One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application. Thanks for your insight. Rob
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Rob Kampen Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 11:56 To: CentOS mailing list Subject: [CentOS] SQL Server 2005 and CentOS?
One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS?
We have vmware server (1.x & 2.x) running Centos 4.x. Several of those are running windows services, including SQL Server and their desktop engine too. Ram ranges from 64MB (w2k/msde) to 2048MB (w2k3/sqlserver v?)
Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application. Thanks for your insight. Rob
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How heavy of a workload is the DB managing?
Everything I've read says you have to be very careful if virtualizing your DB. At very least give the virtual machine a real disk partition.
Of course, I've only read about it - never done it myself :-) But am about to do some benchmarking soon to satisfy my curiosity.
Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application.
XP has a tcp connection limit, so unless you have <10 users that won't work. I sure hope your DB is not IO intensive, that doesn't sound like a rock solid setup really...
You need to also pay *SERIOUS* attention to vb's bluff on writeback to the underlying OS or if anything goes wrong, you *will* be left with a corrupt block device. You can tune this parameter.
Personally I would use vmware server if had to do this, but that's just me...
jlc
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Rob Kampenrkampen@kampensonline.com wrote:
One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application.
What about Xen or Vmware virtual server running on the CentOS box?
Do they need the full SQL 2005 or will the Desktop/Developer or free edition do?
What about converting the CentOS box to VMware ESXi 4 with a CentOS VM and a SQL 2005 VM?
If the CentOS box is a good server grade machine with plenty of CPU and RAM it would perform well with ESXi, then you can do parallel upgrades of the VMs without additional hardware or downtime.
-Ross
Rob Kampen wrote:
One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application.
SQL Server only runs on Windows SERVER OS's. on a desktop OS like XP, youc an only run the 'lite' version aka MSDE or SQL Express depending on which version, and this only allows a very few database connections, and is mostly suited for standalone single user applications and software development.
SQL Server has fairly expensive licensing per user too.
I would NOT virtualize a SQL database server, they have intensive disk IO I/O requirements. also don't run a database on a network mounted file system (samba, NAS, etc) for the same reason.
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:22 PM, John R Piercepierce@hogranch.com wrote:
Rob Kampen wrote:
One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application.
SQL Server only runs on Windows SERVER OS's. on a desktop OS like XP, youc an only run the 'lite' version aka MSDE or SQL Express depending on which version, and this only allows a very few database connections, and is mostly suited for standalone single user applications and software development.
SQL Server has fairly expensive licensing per user too.
I would NOT virtualize a SQL database server, they have intensive disk IO I/O requirements. also don't run a database on a network mounted file system (samba, NAS, etc) for the same reason.
We virtualize SQL 2005 successfully here, but use iSCSI to dedicated RAID volumes for the database files.
It runs well as long as the backend storage and network are properly configured.
Virtual SQL servers to either direct attached storage in pass-through or localhost iSCSI should work well, once again, if the backend storage and network are configured properly.
-Ross
On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 10:22:56AM -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
Rob Kampen wrote:
One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application.
SQL Server only runs on Windows SERVER OS's. on a desktop OS like XP, youc an only run the 'lite' version aka MSDE or SQL Express depending on which version, and this only allows a very few database connections, and is mostly suited for standalone single user applications and software development.
SQL Server has fairly expensive licensing per user too.
I would NOT virtualize a SQL database server, they have intensive disk IO I/O requirements. also don't run a database on a network mounted file system (samba, NAS, etc) for the same reason.
I've been running various MSSQL databases on VMware VMs without problems.. of course you need to have fast enough disks (or a SAN).
Also I've been running Oracle, Mysql and PostgreSQL databases on Xen virtual machines for years without problems.
It all depends on your CPU and/or IO requirements.. if you need all the possible resources, then virtualization is not a good thing.
-- Pasi
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinenpasik@iki.fi wrote:
On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 10:22:56AM -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
Rob Kampen wrote:
One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application.
SQL Server only runs on Windows SERVER OS's. on a desktop OS like XP, youc an only run the 'lite' version aka MSDE or SQL Express depending on which version, and this only allows a very few database connections, and is mostly suited for standalone single user applications and software development.
SQL Server has fairly expensive licensing per user too.
I would NOT virtualize a SQL database server, they have intensive disk IO I/O requirements. also don't run a database on a network mounted file system (samba, NAS, etc) for the same reason.
I've been running various MSSQL databases on VMware VMs without problems.. of course you need to have fast enough disks (or a SAN).
Also I've been running Oracle, Mysql and PostgreSQL databases on Xen virtual machines for years without problems.
It all depends on your CPU and/or IO requirements.. if you need all the possible resources, then virtualization is not a good thing.
Actually $$$ can overcome that.
I know serveral high transaction SQL implementations running off of ESX going to either FC 3Par or EMC systems.
But I don't think the OP's requirements are at that level by the sound of things.
-Ross
Ross Walker wrote:
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinenpasik@iki.fi wrote:
On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 10:22:56AM -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
Rob Kampen wrote:
One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application.
SQL Server only runs on Windows SERVER OS's. on a desktop OS like XP, youc an only run the 'lite' version aka MSDE or SQL Express depending on which version, and this only allows a very few database connections, and is mostly suited for standalone single user applications and software development.
SQL Server has fairly expensive licensing per user too.
I would NOT virtualize a SQL database server, they have intensive disk IO I/O requirements. also don't run a database on a network mounted file system (samba, NAS, etc) for the same reason.
I've been running various MSSQL databases on VMware VMs without problems.. of course you need to have fast enough disks (or a SAN).
Also I've been running Oracle, Mysql and PostgreSQL databases on Xen virtual machines for years without problems.
It all depends on your CPU and/or IO requirements.. if you need all the possible resources, then virtualization is not a good thing.
Actually $$$ can overcome that.
I know serveral high transaction SQL implementations running off of ESX going to either FC 3Par or EMC systems.
But I don't think the OP's requirements are at that level by the sound of things.
-Ross _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Thanks for all the comments and suggestions - very much appreciated. This is a very small scale application - up to four PC's running XP accessing what I have just been informed by the software provider will be an SQL Express database server. This I am assured will run just fine on an XP instance. They suggest reviving an old XP machine - TOO UGLY - can you believe this? Don't folk think about backups, HW failures ..... Thus running on either VMware or VirtualBox will probably work okay. All this gives me a feeling of de-ja-vu vis-a-vis QuickBooks - this app used to work fine with a shared data file for up to five users on a Samba share, then they "upgraded" to SQL server and performance plummeted....... I have some VirtualBox experience but have not yet moved into the realms of VMware - the ESXi product looks interesting - thanks John for pointing this one out. How do these two virtualization systems compare wrt NIC and HDD access? If I read correctly ESXi is actually a hypervisor and thus each OS running will need to be allocated their own space on the HDD or I'll have to look at setting up an iSCSI target on the CentOS VM and accessing from the XP VM???? Have I got my head around this correctly? The server currently has two SATA drives in software RAID1 for / and /boot and swap partitions. All data is on a RocketRAID controller set up with three more SATA drives as a RAID5 /dev/sdc1. Any suggestions on least pain way forward? Thanks Rob
Any suggestions on least pain way forward?
Just read up on virtual box and set it to respect cache flushes, if your vm tanks or your host os tanks, the block device with your db, whether it be SQL Express or Enterprise will sh!t the bed:)
I've seen a plethora of news about this on the zfs lists...
jlc
On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 02:04:35PM -0400, Ross Walker wrote:
On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinenpasik@iki.fi wrote:
On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 10:22:56AM -0700, John R Pierce wrote:
Rob Kampen wrote:
One of my clients use a software product that is "upgrading" and will shortly utilize micro$oft SQL server 2005. Currently the clients are XP on older machines with the database residing on a Samba / CentOS server and this works very well. Question: Does anyone run SQL server from XP in a virtualbox on CentOS? Any other configuration that works on a linux server? I do not want to have to buy another server grade machine just for this application.
SQL Server only runs on Windows SERVER OS's. on a desktop OS like XP, youc an only run the 'lite' version aka MSDE or SQL Express depending on which version, and this only allows a very few database connections, and is mostly suited for standalone single user applications and software development.
SQL Server has fairly expensive licensing per user too.
I would NOT virtualize a SQL database server, they have intensive disk IO I/O requirements. also don't run a database on a network mounted file system (samba, NAS, etc) for the same reason.
I've been running various MSSQL databases on VMware VMs without problems.. of course you need to have fast enough disks (or a SAN).
Also I've been running Oracle, Mysql and PostgreSQL databases on Xen virtual machines for years without problems.
It all depends on your CPU and/or IO requirements.. if you need all the possible resources, then virtualization is not a good thing.
Actually $$$ can overcome that.
I know serveral high transaction SQL implementations running off of ESX going to either FC 3Par or EMC systems.
Yeah and I know some such setups using Equallogic iSCSI storage :)
But I don't think the OP's requirements are at that level by the sound of things.
Yep.
-- Pasi
SQL Server only runs on Windows SERVER OS's. on a desktop OS like XP, youc an only run the 'lite' version aka MSDE or SQL Express depending on which version, and this only allows a very few database connections, and is mostly suited for standalone single user applications and software development.
Uhm, no. Check the Support matrix: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/ms143506%28SQL.90%29.aspx
I would NOT virtualize a SQL database server, they have intensive disk IO I/O requirements. also don't run a database on a network mounted file system (samba, NAS, etc) for the same reason.
Uhm, no again. SQL doesn't have intensive disk IO, *some* usage patterns create intensive disk IO. And it works very well, hell, there are many virtual environments that emulate hardware with more horsepower than *most* baremetal. Your saying a 32 way server with 256G of ram infront of a 4G FC san with rows of SAS discs isn't better that a little POS HP DL380G5? I think not...
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Alan McKay -
Jason Pyeron -
John R Pierce -
Joseph L. Casale -
Pasi Kärkkäinen -
Rob Kampen -
Ross Walker