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SQL Server 2012 : Running SQL Server in A Virtual Environment - EXTENDED FEATURES OF VIRTUALIZATION

7/18/2013 5:50:45 PM

Now that you are familiar with some of the fundamental concepts of virtualization, this section looks at some of the more advanced features and capabilities the technology offers. This is where the unique magic of the technology begins to appear, as some of these concepts simply weren’t available to traditional physical servers for all the time we were using them. While a hypervisor’s primary function is to “run” a virtual server and grant it the resources it requires as it needs them, the current versions of VMware and many of Microsoft’s server virtualization products also provide many of the features discussed in the following sections.

Snapshotting

Snapshotting a virtual server is very similar to how SQL Server’s own snapshot function works. In principle, the hypervisor suspends the virtual machine, or perhaps requires it to be shut down, and places a point-in-time marker within the virtual machine’s data files. From that point on, as changes are made within the virtual machine’s virtual hard drive files, the original data is written to a separate physical snapshot file by the hypervisor. This can have a slight performance overhead on the I/O performance of the virtual server and, more important, require potentially large amounts of disk space because multiple snapshots can be taken of a virtual server, each having its own snapshot file capturing the “before” version of the data blocks. However, a copy of all of the pre-change data gets saved to disk.

Having these snapshot files available to the hypervisor enables it, upon request, to roll back all the changes in the virtual server’s actual data files to the state they were in at the point the snapshot was taken. Once completed, the virtual server will be exactly in the state it was at the point in time the snapshot was taken.

While this sounds like a great feature which can offer a level of rollback functionality, it is un-supported by Microsoft for use with virtual servers running SQL Server. Microsoft gives more information about this in the Knowledge Base article 956893; however, until Microsoft supports its use, snapshotting should not be used with virtual servers running SQL Server.

High-Availability Features

You read earlier that encapsulation means that a virtual server is ultimately just a collection of files stored on a file system somewhere. These files can normally be broken down into the virtual hard drive data files, as well as a number of small metadata files that give the hypervisor information it needs to “run” the virtual server, such as the CPU, memory, and virtual hard drive configuration. Keeping these files in a centralized storage location — a SAN, for example — enables several different host servers to access the virtual server files. The trick that the file system and hypervisor have to perform is controlling concurrent read/write access to those files in a way that prevents corruption and two host servers running the same virtual server at once.

Support for this largely comes from the file systems they use; VMware, for instance, has a proprietary VMFS file system that is designed to allow multiple host servers to both read and write files to and from the same logical storage volumes at the same time. Windows Server 2008 has a similar feature called Clustered Shared Volumes that is required in larger Hyper-V environments where multiple physical host servers concurrently run virtual servers from the same file system volume. This is a departure from the traditional NTFS limitation of granting only one read/write connection access to an NTFS volume at a time. Ensuring that a virtual machine is only started in one place at a time is controlled by the hypervisors themselves. A system using traditional file system file locks and metadata database updates is typically used to allow or prevent a virtual server from starting (see Figure 1).

FIGURE 1

image

By the way, while the cluster shared volumes feature of Windows sounds like a great solution to numerous other requirements you might have, the technology is only supported for use with Hyper-V. 

Online Migration

After you have all the files needed to run your virtual servers stored on some centralized storage, accessible by multiple physical host servers concurrently, numerous features unique to virtualization become available. The key differentiator here between the physical and virtual worlds is that you are no longer dependent on a specific physical server’s availability in order for your virtual server to be available. As long as a correctly configured physical host server with sufficient CPU and memory resources is available and it can access your virtual server’s files on the shared storage, the virtual server can run.

Although Microsoft calls it Live Migration and VMware calls it vMotion for their implementations. Online migrations enable a virtual server to be moved from one physical host server to another without taking the virtual server offline.

For those unfamiliar with this technology and who can’t believe what they’ve just read, an example should clarify the idea. In Figure 2, the virtual server SrvZ is currently running on the physical host server SrvA, while all of its files are stored on the SAN. By performing an online migration, you can move SrvZ to run on SrvB without having to shut it down, as shown in the second half of the diagram.

FIGURE 2

image

Why you might want to do this is a legitimate question for someone new to virtualization, especially as in the physical world this kind of server administration was impossible. In fact, server administrators receive many benefits from being able to move running virtual servers off of a specific physical host server. If a specific host requires patching, upgrading, or repairing, or perhaps has too much load, then these issues can be resolved without affecting the availability of the applications and services that the virtual servers support. Some or all of the virtual servers running on a host server can transparently be migrated to another host, freeing up the host server for maintenance.

The basic concept behind online migration is readily understandable, but some complex operations are needed to actually perform it. After the virtualization administrator identifies where the virtual server should move from and to, the hypervisor logically “joins” the two host servers and they start working together — to support not only the running of the virtual server but also its migration. Each host server begins sharing the virtual server’s data files stored on the shared storage; the new host server loads the virtual server’s metadata, allocates it the physical hardware and network resources it needs, such as vCPUs and memory, and, the final clever part, the hypervisor also sends a snapshot of the virtual machine’s memory from the original host server to the new host server over the local area network.

Because changes are constantly being made to the memory, the process can’t finish here, so at this point every memory change made on the original server needs to be copied to the new server. This can’t happen as quickly as the changes are being made, so a combination of virtual server activity and network bandwidth determine how long this “synchronization” takes. As a consequence, you may need to perform online migrations during quiet periods, although server hardware, hypervisor technology, and 10GB Ethernet mean that these migrations are very quick these days. Before the last few remaining memory changes are copied from the original host server to the new host server, the hypervisor “pauses” the virtual server for literally a couple of milliseconds. In these few milliseconds, the last remaining memory pages are copied along with the ARP network addresses the virtual server uses and full read/write access to the data files. Next, the virtual server is “un-paused” and it carries on exactly what it was doing before it was migrated with the same CPU instructions and memory addresses, and so on.

If you are thinking that this pause sounds dangerous or even potentially fatal to the virtual server, in reality this technology has been tried and tested successfully — not only by the vendors themselves but also by the industry. Online migrations have been performed routinely in large service provider virtualization environments, and with such confidence that the end customer never needed to be told they were happening. Nor is this technology limited to virtual servers with low resource allocations; Microsoft has written white papers and support articles demonstrating how its LiveMigration feature can be used with servers running SQL Server. In fact, the SQLCat team has even released a white paper downloadable on their website with advice about how to tune SQL Server to make online migrations slicker and more efficient.

However, while the technology is designed to make the migration as invisible to the virtual server being migrated as possible, it is still possible for it to notice. The dropping of a few network packets is typically the most visible effect, so client connections to SQL Server can be lost during the process; or perhaps more critical, if you deploy Windows Failover Clustering on to virtual servers, the cluster can detect a failover situation. Because of this, Windows Failover Clustering is not supported for use with online migration features.

While online migrations may seem like a good solution to virtual and host server availability, keep in mind that they are on-demand services — that is, they have be manually initiated; and, most important, both the original and the new servers involved have to be available and online in order for the process to work. They also have to have the same type of CPU as well; otherwise, the difference in low level hardware calls would cause issues.

Highly Available Virtual Servers

Understanding how online migrations work will help you understand how some of the high-availability features in hypervisors work. When comparing the high-availability features of the two most prevalent server platform hypervisors, you can see a difference in their approach to providing high availability. VMware’s vSphere product has a specific high-availability feature, vSphere HA, built-in; whereas Microsoft’s Hyper-V service utilizes the well-known services of Windows Failover Clustering.

Both of these HA services use the same principle as online migration in that all the files needed to start and run a virtual server have to be kept on shared storage that is always accessible by several physical host servers. This means a virtual server is not dependent on any specific physical server being available in order for it to run — other than the server on which it’s currently running, of course. However, whereas online migrations require user intervention following an administrator’s decision to begin the process, HA services themselves detect the failure conditions that require action.

VMware and Microsoft’s approach is ultimately the same, just implemented differently. Both platforms constantly monitor the availability of a virtual server to ensure that it is currently being hosted by a host server and the host server is running it correctly. However, running according to the hypervisor’s checks doesn’t necessarily mean that anything “inside” the virtual server is working; monitoring that is an option available in VMware’s feature where it can respond to a failure of the virtual server’s operating system by re-starting it.

As an example, the hypervisor would detect a physical host server going offline through unexpected failure, causing all the virtual servers running on it to also go offline — the virtual equivalent of pulling the power cord out of the server while it’s running, and then if configured to, re-start all of the virtual servers on another host server.

In this situation, whatever processes were running on the virtual server are gone and whatever was in its memory is lost; there is no preemptive memory snapshotting for this particular feature as there is for online migrations. Instead, the best the hypervisor can do is automatically start the virtual server on another physical host server when it notices the virtual server go offline — this is the virtual equivalent of powering up and cold booting the server. If the virtual server is running SQL Server, then, when the virtual server is restarted, there may well be an initial performance degradation while the plan and data catches build up, just like in the physical world.

What makes this feature exciting is the opportunity to bring some form of high availability to virtual servers regardless of what operating system or application software is running inside the virtual server. For example, you could have standalone installations of Windows and SQL Server running on a virtual server, neither of which are configured with any high-availability services, and yet now protect SQL Server against unplanned physical server failure.

This technology isn’t a replacement for the application-level resilience that traditional failover clustering brings; we already saw that while the hypervisor might be successfully running the virtual machine, Windows or SQL Server may have stopped. However, this feature can provide an increased level of availability for servers that may not justify the cost of failover clustering or availability groups.

Host and Guest Clustering

To conclude this discussion of virtualization’s high-availability benefits, this section explains how the traditional Windows failover clustering instances we’re used to using fit in with it. Host clustering is Microsoft’s term for implementing the virtual server high availability covered in the previous section; that is, should a physical host server fail, it will re-start the virtual servers that were running on it on another physical host server. It does this by using the Windows Failover Clustering services running on the physical host servers to detect failure situations and control the re-starting of the virtual servers.

Guest clustering is where Windows Failover Clustering is deployed within a virtual server to protect a resource such as an instance of SQL Server and any resource dependencies it might have like an IP address and host name.

This is deployed in the same way a Windows Failover Clustering would be in a physical server environment, but with virtual rather than physical servers.

Support from Microsoft for clustering SQL Server in this manner has been available for some time now, but adoption had been slow as the range of storage options that could be used was small. Today however, there are many more types of storage that are supported, including the SMB file share support in SQL Server 2012 and raw device mappings by VMware, which is making the use of guest clustering much more common.

Deploying SQL Server with Virtualization’s High-Availability Features

When SQL Server is deployed in virtual environments, trying to increase its availability by using some of the features described becomes very tempting. In my experience, every virtualization administrator wants to use online migration features, and quite rightly so. Having the flexibility to move virtual servers between host servers is often an operational necessity, so any concerns you may have about SQL Server’s reaction to being transparently relocated should be tested in order to gain confidence in the process. You might find that you agree to perform the task only at quiet periods, or you might feel safe with the process irrespective of the workload.

Likewise, the virtualization administrator is also likely to want to use the vendor’s high-availability feature so that in the event of a physical host server failure, the virtual servers are automatically restarted elsewhere. This is where you need to carefully consider your approach, if any, to making a specific instance of SQL Server highly available. My advice is not to mix the different high-availability technologies available at each layer of the technology stack. This is because when a failure occurs, you only want a single end-to-end process to react to it; the last thing you want is for two different technologies, such as VMware’s HA feature and Windows Failover Clustering to respond to the same issue at the same time.

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