Mission-Critical Operations

Consolidate database servers with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and SQL Server 2008 R2 to reduce capital and operational costs and increase data management efficiency while meeting business needs.

Reduce hardware costs

• Reduce the cost of refreshing hardware by reducing the number of physical servers in the organization.

• Lower expenses associated with adding physical servers, such as space, power, and cooling costs, also lowering your organization’s carbon footprint.

• Benefit from data and backup compression to significantly reduce physical-storage requirements.

Reduce software costs

• Take advantage of premium-edition licensing that requires only one SQL Server license per processor, no matter how many database instances are installed in virtual machines on the host server.

• Use one license to convert a physical database server to a virtual database server and move database instances among virtual machines (VMs).

• Save the cost of separate virtualization software by using the built-in Hyper-V virtualization platform.

Reduce operational costs

• Drive down management costs by reducing the number of servers to be managed and add consistency across hardware and software management.

• Take advantage of the centralized management capabilities of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and SQL Server 2008 R2.

• Standardize on new, more efficient hardware to gain efficiencies and reduce environmental impact.

• Realize significant savings through reduced power and cooling requirements.

• Reduce training costs and increase IT capacity by standardizing data-center software and hardware.

Deploy and optimize database server usage with the flexibility required to adapt to fast-changing business requirements while managing physical and virtual servers consistently across the enterprise.

Enable simpler, faster deployment

• Take advantage of the new Sysprep tool in SQL Server 2008 R2 to more quickly bring a new database server into production.

• Quickly package and deploy databases and the server-level dependencies with support for data-tier applications.

• Simplify provisioning by building a library of VM images for quick deployment, as new servers are needed.

• Enjoy fast, reliable migration to Hyper-V via migration paths supported by System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

• Quickly deploy physical computers by using the Windows Server 2008 R2 ability to boot from a virtual hard disk (VHD).

Scale dynamically with the needs of the business

• Grow business capacity by scaling up host servers to increase the density of VMs per physical host.

• Increase response time by taking advantage of support for memory in excess of 1 terabyte.

• Process workloads more quickly with improved VM performance and better memory management.

• Scale out applications by copying existing VMs and deploying to additional servers.

• Scale up quickly by moving VMs to new, more powerful host servers as application workload increases.

Build a flexible, reliable data infrastructure

• Quickly deploy and move applications in response to changes in business requirements or hardware capacity.

• Take control of your application resource utilization by isolating workloads and proactively enforcing predictable performance.

• Improve service-level agreement compliance while deploying consolidated, managed servers in a shared infrastructure.

Help guarantee revenue production by using virtualization to help ensure business continuity and minimizing planned and unplanned downtime for business-critical applications.

Combine Hyper-V with SQL Server Always On to provide high availability

• Use Live Migration to move VMs between host servers without incurring downtime.

• Maintain open sessions while moving VMs so that connected users do not experience any appreciable delays.

• Create a snapshot of a VHD and use it to recover quickly from a failure.

• Use host clustering to protect a server that is running Hyper-V.

• Protect from failure at the SQL Server instance level by implementing guest clustering in a virtualized database server.

Simplify cluster management

• Use Windows Server 2008 R2 Cluster Shared Volumes to efficiently manage storage in clustered environments.

• Store multiple VHDs on a single volume/logical unit number (LUN) and still have them fail over separately.

• Reduce the total number of LUNs that need to be maintained, using efficient VHD assignment.

Reduce planned downtime

• Minimize outages by temporarily relocating a database to perform maintenance on host servers.

• Seamlessly move a database application from an overutilized server by using Live Migration.

• Use “hot-swap” storage to add storage capacity to a VM without taking it offline.

• Ensure that downtime is minimized when performing rollover patching, enabled by guest clustering support.

Increase operational efficiency from improved security

• Apply standard server policy configurations and enforce them by using policy-based management.

• Simplify and consolidate encryption and key management through support for extensible key management.