FURTHER. FORWARD. FASTER.

White Paper:

Better Together—SQL Server 2012, Windows

Server 2012, and System Center 2012 Delivering a complete data platform for modern datacenter

in the Cloud OS

Published: November 2012

Applies to: SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012

Author: Steve Heuring, Darmadi Komo

Reviewers: Ross Mistry, Bryan Smith

Introduction

Today’s organizations need the ability to seamlessly build, deploy, and manage

applications and services across on-premise, private, and public cloud environments. The

Windows Server® 2012 operating system, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012, and System

Center 2012 work together to provide a consistent, integrated platform across the entire

IT infrastructure. In this white paper, we will look at how these products work better

together to deliver across a range of IT requirements, from scale and performance, to

storage support and cloud management. We will also examine many of the powerful new

capabilities of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V™, and see why it continues to be the best

choice for virtualizing SQL Server workloads.

2 Title of Document Here

Copyright

This document is provided “as is.” Information and views expressed in this

document, including URL and other Internet website references, may change

without notice. You bear the risk of using it.

This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual

property in any Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document for your

internal, reference purposes.

© 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

3 Title of Document Here

Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1

Copyright ............................................................................................................. 2

Executive Summary ............................................................................................ 4

Better Scaling ...................................................................................................... 7

Better Performance ............................................................................................ 7

Better Availability ............................................................................................... 8

Better Networking .............................................................................................. 9

Better Storage Support ...................................................................................... 9

Better Management.......................................................................................... 10

Better Data Protection ..................................................................................... 12

Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 13

Resources........................................................................................................... 14

4 Title of Document Here

Executive Summary

This paper describes the many capabilities and benefits gained by running SQL Server

2012 software on the Windows Server 2012 operating system, and managing the

environment with System Center 2012. Working together, Microsoft’s industry-leading

products deliver an integrated low-TCO platform that offers mission-critical scale,

performance, and availability—combined with enhanced end-to-end security,

management, and development capabilities.

For traditional non-virtualized environment in on-premise data center, Windows Server

2012 provide the best platform for mission-critical SQL Server 2012 workloads (OLTP,

Data Warehousing, and BI):

Performance & Scalability: SQL Server 2012 can consume the operating system

max for both processors and memory. Windows Server 2012 supports 640

processors (cores) over a max of 64 sockets and up to 4 TB of RAM allowing SQL

Server applications to scale tremendously and satisfy most mission critical

applications. The new NIC Teaming feature in Windows Server 2012 allows 2 or

more network adapters to behave as a single, virtual device. This improves the

reliability of the networking subsystem – if one NIC dies, the other continues to

function – and allows the bandwidth available to each to be pooled for greater

total network throughput for SQL Server data. With SMB improvements in

Windows Server 2012, SQL Server can store database files on remote (SMB) file

shares providing customers with many more deployment options for their

database server storage. The new data de-duplication feature in Windows Server

2012 provides compression on steroids and deliver 30-90% storage savings for

FILESTREAM BLOBs and other external files in SQL Server applications.

Availability: SQL Server 2012 support for Windows Core Server which is

expected to eliminate the need for 50-60% of the OS-level patches. With

Windows Server 2012, the server admin can configure the SQL Server to run with

full support for graphical interfaces and then switch to run in Server Core mode.

Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) automates SQL Server cluster node maintenance

making the process easier, faster, more consistent and more reliable with

significant less downtime. With dynamic quorum management, the cluster can

dynamically reconfigure itself to keep running down to the last surviving node to

allow SQL Server AlwaysOn cluster to adjust the number of quorum votes

dynamically that are required to keep running while simplifying set up by as

much as 80%.

Today, organizations are also seeking a cloud-optimized IT infrastructure that can span

from private to public cloud. A common virtualization platform that increases efficiency

and performance across the infrastructure is essential to achieving this goal. Windows

Server 2012 Hyper-V offers the best virtualization platform for SQL Server 2012.

5 Title of Document Here

When compared to VMware vSphere, Hyper-V offers a number of advantages for SQL

Server workloads:

Performance & Scalability: Hyper-V is better equipped to deploy mission critical

SQL Server workloads in virtualized environment, allowing up to 64 virtual

processors per VM with no SKU-specific restrictions. By contrast, vSphere

Enterprise and vSphere Hypervisor support only 32 and 8 vCPUs per VM

respectively. Only the most expensive vSphere Enterprise Plus edition allows

support up to 64 vCPUs. Hyper-V offers superior performance for SQL Server

virtualization, supporting 320 logical processors per host, while vSphere

Hypervisor and VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus support only 160. Hyper-V also

supports up to 4TB of physical memory, while VMware host physical memory is

capped at 32GB for vSphere Hypervisor and 2TB for vSphere Enterprise Plus.

Storage & High Availability: For mission critical SQL Server AlwaysOn scenario

that make use of Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), customers retain

full Hyper-V functionalities whereas VMware recommends turning off key

features such as vMotion for VM mobility, DRS for dynamic resource allocation,

and vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) when using WSFC. Besides that, there are

restrictions on 2 node limits and no support for iSCSI, FCoE, and NFS storage

protocols. On the other hand, Hyper-V offers unmatched scale for failover

clustering, with support for up to 64 nodes and 8,000 VMs per cluster. Hyper-V

Live Migration also offers unlimited simultaneous Live Migrations and Shared-

Nothing Live Migration for seamlessly moving VMs between hosts and clusters.

Additionally, Hyper-V fully supports Guest Clustering with Live Migration and

Dynamic memory and vSphere does not. On storage, Hyper-V is optimized to

take advantage of increased capacity of single virtual disk to store huge

databases, file repositories or document archives for up to 64TB in size, while

vSphere is restricted to only 2TB.

Deployment & Management: Hyper-V combined with System Center supports

VM migration and management from private (virtualized) to public cloud

(virtualized) as well as support for Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines

management. VMware only supports virtualized management for VMware virtual

machines. Hyper-V combined with System Center also provides complete in-

guest monitoring (hardware, hypervisor, operating system, and application).

VMware does not support application monitoring.

Lower costs: Hyper-V provides a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than

VMware vSphere for initial licensing and ongoing operations. More details on

the cost comparison can be obtained through this web site where the analysis

shows that a VMware private cloud solution can cost 5.5 times more than a

Microsoft based private cloud solution.

6 Title of Document Here

Hyper-V proves to be the best solution for virtualizing SQL Server databases, with

superior capabilities in many areas while offering significantly better TCO than VMware.

Many customers understand the benefits outlined in the summary and table below and

they have chosen to run their SQL Server using Hyper-V or have switched their existing

SQL Server to Hyper-V from VMware. See these case studies for more details.

The following table shows the comparison from Hyper-V and VMware:

Features Microsoft Hyper-V VMware vSphere

Performance & Scale

Support for 64 virtual processors per VM 1

Support for 320 logical processors per host

Support for 4TB physical memory per host

Storage & High Availability

Full support for SQL Server AlwaysOn

Full support for Guest Clustering

Full support for Live Migration scenarios

Deployment & Management

Support VM migration from Private to Public Cloud

Support for Hyper-V and VMware management

Guest OS & Application Monitoring

Private & Public Cloud management

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

1 Available only in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5.1

7 Title of Document Here

Better Scaling

With the rapid growth in the volumes and types of data being generated in the course

of doing business, there is a continual demand on IT departments to deliver

applications with the scale to handle the most demanding workloads. Windows Server

2012 and SQL Server 2012 work together to deliver the level of scalability needed to

meet today’s enterprise requirements.

High capacity virtual processors and memory enable organizations to deploy mission

critical workloads using SQL Server 2012 in a virtualized environment. A SQL Server VM

can use up to 64 virtual processors and 1 TB of memory—an increase of 16X over the

previous Windows Server Hyper-V. In addition, support for up to 640 logical processors

and 4 TB of memory enables deployment of mission critical SQL Server workloads in a

non-virtualized environment.

With Windows 2012, SQL Server can achieve greater cluster density for deployment in

virtualized environments, allowing up to 8,000 SQL Server VMs per cluster. (This

represents an increase of 8X over the previous version of Windows Server.)

Windows Server 2012 also enables greater cluster scalability, supporting SQL Server

clusters up to 64 nodes—which is four times the previous Windows Server version. This

provides a range of benefits, including enhanced scalability, improved configuration

and management, and ease-of-maintenance for large SQL Server clusters in both

virtualized and non-virtualized environments.

To address the growing need for centrally managed database services that provide

multitenancy for isolated workloads, SQL Server 2012 offers a number of enhancements

to the Resource Governor. Resource Governor enables customers to define resource

usage across different applications, helping to ensure consistent performance for

concurrent and mixed workloads. Now Resource Governor has increased the number of

resource pools to 64 and added the ability to create a hard cap on CPU resource usage.

Resource pools can also be affinitized to schedulers, groups of schedulers, and NUMA

nodes.

Better Performance

Working together, Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 offer a number of

capabilities that help to deliver industry-leading performance for database workloads.

For example, new support for NUMA optimization (thread scheduler and memory

allocation) in Hyper-V can be used in a SQL Server VM to greatly enhance SQL Server

performance in virtualized environment.

SQL Server VM can connect to Fiber Channel directly to support N_Port ID

Virtualization (NPIV), virtual SAN, and multipath IO (MPIO) to ensure continuous

connectivity. This helps to increase storage capacity, storage compatibility, and overall

8 Title of Document Here

performance for SQL Server deployments in virtualized environments.

Additional capabilities using the new dynamic VHDX contribute to increased

protection, performance, and manageability of SQL Server storage in virtualized

environment. With VHDX, SQL Server VMs can scale up to 64 TB and has better

resiliency to protect against data corruption during power failure.

New in SQL Server 2012 is xVelocity in-memory technologies, which is achieving results

of 10-100x performance gains for SQL Server workloads. xVelocity columnstore index

enables organizations to achieve next generation performance for common data

warehouse queries. For business intelligence application, xVelocity delivers an in-

memory analytics engine within SQL Server Analysis Services. xVelocity gives users the

ability to actively interact with an unprecedented amount of data with scan rates of 10s

of billions of rows per second on typical industry hardware.

Better Availability

As data volumes continue to grow, Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 work

together to deliver the maximum uptime and data availability required for mission

critical needs. SQL Server instances hosted on the Windows 2012 Hyper-V environment

have the benefit of Live Migration, which enables migration of virtual machines without

downtime.

Windows Server 2012 allows simultaneous migration of as many SQL Server VMs as is

desired, helping to maintain availability of SQL Server while decreasing planned

downtime. Faster Live Migration also helps to decrease planned downtime, allowing

migration of multiple SQL Server VMs (with priority settings) in a clustered environment

and using up to 10 GB of network bandwidth.

Live Migration of SQL Server VM in a non-clustered environment is allowed on both

centrally shared and non-shared VM storage. This helps to reduce the cost and

complexity of SQL Server deployments in virtualized environments while maintaining

availability during planned downtime

With Cluster-Aware Updating (CAU) updates can be applied automatically to the host

operating system, or other system components in a clustered SQL Server environment

while maintaining availability. This can significantly help to increase SQL Server

availability during the update process in both virtualized and non-virtualized

environment.

Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering Dynamic Quorum allows SQL Server

AlwaysOn cluster to adjust the number of quorum votes dynamically that are required

to keep running. This can simplify set up by as much as 80%. It also helps increase

availability of a SQL Server cluster in failover scenarios in both virtualized and non-

virtualized environment, with the ability to recalculate a quorum on the fly and still

9 Title of Document Here

maintain a working cluster.

SQL Server 2012 delivers a number of features and capabilities that enable mission

critical availability. SQL Server AlwaysOn provides an integrated, flexible, cost-efficient

high availability and disaster recovery solution that includes availability groups, failover

clustering, database mirroring, log shipping, and replication.

SQL Server 2012 also offers support for Windows Server Core in both virtualized and

non-virtualized environment, helping to decrease planned downtime by reducing the

need for OS patching by as much as 50-60% while allowing easy conversion between

full GUI mode and Server Core mode in Windows Server 2012.

Built into Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V is Hyper-V Replica, which provides an

asynchronous disaster recovery solution for SQL Server VM. Hyper-V Replica enables

virtual machines to be replicated between storage systems, clusters, and data centers in

two sites to provide business continuity and disaster recovery. It is easy to set up and

manage, which ultimately helps to lower the management costs of disaster recovery for

non-mission critical SQL Server installations.

Better Networking

Running SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 offers a number advantages for

optimizing network bandwidth and reducing management costs.

Quality of Service (QoS) helps improve user experience by helping the IT department to

better manage network traffic. QoS in Windows Server 2012 enables enforcement of

network bandwidth into a network adapter for multiple SQL Server services, such as

VM, Storage, Live Migration, and Cluster Shared Volume. This can help to lower capital

and operating expenses by converging network traffic onto a single network adapter.

With software-controlled network virtualization, isolation and security can be provided

for multiple SQL Server VMs using policies and placement of SQL Server VMs based on

workload. This improves multi-tenancy support across multiple SQL Server

deployments in a virtualized environment.

With Windows Server NIC Teaming, bandwidth can be increased for SQL Server

network traffic by configuring multiple NICs for load-balancing. In addition, configuring

multiple NICs for hardware failover helps to maintain SQL Server availability in both

virtualized and non-virtualized environment.

Better Storage Support

Running on Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012 benefits from many storage

enhancements that help reduce costs and increase performance and availability. For

example, running on Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012 can take advantage of

10 Title of Document Here

new server message block (SMB) file server features. This means SQL Server can store

data files using remote shared folders that use SMB Direct and SMB Multichannel on

industry standard network adapters. Ultimately, this can create significant storage

benefits, including reduced cost, improved high availability, and increased performance

for SQL Server deployments in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments.

4-KB Disk Sectors allow databases to be safely deployed on the newest generations of

disk technology. This helps to increase storage efficiency for SQL Server files in both

virtualized and non-virtualized environments.

Organizations have an opportunity to lower costs by using industry standard storage in

SQL Server deployments for non-virtualized environment, in some cases even replacing

expensive SAN solutions. Storage Pools can improve the flexibility of SQL Server

storage with resilient storage (mirroring and parity) and multi-tenancy isolation (ACLs).

With data deduplication, storage can be increased for certain SQL Server data (30-90%)

in less physical space with minimum impact on performance in both virtualized and

non-virtualized environment. Variable-size chunking and compression can provide

significant storage space savings in FILESTREAM applications such as SharePoint

document storage.

Better Management

The tight integration between System Center 2012 and SQL Server 2012 enables

significant benefits for improved monitoring of SQL Server deployments. System Center

2012 Operations Manager helps reduce the cost of monitoring SQL Server instances,

enabling both proactive and reactive monitoring of SQL Server instances (from SQL

Server 2005 and up). Key Operations Manager monitoring capabilities include:

Database engine and agent monitoring (health, usage, and performance)

Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services monitoring

AlwaysOn, Database Mirroring, and Replication monitoring

Policy-based management monitoring

Operations Manager helps makes monitoring the IT infrastructure flexible and cost-

effective, offering comprehensive monitoring, whether on-premise or in the private or

public cloud.

SQL Server 2012 is supported by System Center Advisor, which enables IT to assess

server configurations and proactively avoid problems. It can proactively scan the server

environment, helping to resolve issues faster with support staff, and helping to reduce

server downtime. The solution installs agents that run continuously on each server, and

it uploads data daily and writes it to a file to help provide full visibility.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 work together to perform

11 Title of Document Here

Hyper-V application monitoring, which provides a simple solution to monitor

applications running in VMs. Services and event logs can be monitored inside the VM

to determine whether key services that a virtual machine provides are healthy. It also

provides corrective action, including restarting the virtual machine or restarting a

service within the VM. VMware cannot do application monitoring natively.

Together, System Center 2012 and SQL Server 2012 also provide compelling

capabilities that ease management across private and public cloud environments.

System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) offers a range of features and

functionality that help reduce the cost and complexity in building and managing a SQL

Server for Private Cloud solution. IT allows conversion of physical SQL Server instances

into virtual SQL Server instances. It also allows conversion of VMware-based virtual SQL

Server instances into Hyper-V based virtual SQL Server instances.

VMM allows faster creation of SQL Server VM based on pre-built templates using SQL

Server Sysprep technology. It also enables the creation of database application profiles

inside SQL Server VMs based on SQL Server data-tier applications (DACs).

Organizations can also use VMM to create and manage a private cloud based on SQL

Server VMs.

System Center 2012 App Controller is a self-service portal for VMM that helps to

reduce cost and complexity in configuring, deploying, and managing SQL Server virtual

machines across Microsoft private cloud (VMM) and public cloud (Windows Azure).

App Controller enables self-service management of SQL Server VM based on roles in

both private cloud and public cloud environment. It enables deployment of SQL Server

VM across multiple private cloud environments, as well as deployment of SQL Server

VM from a private cloud to a public cloud environment.

For public cloud, Windows Azure Virtual Machine (VM) makes it easy to deploy

dedicated instances of SQL Server in the Windows Azure cloud. This enables

organizations to implement the most compelling scenarios for public cloud:

- Migrate on premise SQL Server database applications to Windows Azure,

without having to modify the application.

- Start a new development and testing for SQL Server applications in Windows

Azure

- Backup SQL Server data and store the backup files in Windows Azure Storage

- Use Windows Azure as a disaster-recovery (DR) option for SQL Server

applications

- Move a portion of SQL Server applications into Windows Azure while

maintaining sensitive data on premise

12 Title of Document Here

Better Data Protection

System Center 2012 includes Data Protection Manager (DPM), which enables backup

and restore of SQL Server databases (from SQL Server 2000 and up) for multiple

configurations, including a single instance, clustered instances, and mirrored instances.

This helps reduce the cost of data protection for multiple SQL Server instances in a

centralized location.

System Center 2012 introduces a number of new features and enhancements to DPM

that help to better manage data protection for instances of SQL Server. DPM offers

centralized management of multiple DPM servers as well as the ability to remotely

manage servers. In addition, multiple DPM servers can share one instance of SQL Server

for DPMDB. DPM also offers certificate-based authentication for computers in

workgroups or untrusted domains. New protection group sets can help to improve

tape usage, and DPM now offers support for protecting VMM hosts.

SQL Server 2012 offers a range of enhancements for improved data protection.

Transparent data encryption (TDE) performs real-time I/O encryption and decryption of

the data and log files, which helps to meet compliance needs and enables developers

to encrypt data without changing existing applications. User-Defined Server Roles allow

organizations to control what administrators and DBAs can see across the system at a

detailed level based on roles. Roles can even be nested to better map to hierarchical

organizational structures.

13 Title of Document Here

Conclusion

By working together, SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012, and System Center 2012

offer a seamlessly integrated, on-premise and cloud-ready information platform to

meet the demands of today’s enterprise. Below table is the summary of features that

are applicable for SQL Server in virtualized and non-virtualized environment:

Features Non-virtualized Environment Virtualized Environment

Scale

High capacity 640 logical processor and 4 TB memory

Increase cluster scalability to 64 nodes

High capacity 64 virtual processor and 1 TB memory

Increase VM density to 8,000 per cluster

Performance

NUMA support

Fiber Channel support

New VHDX format

Availability

Windows Server Core

Cluster-Aware Updating (CAU)

Dynamic Quorum in Cluster

Simultaneous Live Migration

Faster Live Migration

Live Migration without a cluster

Live Migration without a shared storage

Hyper-V Replica

Networking

QoS – Network Bandwidth Enforcing

Extensible Switch and Network Virtualization

Windows NIC Teaming

Storage

SMB support

4-KB Disk Sector support

Storage Spaces and Pools

Data Deduplication

Cloud Management

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

14 Title of Document Here

System Center App Controller

Server Management

System Center Operations Manager

System Center Advisor

SQL Server PowerShell

Data Protection

System Center Data Protection Manager

Windows BitLocker

Windows Integrated Authentication

As organizations continue to virtualize their IT infrastructure and more fully embrace

private and public cloud environments, Microsoft offers a unique combination of

products and technologies designed to help organizations of all types and sizes to

cloud optimize their IT.

Resources

SQL Server 2012 website: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/

Windows Server 2012 website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/new.aspx

System Center 2012 website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-

center/default.aspx

Download free SQL Server Trial:

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/get-sql-server/try-it.aspx

Did this paper help you? Please give us your feedback. Tell us on a scale of 1 (poor) to

5 (excellent), how would you rate this paper and why have you given it this rating? For

example:

Are you rating it high due to having good examples, excellent screen shots, clear

writing, or another reason?

Are you rating it low due to poor examples, fuzzy screen shots, or unclear

writing?

This feedback will help us improve the quality of white papers we release.

Send feedback.