Consolidation and Virtualizationwith SQL Server

Rob ReinauerProduct Unit ManagerSQL Server Engine

Melbourne User GroupSeptember 10, 2009

AgendaSQL Server Consolidation Today

Virtualization and Microsoft Hyper-V ArchitectureCapabilities with SQL Server

Managing virtualized environments

Performance of SQL Server with Hyper-VScalability across multiple VMs on a systemIO Performance

Achieving Scalability with VirtualizationCPU, Memory, Network and Disk subsystems

Microsoft IT Case Study

Questions

Forces Driving ConsolidationHardware Utilization Efficiency

Datacenter deployment efficiency

Power Utilization

Hardware standardization initiatives

Management EfficiencyFewer physical servers to manage and maintain

Centralized management of multiple/many servers

Infrastructure AgilityLoad Balancing

Lowered cost and complexity for High Availability

Power Sav-ings18%

Hardware Uti-lization

25%

Rack Space Savings18%

Ease of Manage-

ment21%

Licensing Costs18%

SQL Server Consolidation TodayHi

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MyServer

Databases InstancesIT ManagedEnvironment

VirtualMachines

Schemas

Microsoft Confidential

Sales_1Marketing_1Online_SalesERP_10ERP_10

DB_1DB_2DB_3

Consolidate_1

Currently a variety of consolidation strategies exist and are utilized.

Typically, as isolation goes up, density goes down and cost goes up.

Schema level consolidation Multiple databases are collapsed into a single database

Forces common security model on all applicationsTypically requires changes to application and scriptsMany opportunities for subtle cross interactions

Namespace collisions and conflictsUnexpected dependencies / performance contentions

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osts Higher Density, Low

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Database level consolidation Multiple databases hosted on a single instance

Common security, manageability and compatibility models requiredMight require changes to existing applications and scriptsLower manageability costsBetter resource isolation and allocation capabilities through Resource Governor.

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osts Higher Density, Low

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Instance level consolidation Multiple Instances running on one system

Full schema and security isolationPartial system resource & management isolationPotential conflicts in namespace, resources and system rolesSystem Memory and CPU are typical density limiters

SQL Server Consolidation TodayHi

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ation

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osts Higher Density, Low

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Microsoft Confidential

Virtual Machine consolidationStrong isolation between applicationsEase of capturing and moving execution loadsOut of the box High Availability configurationFlexible storage managementFewer systems, but just as many OS images to manageIncreased resource usage

What is Virtualization?Multiple operating systems images supporting separate independent applications running simultaneously on the same computer system.Strong hardware enforced isolation between the VMs

Server

Child Partition

Root Partition

Devices Processors Memory

Hypervisor

Hardware

One Physical Server

Server

Child Partition

SP2 RC

Server

Child Partition

Virtualization Scenario:Windows Server 2008 is installed on the bare system, Hyper-V enabled

Devices Processors MemoryHardware

Hypervisor

One Physical Server

Running one application on one OS

Root Partition

Virtualization Scenario:Windows Server 2008 is installed on the bare system, Hyper-V enabled

Devices Processors Memory

Hypervisor

Hardware

One Physical Server

Server

Child Partition

Running one application on one OS

Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 are installed or imaged into a child partition.

Root Partition

We would like to try out our application running against SQL Server 2008 running on Windows Server 2008 SP2 RC.But… we need to keep our existing application online and running.

Devices Processors Memory

Hypervisor

Hardware

One Physical Server

Server

Child Partition

SP2 RC

Server

Child Partition

Virtualization Scenario: Deploying Test Bed Environments

New OS and SQL Server installed or imaged into new child partition

Root Partition

Server

Child Partition

We would like to retire old hardware serversBut… we don’t want to purchase new hardware or go through a re-verification on new operating system and SQL Server versions.

Devices Processors Memory

Hypervisor

Hardware

One Physical Server

Server

Child Partition

SP2 RC

Server

Child Partition

Virtualization Scenario: Consolidating Legacy Applications

System Center VMM migrates a physical server image to a Hyper-V partition.

Root Partition

Hyper-V Architectural overviewThe Hyper-V Hypervisor runs directly on the hardwareProvides virtualized execution environment for operating systemsOperating systems and applications run in partitions on top of the HypervisorEnlightenments provide fast paths to mitigate overhead

Windows Server 08 R2 Hyper-V Improvements

Virtualization Feature WS08 Hyper-V RTM WS08 Hyper-V SP2Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

(Windows 7)

Logical Processor Support 16 24 64

Physical Socket Support 4 4 8

Total number of running VMs 128 192 384

Address Space Management Software Emulation Software Emulation Hardware(SLAT / IOMMU)

Effective Core Parking Limited Limited Yes

Zero Down Time Load Migration No (Quick Migration) No (Quick Migration) Yes (Live Migration)

Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) No No Yes

Network stack offloading No No Yes

Online storage provisioning No No Yes

High Availability for SQL ServerIn Virtualized Environments

Consolidation Increases the importance of High Availability FeaturesConsolidation serves to increase cost for a single system failure Increasing focus on planned outages vs. unplanned outages

Microsoft Confidential

Shared Disk Environments - SANs, iSCSI, NAS,Windows Fail-Over Clustering

Host based ClusteringChild partition based Clustering

Non-Shared Disk EnvironmentsSQL Server MirroringTransactional and Peer-to-Peer replicationLog Shipping

Resource IsolationHyper-V ManagerSCVMMSQL Server Resource Manager

High Availability In Virtualized EnvironmentsWindows Fail-Over Clustering - Host Level Clustering

One complete system fails over to another system All VMs on the source system fail overEach VM can target different physical systems for fail-over.Each VM is re-started on fail-over target system WFC migrates LUNs to target system(s)Enables Live Migration in Windows 2008 R2

ChildPartition 1SQL 2008

ChildPartition 2SQL S005

Parent Partition

Lun1->E:

Hypervisor

D1.VHD->S:E:\D1.VHD

E:\D2.VHD

F:\D1.VHD

F:\D2.VHD

D2.VHD->S:

D1.VHD->T: D2.VHD->T:

System 1

SAN FiberChannel or iSCSI

System 2

Lun2->F:

LUN 1

Windows Failover Clustering

No Child PartitionsIn Existence.

SQL Server High Availability with Hyper-VHost Level Clustering - Partition movement, Drive routings

Pre-Failover

LUN 2

ChildPartition 1SQL 2008

ChildPartition 2SQL S005

Parent Partition

Lun1->E:

Hypervisor

D1.VHD->S:E:\D1.VHD

E:\D2.VHD

F:\D1.VHD

F:\D2.VHD

D2.VHD->S:

D1.VHD->T: D2.VHD->T:

System 1

SAN FiberChannel or iSCSI

System 2

Lun2->F:

LUN 1

Windows Failover Clustering

SQL Server High Availability with Hyper-VHost Level Clustering - Partition movement, Drive routings

After-Failover

LUN 2

System Failure

High Availability In Virtualized EnvironmentsWindows Fail-Over Clustering - Guest Level Clustering

Clustering applied at the individual VM level A single VM on the source system fails over to another VMEach VM can target different physical systems for fail-over. WFC does not migrate LUNs to target system(s)iSCSI typically required

ChildPartition 1SQL 2008

ChildPartition 2SQL S005

Parent Partition

Hypervisor

D1.VHD->S: D2.VHD->S:

System 1

SAN iSCSI

System 2

LUN 1

Windows Failover Clustering

SQL Server High Availability with Hyper-VGuest Partition Clustering - Partition movement, Drive routings

Pre-Failover

LUN 2

ChildPartition 1

ChildPartition 2Parent Partition

Hypervisor

D1.VHD->T: D2.VHD->T:

ChildPartition 1SQL 2008

ChildPartition 2SQL S005

Parent Partition

Hypervisor

D1.VHD->S: D2.VHD->S:

System 1

SAN iSCSI

System 2

LUN 1

Windows Failover Clustering

SQL Server High Availability with Hyper-VGuest Partition Clustering - Partition movement, Drive routings

After-Failover

LUN 2

ChildPartition 2Parent Partition

Hypervisor

D1.VHD->T: D2.VHD->T:

ChildPartition 1SQL 2008

D1.VHD->S:

D1.VHD->T:

PartitionFailure

Delivered in Windows 2008 R2Migrates a running VM with essentially zero down timeActually, several seconds of downtime, but connections are maintainedAllows essentially zero down time:

Hardware maintenancePatching and servicing of host OS

Currently does not allow zero down time;Patching and servicing of guest OSPatching and servicing of applications within guest VMs

Hyper-V Live Migration

Root Partition

HypervisorHardware

Physical Server Source Child Partition

Partition Memory

Network Connections

HypervisorHardware

Changed Pages

Storage Connections

Root Partition

Physical ServerDestination Child Partition

Step 1: Snapshot VM memoryCopy partition memory from source VM to Destination

Partition Memory

Shared StorageLUN 2LUN 1

Network Connections

Hyper-V Live MigrationHow it works: step by step

Step 2: Copy changed pages from source VM to destination

Root Partition

HypervisorHardware

Physical Server Source Child Partition

Partition Memory

Network Connections

HypervisorHardware

Changed Pages

Storage Connections

Root Partition

Physical ServerDestination Child Partition

Partition Memory

Shared StorageLUN 2LUN 1

Network Connections

Changed Pages

Hyper-V Live MigrationHow it works: step by step

Step 3: Storage connections are migrated from the source VM to the destination VM.

Root Partition

HypervisorHardware

Physical Server Source Child Partition

Partition Memory

Network Connections

HypervisorHardware

Changed Pages

Storage Connections

Root Partition

Physical ServerDestination Child Partition

Partition Memory

Shared StorageLUN 1

Network Connections

Changed Pages

Storage Connections

LUN 2

Hyper-V Live MigrationHow it works: step by step

Step 4: Network connections are migrated from source VM to destination VM

Root Partition

HypervisorHardware

Physical Server Source Child Partition

Partition Memory

Network Connections

HypervisorHardware

Changed Pages

Storage Connections

Root Partition

Physical ServerDestination Child Partition

Partition Memory

Shared StorageLUN 1

Changed Pages

Storage Connections

Network Connections

Network ConnectionsLUN 2

Hyper-V Live MigrationHow it works: step by step

Source Child Partition

Step 5: Destination VM is brought online, Source VM is taken off line

Root Partition

HypervisorHardware

Physical Server Destination Child Partition

HypervisorHardware

Root Partition

Physical Server

Partition Memory

Shared StorageLUN 1

Changed Pages

Storage Connections

Network Connections

Network ConnectionsLUN 2

Hyper-V Live MigrationHow it works: step by step

Centralized management of Virtual Machine creation, configuration and provisioning

Provides wizards for creation and provisioning of VMs and devices

Provides tools for creation and provisioning of Virtual Hard Drives (VHDs)Limited import capabilities

Creating and managing Virtual MachinesHyper-V Role in Windows 2008 Server Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Creating and managing Virtual Machines

Physical to Virtual and Virtual to Virtual image creationIn place physical systems can be provisioned to VMsVMWare VMs can be translated to Hyper-V

Rapid Virtual Machine Provisioning – Virtual Machine LibraryMulti-machine management across system and VMsPRO - Performance and Resource Optimization and automation

System Center VMM Multi-Machine Monitoring and Management

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Creating and managing Virtual Machines

Evaluating Virtual Machine EfficiencyWe wanted to address the following questions:

Hypervisor

Hardware

SQL running in 8 Separate virtual machines running on a single system

HardwareR2

8 Separate SQL Instances running on a single system

If Consolidating Servers: 1. Is it more efficient to utilize multiple instances (Scenario 1 below) or

multiple virtual machines (Scenario 2)

2. How much overhead develops with larger numbers of instances and Virtual Machines?

Scenario 1 Scenario 2

Hyper-V + Processor virtualization support = Huge Win! SLAT (second level address translation) 1% - 2% overhead per Virtual Machine

1VM 2VM 3VM 4VM 5VM 6VM 7VM 8VM0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

3500

Batch req/sec %CPU Relative Throughput

Virtual Instances Scalability Measurement Configuration

AMD Shanghai CPUs SLAT support No IOMMU

HP DL585 16 CoresHP EVA8000 SANWindows 2008 R2 RCVM Configurations

4 Virtual Processors 7GB RAM

Fixed VHDs Approximately 10%

CPU utilization / VM Relative Throughput

is normalized per VM

Batch

Requests

/

Sec

Total

CPU

Utilizztion

Evaluating Virtual Machine Efficiency

Achieving Scalability With Virtualization

CPU UtilizationThe sum of the CPU utilizations of consolidated applications should not exceed the capacity of the target systemCPU cores can be explicitly allocated to Virtual MachinesCPU reserves, limits and relative priorities can be specifiedCPU cores can be over committed

For example:

- On an 8 core system 4 VMs can each be allocated 4 virtual CPUs- System scheduling provides load balancing across the VMs - The administrator could specify limits and reserves across the VMs

Scalability requires balanced system capabilities CPU, Memory, Network and Disk subsystem bandwidth

Achieving Scalability With VirtualizationScalability requires balanced system capabilities CPU, Memory, Network and Disk subsystem bandwidth

Memory Allocation and UtilizationMemory is allocated to virtual machines in fixed amountsAssume ~1.5 GB consumed by Operating System and SQL Server instance code pagesRemaining memory utilized for data caching, mostly for SQL Server

Network subsystem bandwidthSufficient bandwidth must be provided for the sum total of the consolidated applicationsTask Manager and Perfmon can provide statistics on application network utilization

Achieving Scalability With VirtualizationScalability requires balanced system capabilities CPU, Memory, Network and Disk subsystem bandwidth

Disk subsystem bandwidthI/O Bandwidth is typically gated on number of random I/Os not MB/Sec. throughput

Throughput typically scales with number of drives not with the speed of the attach busThroughput essentially never scales with the space of the storage subsystem

Disk attach bus bandwidth may become significant when:The work loads generate significant percentages of sequential I/OMultiple I/O intensive applications generate large numbers of I/OsSolid State storage is being utilized

Perfmon can provide statistics on number of I/Os, latency and bandwidth utilization.

Evaluating Virtual Machine EfficiencyQlogic Fiber Channel SAN Performance Benchmark

FiberChannel Reads

Infrastructure Workload

IO Intensive Application

iSCSI Reads0

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

140,000

160,000

180,000

200,000

NativeHyper-V

Windows Server 2008 with fiber channel SAN achieves more than 200,000 I/O operations per second.On a range of tests, Hyper-V based I/O workloads were between 88% and 99% of native performance

90%88%

97%

99%

Hyper-V I/O operations per second compared to Native OSIOPS

Non-IOMMUEnabled CPUs

Case Study – MSIT SQL Consolidation

Pre-Consolidation State~2,700 Applications in MSIT Portfolio~4797 SQL Server Instances~100,000 databases~20% end-of-life hosts/year~10% CPU utilization across hosts

Consolidation ApproachMicrosoft IT evaluated database, instance and host based consolidation

Resource Management ApproachResource Management effectiveness considered critical issueInstance based would utilize WSRM Hyper-V allows explicit allocation of CPU and IO channels

Microsoft IT Infrastructure Overview

Case Study – MSIT SQL Consolidation

Consolidation StrategyHost Consolidation utilizing Hyper-VTarget of 6 to 1 consolidation ratioFixed Virtual Drives (VHDs) over Dynamic and Pass Through

Consolidation ApproachDecision starting point was instance based consolidationEvaluation led to decision change: Hyper-V based host consolidation

WSRM vs. Hyper-V

Microsoft IT evaluated WSRM vs. Hyper-V & ultimately chose Hyper-V

Microsoft IT Consolidation Conclusions

Case Study - Microsoft IT Consolidation

0500,000

1,000,0001,500,0002,000,0002,500,0003,000,0003,500,0004,000,000

Power and Cooling at 6:1 Consolidation

Legacy Consolidated$0

$5,000$10,000$15,000$20,000$25,000$30,000$35,000$40,000$45,000$50,000

Annual Recycle Cost at 6:1 Consolidation

Legacy Consolidated

$0$2,000,000$4,000,000$6,000,000$8,000,000

$10,000,000$12,000,000$14,000,000$16,000,000$18,000,000

Annual Operating Cost at 6:1 Consolidation

Legacy Consolidated

Operational Results

Summary Hyper-V based virtualization is an effective server consolidation platform for SQL Server

Modern CPUs easily achieve efficient SQL Server scalability out beyond 8 virtual machines.

The Microsoft Hyper-V platform and SQL Server work together to implement robust high availability environments.

Windows 2008 R2 Live Migration offers effectively zero down time load migration between two systems.

Microsoft IT has documented a successful server consolidation strategy utilizing Hyper-V.

The System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides powerful tools to manage Virtual Machines

Migrating existing native system images to Hyper-V imagesAdministration and monitoring for multiple Virtual MachinesPRO - Performance and load balancing automation

SQL Server Community Resources

Become a FREE PASS Member: www.sqlpass.org/RegisterforSQLPASS.aspxLearn more about the PASS organization www.sqlpass.org/

Additional Community ResourcesSQL Server Community Center www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/community-center.aspxTechNet Community for IT Professionalshttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb671048.aspxDeveloper Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb671064.aspxSQL Server 2008 Learning Portalhttp://www.microsoft.com/learning/sql/2008/default.mspx

The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) is an independent, not-for-profit association, dedicated to supporting, educating, and promoting the Microsoft SQL Server community.

ReferencesRunning SQL 2008 in Hyper-V Environment

http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2008/10/03/running-sql-server-2008-in-a-hyper-v-environment-best-practices-and-performance-recommendations.aspx

Microsoft IT virtualization case studyhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd557540.aspx

Green IT in Practices: SQL Server Consolidation in Microsoft IThttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd393309.aspx

Qlogic Hyper-V IO performance benchmarkshttp://www.qlogic.com/promos/products/hyper-v.aspx

Windows Server Hyper-V site

• http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/virtualization-consolidation.aspx

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 site• http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/virtualmachinemanager/en/us/default.aspx

Hyper-V Technet center http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/servermanager/virtualization.mspx

SQL Server 2008 Business Value Calculator:http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/value-calc.aspx

Questions?