Best Practices for Virtualising and Managing SQL Server 2012

To give you a flavour of what this document is about and who should read this, I have copied the beginning of the pdf document. If you are going to virtualise your server environment, I would recommend you read this document Best_Practices_for_Virtualizing_and_Managing_SQL_Server_2012.pdf

Introduction 

This guide provides high-level best practices and considerations for deploying and managing Microsoft
SQL Server 2012 on a Microsoft virtualization infrastructure. The recommendations and guidance in this
document aim to:
Complement the architectural design of an organization’s specific environment.
Help organizations take advantage of the key platform features in SQL Server 2012 to deliver the
highest levels of performance and availability.

Executive Summary 

With the proliferation of applications in everyday use, enterprises have an increasing need for more
instances of databases such as SQL Server. Most applications have their own set of database
requirements, leading to the use of multiple versions of databases and to significant costs related to the
databases and related hardware resources. More importantly, the hardware deployed for databases is not
fully utilized or there is a demand to scale up hardware resources to meet peak utilization on certain
databases. Therefore, it has become important to control the cost of databases and related hardware
resources, and to optimize and scale the use of hardware resources in different scenarios to provide better
flexibility and maintain service level agreements (SLAs). An ideal solution to this problem is virtualization.
Virtualization is fairly common now. Many organizations worldwide have moved beyond the nascent
stage into being more advanced users of server virtualization, specifically. These organizations have
gained benefits in the areas of costs, efficiency, operations, availability, agility, and resiliency.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 provide a host of new features that can be used to
effectively virtualize demanding database workloads that previously were not considered for virtualization.
This guide explains these new features in the context of how organizations should consider virtualizing
SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 and the benefits of managing this virtualized environment with
Microsoft System Center 2012. Working together, these industry-leading products deliver an integrated
platform with a low total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as mission-critical scale, performance, and
availability. The platform also provides enhanced end-to-end security, management, and monitoring
capabilities.

Further, many organizations now want to go a step beyond and adopt an IT infrastructure that is
optimized for and ready to work in the cloud. They need an IT infrastructure that can seamlessly span
from a private to a public cloud. To achieve this goal, organizations require a common virtualization
platform that can increase performance and efficiency across the infrastructure. In this regard, Windows
Server 2012 Hyper-V offers an ideal virtualization platform for SQL Server 2012.