Specifications
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C H A P T E R 5
Consolidation and Monitoring
T
oday's competitive economy dictates that organizations reduce cost and improve
agility in their database environments. This means the large percentage of organiza-
tions out there running underutilized Microsoft SQL Server installations must take con-
trol of their environments in order to experience signicant cost savings and increased
activity. Thankfully, enhancements in hardware and software technologies have unlocked
new opportunities to reduce costs through consolidation. Consolidation reduces the
number of physical servers in an organization's environment, directly impacting costs in
numerous areas including, but not limited to hardware, administration, power consump-
tion, and licenses. Equally important, by leveraging the new SQL Server Utility feature
in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, organizations can streamline consolidation efforts
because this feature provides database administrators (DBAs) with insight into resource
utilization through policy evaluation and historical analysis.
This chapter begins by describing the consolidation options available to DBAs. It then ex-
plains how DBAs can take advantage of viewpoints and dashboards in the SQL Server Utility
to identify consolidation opportunities, which is done by monitoring resource utilization
and health state for SQL Server instances, databases, and deployed data-tier applications.
SQL Server Consolidation Strategies
The goal of SQL Server consolidation is to identify underutilized hardware and improve
utilization by choosing an appropriate consolidation strategy. With SQL Server, hardware
could be considered to be underutilized when workloads are using less than 30 percent
of server resources. However, underutilization thresholds vary based on the hardware
utilized for SQL Server and the organization. Some compelling reasons for organizations
to consolidate are to reduce costs, improve efciency, address lack of physical space in
the data center, create more effective service levels, standardize, and centralize manage-
ment. Some common consolidation strategies organizations can apply are described in
the rest of this section.