Microsoft SQL Server Database Consolidation

Question

Good mornig to everyone. I am working to a hotels company as Information Technology Administrator. In company we have virtual servers and some of them running different versions of Microsoft SQL Server . Our plan is buy a new Physical Machine , install a Microsoft SQL Standard and consolidate all the database of virtual server in Microsoft SQL Standard on Physical Machine. I want like to ask some information about this plan: 1) How i must configure the hardware of Physical Machine? 2)Will i have a performance problem(example Speed)? 3)Is correct strategy to have one SQL Server instance for all Databases ? 4) The number of databases is 13 , what specifications i will have to carefull for each database? Thank you very much for your time .

Answer 1

These questions are impossible to answer without more detailed knowledge about the databases and the applications using the databases.

What I can say is that it sounds a little odd to me that someone would do this in 2021. Many organizations would rather look into migrate the databases to the cloud, for instance Azure SQL Database. Now, since the feature set is not fully one-to-one between Azure SQL and the box version of SQL Server, this is not always easily achieve by just moving the databases to the cloud.

Maybe you have already considered the cloud and dismissed that option, and with good reasons. Still this is a step that surprises me.

But as I said, there is a lot of "it depends" here. Do these applications/databases talk with each other? What are the security considerations? Are all users expected to have access to all databases? Or are some databases very sensitive?