Planning a virtualized Microsoft® SQL Server® database on a VMware® virtual machine (VM) requires careful planning and design of systems that can sustain component failure or even server downtime. VMware vSphere4™ offers many advantages including consolidation, increased utilization levels and power savings.
VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) technologies protect VMs by providing either a stateless automatic restart of the VM(s) on a serving node or a transparent failover of the VM in the event of component or physical server failure. It is important to add another layer of protection to your SQL Server database environment by combining these VMware HA or VMware FT technologies with your Microsoft SQL Server to achieve a robust, fault-tolerant and highly-available solution.
Learn the recommended best practices for small and large implementations of VMware HA and VMware FT in your virtual environment that minimize the downtime of your SQL Server database.