<div>
<div class="content wysiwyg-content">
I am reviewing some redundancy based checks for a database application (MSSQL) but I wanted to gather your view as to whether these best practices are more geared towards physical servers and opposed virtual servers running on a SAN.<br />
<br />
The best practice suggests separating database and log files and backups onto different drives, indicating if one drive dies then the other should be ok and it may not be a disaster.<br />
<br />
But for drives on a VM hosted on a SAN - can individual drives on the VM still fail as they could in old physical drives. And by fail I mean can they fail in isolation, or would it be more likely the whole VM would fail as all the &quot;virtual&quot; drives on the VM are on the same hardware (SAN). If virtual drives can still die/fail in isolation even though they arent unique hardware as they would have been on an old physical server, can you give some pointers on how/common reasons they would fail/crash/whatever?
</div>
</div>


I am reviewing some redundancy based checks for a database application (MSSQL) but I wanted to gather your view as to whether these best practices are more geared towards physical servers and opposed virtual servers running on a SAN.

The best practice suggests separating database and log files and backups onto different drives, indicating if one drive dies then the other should be ok and it may not be a disaster.

But for drives on a VM hosted on a SAN - can individual drives on the VM still fail as they could in old physical drives. And by fail I mean can they fail in isolation, or would it be more likely the whole VM would fail as all the "virtual" drives on the VM are on the same hardware (SAN). If virtual drives can still die/fail in isolation even though they arent unique hardware as they would have been on an old physical server, can you give some pointers on how/common reasons they would fail/crash/whatever?

virtual drives on SAN

Microsoft SQL Server is a suite of relational database management system (RDBMS) products providing multi-user database access functionality.SQL Server is available in multiple versions, typically identified by release year, and versions are subdivided into editions to distinguish between product functionality. Component services include integration (SSIS), reporting (SSRS), analysis (SSAS), data quality, master data, T-SQL and performance tuning.

Microsoft SQL Server

Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media used to retain digital data. In addition to local storage devices like CD and DVD readers, hard drives and flash drives, solid state drives can hold enormous amounts of data in a very small device. Cloud services and other new forms of remote storage also add to the capacity of devices and their ability to access more data without building additional data storage into a device.

Storage

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.