Dell PowerEdge R820 - Manual (Page 4)

Dell Virtualization Solution for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 using PowerEdge R820
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Executive summary
Dell PowerEdge 12 th generation servers provide the robustness and reliability for a highly efficient
database consolidation platform. You should choose Dell PowerEdge R820—a powerful four socket
enterprise server—as an optimal platform for database consolidation because of its robustness,
reliability, and performance characteristics.
This white paper describes the advantages of consolidating Microsoft® SQL Server® database
application workloads to a virtualization environment using Microsoft Windows® Server® 2008 R2
Hyper-V™ and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on dell PowerEdge R820. It demonstrates that Dell PowerEdge
R820 is capable of delivering the performance, consolidation, and scalability needed to run SQL Server
workloads in a virtualized environment.
Introduction
One of the major challenges organizations face is the challenge of ensuring the operating efficiency of
the data center. With the emergence of powerful servers, there is a large possibility of not optimally
utilizing the hardware capability for a specific workload. In such cases, it is expensive to run workloads
on a standalone machine. In addition to the inefficient operation, it leads to several other challenges
like over power consumption, manageability, increased data center space usage etc., which becomes
even more challenging in scenarios when increasing data growth slows down the system performance
and requires physical expansion of the configuration.
Organizations are looking for deploying virtual servers to reduce IT cost and increase data center
performance. Microsoft SQL Server is a popular database product that is widely used by business
applications. Consolidating servers through virtualization helps us utilize the resources appropriately;
eases deployment, maintenance, power saving, reliability, and availability.
The adoption of virtualization in enterprise has increased flexibility in deployment and life cycle
management of applications. IT professionals deploy and use virtualization to consolidate workloads
and reduce server sprawl. Additionally, they deploy virtualization with clustering technologies to
provide a robust IT infrastructure with high availability and quick disaster recovery.
This paper outlines how Dell PowerEdge R820 and Microsoft Hyper-V may be used to deploy multiple
SQL Server 2012 databases on a virtualized environment without compromising on the performance.
Objectives
The objectives of this technical paper include:
 Understanding Dell PowerEdge R820 server capabilities to run SQL workload in a virtualized
environment.
 Testing to see how many medium and large SQL VM’s can be consolidated using R820.
 Using best practices to run SQL server workload on a virtualized environment.