads in virtualized environment, allowing up to 64 virtual
processors per VM with no SKU-specific restrictions. By contrast, vSphere
Enterprise and vSphere Hypervisor support only 32 and 8 vCPUs per VM
respectively. Only the most expensive vSphere Enterprise Plus edition allows
support up to 64 vCPUs. Hyper-V offers superior performance for SQL Server
virtualization, supporting 320 logical processors per host, while vSphere
Hypervisor and VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus support only 160. Hyper-V also
supports up to 4TB of physical memory, while VMware host physical memory is
capped at 32GB for vSphere Hypervisor and 2TB for vSphere Enterprise Plus.
Storage & High Availability: For mission critical SQL Server AlwaysOn scenario
that make use of Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), customers retain
full Hyper-V functionalities whereas VMware recommends turning off key
features such as vMotion for VM mobility, DRS for dynamic resource allocation,
and vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) when using WSFC. Besides that, there are
restrictions on 2 node limits and no support for iSCSI, FCoE, and NFS storage
protocols. On the other hand, Hyper-V offers unmatched scale for failover
clustering, with support for up to 64 nodes and 8,000 VMs per cluster. Hyper-V
Live Migration also offers unlimited simultaneous Live Migrations and Shared-
Nothing Live Migration for seamlessly moving VMs between hosts and clusters.
Additionally, Hyper-V fully supports Guest Clustering with Live Migration and
Dynamic memory and vSphere does not. On storage, Hyper-V is optimized to
take advantage of increased capacity of single virtual disk to store huge
databases, file repositories or document archives for up to 64TB in size, while
vSphere is restricted to only 2TB.
Deployment & Management: Hyper-V combined with System Center supports
VM migration and management from private (virtualized) to public cloud
(virtualized) as well as support for Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines
management. VMware only supports virtualized management for VMware virtual
machines. Hyper-V combined with System Center also provides complete in-
guest monitoring (hardware, hypervisor, operating system, and application).
VMware does not support application monitoring.
Lower costs: Hyper-V provides a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than
VMware vSphere for initial licensing and ongoing operations. More details on
the cost comparison can be obtained through this web site where the analysis
shows that a VMware private cloud solution can cost 5.5 times more than a
Microsoft based private cloud solution.
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Hyper-V proves to be the best solution for virtualizing SQL Server databases, with
superior capabilities in many areas while offering significantly better TCO than VMware.
Many customers understand the benefits outlined in the summary and table below and
they have chosen to run their SQL Server using Hyper-V or have switched their existing
SQL Server to Hyper-V from VMware. See these case studies for more details.
The following table shows the comparison from Hyper-V and VMware:
Features Microsoft Hyper-V VMware vSphere
Performance & Scale
Support for 64 virtual processors per VM 1
Support for 320 logical processors per host
Support for 4TB physical memory per host
Storage & High Availability
Full support for SQL Server AlwaysOn
Full support for Guest Clustering
Full support for Live Migration scenarios
Deployment & Management
Support VM migration from Private to Public Cloud
Support for Hyper-V and VMware management
Guest OS & Application Monitoring
Private & Public Cloud management
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
1 Available only in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5.1
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Better Scaling
With the rapid growth in the volumes and types of data being generated in the course
of doing business, there is a continual demand on IT departments to deliver
applications with the scale to handle the most demanding workloads. Windows Server
2012 and SQL Server 2012 work together to deliver the level of scalability needed to
meet today’s enterprise requirements.
High capacity virtual processors and memory enable organizations to deploy mission
critical workloads using SQL Server 2012 in a virtualized environment. A SQL Server VM
can use up to 64 virtual processors and 1 TB of memory—an increase of 16X over the
previous Windows Server Hyper-V. In addition, support for up to 640 logical processors
and 4 TB of memory enables deployment of mission critical SQL Server workloads in a
non-virtualized environment.
With Windows 2012, SQL Server can achieve greater cluster density for deployment in
virtualized environments, allowing up to 8,000 SQL Server VMs per cluster. (This
represents an increase of 8X over the previous version of Windows Server.)
Windows Server 2012 also enables greater cluster scalability, supporting SQL Server
clusters up to 64 nodes—which is four times the previous Windows Server version. This
provides a range of benefits, including enhanced scalability, improved configuration
and management, and ease-of-maintenance for large SQL Server clusters in both
virtualized and non-virtualized environments.
To address the growing need for centrally managed database services that provide
multitenancy for isolated workloads, SQL Server 2012 offers a number of enhancements
to the Resource Governor. Resource Governor enables customers to define resource
usage across different applications, helping to ensure consistent performance for
concurrent and mixed workloads. Now Resource Governor has increased the number of
resource pools to 64 and added the ability to create a hard cap on CPU resource usage.
Resource pools can also be affinitized to schedulers, groups of schedulers, and NUMA
nodes.
Better Performance
Working together, Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 offer a number of
capabilities that help to deliver industry-leading performance for database workloads.
For example, new support for NUMA optimization (thread scheduler and memory
allocation) in Hyper-V can be used in a SQL Server VM to greatly enhance SQL Server
performance in virtualized environment.
SQL Server VM can connect to Fiber Channel directly to support N_Port ID
Virtualization (NPIV), virtual SAN, and multipath IO (MPIO) to ensure continuous
connectivity. This helps to increase storage capacity, storage compatibility, and overall
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performance for SQL Server deployments in virtualized environments.
Additional capabilities using the new dynamic VHDX contribute to increased
protection, performance, and manageability of SQL Server storage in virtualized
environment. With VHDX, SQL Server VMs can scale up to 64 TB and has better
resiliency to protect against data corruption during power failure.
New in SQL Server 2012 is xVelocity in-memory technologies, which is achieving results
of 10-100x performance gains for SQL Server workloads. xVelocity columnstore index
enables organizations to achieve next generation performance for common data
warehouse queries. For business intelligence application, xVelocity delivers an in-
memory analytics engine within SQL Server Analysis Services. xVelocity gives users the
ability to actively interact with an unprecedented amount of data with scan rates of 10s
of billions of rows per second on typical industry hardware.
Better Availability
As data volumes continue to grow, Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 work
together to deliver the maximum uptime and data availability required for mission
critical needs. SQL Server instances hosted on the Windows 2012 Hyper-V environment
have the benefit of Live Migration, which enables migration of virtual machines without
downtime.
Windows Server 2012 allows simultaneous migration of as many SQL Server VMs as is
desired, helping to maintain availability of SQL Server while decreasing planned
downtime. Faster Live Migration also helps to decrease planned downtime, allowing
migration of multiple SQL Server VMs (with priority settings) in a clustered environment
and using up to 10 GB of network bandwidth.
Live Migration of SQL Server VM in a non-clustered environment is allowed on both
centrally shared and non-shared VM storage. This helps to reduce the cost and
complexity of SQL Server deployments in virtualized environments while maintaining
availability during planned downtime
With Cluster-Aware Updating (CAU) updates can be applied automatically to the host
operating system, or other system components in a clustered SQL Server environment
while maintaining availability. This can significantly help to increase SQL Server
availability during the update process in both virtualized and non-virtualized
environment.
Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering Dynamic Quorum allows SQL Server
AlwaysOn cluster to adjust the number of quorum votes dynamically that are required
to keep running. This can simplify set up by as much as 80%. It also helps increase
availability of a SQL Server cluster in failover scenarios in both virtualized and non-
virtualized environment, with the ability to recalculate a quorum on the fly and still
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maintain a working cluster.
SQL Server 2012 delivers a number of features and capabilities that enable mission
critical availability. SQL Server AlwaysOn provides an integrated, flexible, cost-efficient
high availability and disaster recovery solution that includes availability groups, failover
clustering, database mirroring, log shipping, and replication.
SQL Server 2012 also offers support for Windows Server Core in both virtualized and
non-virtualized environment, helping to decrease planned downtime by reducing the
need for OS patching by as much as 50-60% while allowing easy conversion between
full GUI mode and Server Core mode in Windows Server 2012.
Built into Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V is Hyper-V Replica, which provides an
asynchronous disaster recovery solution for SQL Server VM. Hyper-V Replica enables
virtual machines to be replicated between storage systems, clusters, and data centers in
two sites to provide business continuity and disaster recovery. It is easy to set up and
manage, which ultimately helps to lower the management costs of disaster recovery for
non-mission critical SQL Server installations.
Better Networking
Running SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 offers a number advantages for
optimizing network bandwidth and reducing management costs.
Quality of Service (QoS) helps improve user experience by helping the IT department to
better manage network traffic. QoS in Windows Server 2012 enables enforcement of
network bandwidth into a network adapter for multiple SQL Server services, such as
VM, Storage, Live Migration, and Cluster Shared Volume. This can help to lower capital
and operating expenses by converging network traffic onto a single network adapter.
With software-controlled network virtualization, isolation and security can be provided
for multiple SQL Server VMs using policies and placement of SQL Server VMs based on
workload. This improves multi-tenancy support across multiple SQL Server
deployments in a virtualized environment.
With Windows Server NIC Teaming, bandwidth can be increased for SQL Server
network traffic by configuring multiple NICs for load-balancing. In addition, configuring
multiple NICs for hardware failover helps to maintain SQL Server availability in both
virtualized and non-virtualized environment.
Better Storage Support
Running on Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012 benefits from many storage
enhancements that help reduce costs and increase performance and availability. For
example, running on Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012 can take advantage of
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new server message block (SMB) file server features. This means SQL Server can store
data files using remote shared folders that use SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel on
industry standard network adapters. Ultimately, this can create significant storage
benefits, including reduced cost, improved high availability, and increased performance
for SQL Server deployments in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments.
4-KB Disk Sectors allow databases to be safely deployed on the newest generations of
disk technology. This helps to increase storage efficiency for SQL Server files in both
virtualized and non-virtualized environments.
Organizations have an opportunity to lower costs by using industry standard storage in
SQL Server deployments for non-virtualized environment, in some cases even replacing
expensive SAN solutions. Storage Pools can improve the flexibility of SQL Server
storage with resilient storage (mirroring and parity) and multi-tenancy isolation (ACLs).
With data deduplication, storage can be increased for certain SQL Server data (30-90%)
in less physical space with minimum impact on performance in both virtualized and
non-virtualized environment. Variable-size chunking and compression can provide
significant storage space savings in FILESTREAM applications such as SharePoint
document storage.
Better Management
The tight integration between System Center 2012 and SQL Server 2012 enables
significant benefits for improved monitoring of SQL Server deployments. System Center
2012 Operations Manager helps reduce the cost of monitoring SQL Server instances,
enabling both proactive and reactive monitoring of SQL Server instances (from SQL
Server 2005 and up). Key Operations Manager monitoring capabilities include:
Database engine and agent monitoring (health, usage, and performance)
Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services monitoring
AlwaysOn, Database Mirroring, and Replication monitoring
Policy-based management monitoring
Operations Manager helps makes monitoring the IT infrastructure flexible and cost-
effective, offering comprehensive monitoring, whether on-premise or in the private or
public cloud.
SQL Server 2012 is supported by System Center Advisor, which enables IT to assess
server configurations and proactively avoid problems. It can proactively scan the server
environment, helping to resolve issues faster with support staff, and helping to reduce
server downtime. The solution installs agents that run continuously on each server, and
it uploads data daily and writes it to a file to help provide full visibility.
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 work together to perform
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Hyper-V application monitoring, which provides a simple solution to monitor
applications running in VMs. Services and event logs can be monitored inside the VM
to determine whether key services that a virtual machine provides are healthy. It also
provides corrective action, including restarting the virtual machine or restarting a
service within the VM. VMware cannot do application monitoring natively.
Together, System Center 2012 and SQL Server 2012 also provide compelling
capabilities that ease management across private and public cloud environments.
System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) offers a range of features and
functionality that help reduce the cost and complexity in building and managing a SQL
Server for Private Cloud solution. IT allows conversion of physical SQL Server instances
into virtual SQL Server instances. It also allows conversion of VMware-based virtual SQL
Server instances into Hyper-V based virtual SQL Server instances.
VMM allows faster creation of SQL Server VM based on pre-built templates using SQL
Server Sysprep technology. It also enables the creation of database application profiles
inside SQL Server VMs based on SQL Server data-tier applications (DACs).
Organizations can also use VMM to create and manage a private cloud based on SQL
Server VMs.
System Center 2012 App Controller is a self-service portal for VMM that helps to
reduce cost and complexity in configuring, deploying, and managing SQL Server virtual
machines across Microsoft private cloud (VMM) and public cloud (Windows Azure).
App Controller enables self-service management of SQL Server VM based on roles in
both private cloud and public cloud environment. It enables deployment of SQL Server
VM across multiple private cloud environments, as well as deployment of SQL Server
VM from a private cloud to a public cloud environment.
For public cloud, Windows Azure Virtual Machine (VM) makes it easy to deploy
dedicated instances of SQL Server in the Windows Azure cloud. This enables
organizations to implement the most compelling scenarios for public cloud:
- Migrate on premise SQL Server database applications to Windows Azure,
without having to modify the application.
- Start a new development and testing for SQL Server applications in Windows
Azure
- Backup SQL Server data and store the backup files in Windows Azure Storage
- Use Windows Azure as a disaster-recovery (DR) option for SQL Server
applications
- Move a portion of SQL Server applications into Windows Azure while
maintaining sensitive data on premise
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Better Data Protection
System Center 2012 includes Data Protection Manager (DPM), which enables backup
and restore of SQL Server databases (from SQL Server 2000 and up) for multiple
configurations, including a single instance, clustered instances, and mirrored instances.
This helps reduce the cost of data protection for multiple SQL Server instances in a
centralized location.
System Center 2012 introduces a number of new features and enhancements to DPM
that help to better manage data protection for instances of SQL Server. DPM offers
centralized management of multiple DPM servers as well as the ability to remotely
manage servers. In addition, multiple DPM servers can share one instance of SQL Server
for DPMDB. DPM also offers certificate-based authentication for computers in
workgroups or untrusted domains. New protection group sets can help to improve
tape usage, and DPM now offers support for protecting VMM hosts.
SQL Server 2012 offers a range of enhancements for improved data protection.
Transparent data encryption (TDE) performs real-time I/O encryption and decryption of
the data and log files, which helps to meet compliance needs and enables developers
to encrypt data without changing existing applications. User-Defined Server Roles allow
organizations to control what administrators and DBAs can see across the system at a
detailed level based on roles. Roles can even be nested to better map to hierarchical
organizational structures.
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Conclusion
By working together, SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012, and System Center 2012
offer a seamlessly integrated, on-premise and cloud-ready information platform to
meet the demands of today’s enterprise. Below table is the summary of features that
are applicable for SQL Server in virtualized and non-virtualized environment:
Features Non-virtualized Environment Virtualized Environment
Scale
High capacity 640 logical processor and 4 TB memory
Increase cluster scalability to 64 nodes
High capacity 64 virtual processor and 1 TB memory
Increase VM density to 8,000 per cluster
Performance
NUMA support
Fiber Channel support
New VHDX format
Availability
Windows Server Core
Cluster-Aware Updating (CAU)
Dynamic Quorum in Cluster
Simultaneous Live Migration
Faster Live Migration
Live Migration without a cluster
Live Migration without a shared storage
Hyper-V Replica
Networking
QoS – Network Bandwidth Enforcing
Extensible Switch and Network Virtualization
Windows NIC Teaming
Storage
SMB support
4-KB Disk Sector support
Storage Spaces and Pools
Data Deduplication
Cloud Management
System Center Virtual Machine Manager
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System Center App Controller
Server Management
System Center Operations Manager
System Center Advisor
SQL Server PowerShell
Data Protection
System Center Data Protection Manager
Windows BitLocker
Windows Integrated Authentication
As organizations continue to virtualize their IT infrastructure and more fully embrace
private and public cloud environments, Microsoft offers a unique combination of
products and technologies designed to help organizations of all types and sizes to
cloud optimize their IT.
Resources
SQL Server 2012 website: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/
Windows Server 2012 website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/new.aspx
System Center 2012 website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-
center/default.aspx
Download free SQL Server Trial:
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/get-sql-server/try-it.aspx
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