Not necessarily for all data related issues, but perhaps in one area we are nearing the end of our "best guesses" about how to build a scalable system.
I was out at lunch recently with some friends, specifically to talk to them about their infrastructure. They work at a large company, and have a pretty hefty setup of systems to maintain: hundreds of servers, multi-terabyte SANs, and more. And it's a mission critical, highly available system that can directly affect their revenue if things were to go down.
We were talking because I was interested in some work they'd done with their SQL Servers. Apparently they'd recently moved some production SQL Server instances to virtual machines on blade servers. And they'd had great success with it, something that I'd been concerned about in the past. I'm trying to plan some more trips over there and gather some more detailed information about how they decided to configure the VMs as well as any metrics I can gather.
As we talked about their setup and how they built things, one very, very interesting thing came out about their provisioning of resources. They didn't necessarily go with estimates from the server administrator as to the size of the server needed. Typically they built servers as 2x2 (2 CPUs with 2GB of RAM) and if there was a need to allocate more resources, they could move to a 2x4 (4GB RAM) or 4x4 server to meet the needs of the application. It required a VM restart, but we're used to that in the Windows world, at least for now. I am definitely interested in Windows 2008 and Hot-Add here.
I've heard lots of arguments for and against VMs, but this was a fantastic one. Build a standard server, collect metrics, and provision more resources if you need them. It's just like requesting more space on the SAN, here you just ask for more CPUs or RAM.
But without the purchase order process!
As virtualization technology grows and becomes more powerful, I expect that we'll be able to build larger and larger virtual machines. I think my friends were expecting that the next release of the VM software (and a license update) would allow them to build up to 8x32 VMs, which is pretty powerful.
Whether or not you believe in VMs as a solution in your business, I think you have to admit it's pretty cool to add 2GB worth of RAM to your server in seconds and have it appear on a reboot. Especially without having to go beg for more money.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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