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Five Best Practices to Help DBAs Simplify the Complexity of Managing Virtualized Databases
August 2014 by Marc Jacob
Database virtualization is on the rise due to its cost savings, efficiency and agility benefits. According to a recent survey of nearly 500 IT Professionals conducted by SolarWinds, the majority of respondents (76 percent) have virtualized their databases and/or are using a hybrid approach of virtual and physical databases to support their environment.
Key benefits of virtualization aside, databases are inherently complex due to their business-critical nature of maintaining peak reliability, scalability and speed. Once virtualization is introduced, an additional set of complexities must be considered. The following five best practices should be on every DBA’s radar to not only ensure a database virtualization project goes smoothly, but also maintain top performance once virtualized:
1. Don’t fear virtualizing a large database with a high transactional load. Modern virtualization technology is reliable and robust, and can deliver performance that is very close to running database on bare metal servers.
2. Develop a good working relationship with the virtualization administrator. Without the ability to make changes to the virtual machine (VM) resources, the DBA will be missing out on the biggest benefit to virtualization — agility. Unlike making changes to a physical server, which is a manual process, with just a few short clicks, additional CPU, RAM and storage resources can be added to a virtualized database server.
3. Utilize shared metrics to improve cross-collaboration between IT groups. Avoid confusion and finger-pointing by establishing a unified understanding among the database team, developers, system and virtualization administrators. These teams can collaborate to stay on top of key considerations such as server resource contention and I/O bottlenecks.
4. Correlate physical host and VM resource metrics with SQL query performance. VM metrics can be misleading because the operating system does not accurately report resource metrics when running on a VM. By putting metrics in the context of query performance the impact of issues caused by noisy neighbors, VM events, and resource provisioning to be quickly identified.
5. Monitor SQL response time before and after virtualization. It’s essential to have the right tools in place to gain visibility on response time. This data provides evidence that database performance is maintained or improved, and when performance issues occur, the analysis history provides the ability to pinpoint and resolve issues fast.
Database Performance Management for Every IT Pro, Organization
As more databases are being virtualized, the way software is licensed also needs to evolve. Traditionally, enterprise software has been licensed per core. However, in a virtualized world, core counts can be easily changed, creating licensing issues that affect both deployment and scalability.
SolarWinds(R) Database Performance Analyzer, formerly Confio Ignite(R), provides comprehensive visibility into database performance issues on VMware(R) and aligns with this new licensing reality. Now with instance-based pricing, DBAs at any size organization can afford to effectively and efficiently monitor, test and optimize the performance of all database instances.
– Pricing and Availability
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, formerly Confio Ignite, pricing starts at $1,995 USD for SQL Server(R) and Oracle(R) Standard Edition, and $3,495 for Oracle Enterprise Edition, DB2(R) and Sybase(R). All database platforms are now licensed by the instance and pricing includes the first year of maintenance.
