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