I’m proud to announce that yesterday the first installment of my new Stairway series at SQL Server Central has been released – Stairway to SQL Server Virtualization. Virtualization is becoming more and more common, and without an understanding how virtualization works, the DBA will have blind spots when attempting to resolving performance issues, such as reduce resource contention, or improve the backup and restore operations, and so on.

The first Level in this series answers the questions surrounding just what is virtualization, and how does it relate to SQL Server DBAs. The differences that it makes in terms of day-to-day operations, high availability, agility, and standardization are all discussed.

I hope you enjoy reading this article, and stay tuned for more Levels coming soon!