We are just weeks away from the #SQLPASS North American Summit for 2010 and yesterday. Mike Walsh (Blog|Twitter) posted the list of topics for the Birds of a Feather Lunch event that was started last year and has been continued into this year.
PASS Summit MVP Birds of a Feather Lunch 2010
This year will be my third year attending PASS Summit, and my second year hosting a table at the Birds of a Feather Lunch. This year I thought I’d submit the topic of Virtualizing SQL Server as a general topic, but when the pre-list of selected topics was sent to the hosts by email I saw that my good friend Christian Bolton (Blog|Twitter) was hosting a table on Hyper-V with SQL Server, so rather than have overlap I’ll be doing VMware with SQL Server, providing platform specific tables for the two most popular hypervisors IMO.
I have been running production SQL Servers virtualized on VMware for going on 5 years now and I have nothing but good to say about it when its done correctly. A lot of questions come up about the viability of running production systems virtualized and from my own experience it can certainly be done. However, virtualizing SQL Server requires considerations that other applications don’t, and when you virtualize SQL as if it were any other application problems can and usually will occur, generally in the area of performance. If you want to know more about virtualizing SQL Server on VMware come by and have lunch with me at the Summit.
For a full list of hosts and topics see Mike’s blog post above.