Overview
I created this post to use as a reference for how my current working environment is configured, so I don’t have to repeat details in my other posts; I can just reference this post.
What we have
Our shop is predominantly Microsoft, so .NET and MSSQL, with a few others thrown in (MySQL and PHP, really, but I have almost nothing to do with them (yay)), and we’re also in the process of integrating Azure into the mix. Other than our production environment we have 2-3 non-prod tiers for almost all of our ecosystems: DEV and QA for almost all, and PLT (performance load testing) for a couple. We are a VMWare shop and aside from a few older systems almost 100% of our environment is virtualized (of the machines which can be virtualized, of course). Because of this, we have dedicated ESX hosts for all of our SQL Servers and license the hosts; this allows us to have as many VMs as we need (as an enterprise client we have Software Assurance) as well as use Enterprise Edition, which also allows us to create dedicated SQL Servers for individual ecosystems and not have to worry about the issues with sharing. We currently have around 90 SQL Server instances in production. Continue reading