Virtualized or physical?

Question

Hi! 
 We are debating whether we should go physical or virtualized with our SolarWinds Orion environment. We used to have a physical failover cluster on a MSSQL Standard Edition license. We are now running on a virtualized environment on a single node. We are discussing which direction to go; virtualized with AlwaysOn, or go back to our physical failover-cluster. And furthermore, we are discussing whether we should upgrade to a MSSQL Enterprise Edition license. 
 Our environment is currently running with 55000 elements and 285000 SAM component. Zero downtime is very important. 
 We are having a hard time finding any metrics that directly indicate a need to go virtual, and the same for upgrading to Enterprise. We are aware that the limitation on memory and CPU cores on a standard edition might be a bottleneck, but can't seem to find any direct proof that upgrading would justify the cost of upgrading to Enterprise. 
 Has anyone been in the same situation? And if so, would you recommend virtual or physical, and what would your take on Standard vs Enterprise be?

stevenstadel · Accepted Answer

Virtual infrastructure with fast SSDs. The flexibility you get with virtualization (snapshots, host migration, host redundancy, ability to add/remove CPU and Memory etc.) are superior to physical hosts. SQL enterprise with core based licensing in a 3 node Always On configuration over 2 DCs.

Mikno · Answer

Thank you for your answer. We are still unsure which direction to go due to costs. 
 When running MSSQL on a virtual environment, how does the core based licensing work? Currently, on a physical environment, we have a license for 8 physical cores, but we have 16 logical cores. From my understanding, on a virtual environment, we would be licensed for the 16. This means that not only would the cost in Enterprise over Standard be significant, but it would also double if we were to go virtual due to the licensing. 
 Do I understand this correctly?

Seashore · Answer

With SQL Core based licensing on a virtual environment you can choose to either license the physical core's or the virtual. If you license the physical, you are allowed to run as many virtual core's as you want. But all possible core's has to be licensed. (Have hosts only for SQL servers) 
 Take a look here for MS SQL licensing guides: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/docs/view/SQL-Server?assetType=324

itengineer · Answer

Hi Mikno , In 2015, our Solarwinds monitoring solution used a physical server to monitor the Virtual Infrastructure running on VMware. 
 Now, it has been converted to a fully virtualised environment on VMware. Set up the Affinity rule to separate the Database and Polling Engines VMs to a different host to avoid resource contention and redundancies. 
 The most important thing here is the dedicated or separate SQL Server database and the polling engines, as the Database processing and polling can be resource-intensive. 
 Hope this helps.

Virtualized or physical?

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