Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > Guides > Design Guide—SQL Server 2022 Database Solution with Object Storage on Dell Hardware Stack > Virtual environment setup
Dell solutions engineers deployed a virtual environment in accordance with the previously described architecture. For this setup, the following technologies from VMware were used:
Deploying VMware vSphere 7.x is ubiquitous among system administrators, and there exists many documents detailing the deployment of vSphere. This solution followed the installation guide for VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x on Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers.
A preexisting VMware vCenter was used with version 7.0U3 for the setup and validation process. However, Dell engineers have provided a step-by-step guide for deploying VMware vCenter 7.x on Dell servers.
An empty cluster needs to be created to enable the cluster for vSphere HA. After planning the resources and cluster’s networking architecture, use the vSphere Web Client to add hosts to the cluster and specify the vSphere HA settings. Follow the VMware documentation for detailed instructions for configuring the vSphere HA cluster.
The following article from Microsoft details the process of creating a VMware vSphere virtual machine (VM) template for Windows Server.
Deploying a virtual machine from a template will create a virtual machine identical to the template. The new virtual machine has the virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that are configured for the template. Please go to Deploying a Virtual Machine from a Template in the vSphere Web Client, for detailed instructions.
The process of creating a Windows server failover cluster is documented by Microsoft.
The Always-On Availability Groups feature is a high-availability and disaster-recovery solution that provides an enterprise-level alternative to database mirroring. Introduced in SQL Server 2012 (11.x), this feature maximizes the availability of a set of user databases for an enterprise. An availability group supports a failover environment for a discrete set of user databases, known as availability databases, that fail over together. An availability group supports a set of read-write primary databases and one to eight sets of corresponding secondary databases. Optionally, secondary databases can be made available for read-only access and/or some backup operations.
An availability group fails over at the level of an availability replica. Database issues such as datafile loss, database deletion, and transaction log corruption don’t cause failovers. Microsoft documents their SQL Server 2022 Always-On availability group at this site.