Another update for the Support Policy for Virtualization for SQL Server….

We now have live an update to the KB article for the Support policy for virtualization for SQL Server at:

Support policy for Microsoft SQL Server products that are running in a hardware virtualization environment

I created this blog post, because there are some changes to the article I believe are important to our SQL Server customers:

  • Added in support for Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
  • Reformatted the article in several places to (hopefully) reduce questions and confusion on what is supported, not supported, and certain restrictions on support.
  • Added in statement for non-support of snapshots from any virtualization vendor including Hyper-V. It is very possible you could restore a virtual machine image snapshot where SQL Server was running and not see any problems. However, there are possible problems that can occur with SQL Server (and there is no finite list of problems to list out) in this situation. Therefore, we have made the statement that we do not support this. Again, you may restore from a snapshot and never see a problem. But, if you call Microsoft CSS and have an issue with SQL Server in a virtual machine that was restored from a snapshot, CSS will tell you this is not supported.
  • Added in the FAQ section that we support Quick and Live Migration. I knew we would get questions on these features, so we specifically call them out.
  • Added in a statement in the FAQ about support for non-Microsoft virtualization vendor features. In the SVVP program, this is called “additional functionality”. Any of these additional functionality features are not part of the SVVP program and must be supported by that vendor. This includes any problems that may occur with SQL Server when using these features. This is nothing new, but I’ve seen questions on this so calling it out in the FAQ.

Bob Ward
Microsoft