[CentOS] SQL Server 2005 and CentOS?

[Rob Kampen]

Ross Walker wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinen<pasik at 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
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>   
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

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