Francisco Tapia
fhtapia at gmail.com
Thu Sep 8 11:36:48 CDT 2011
On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Alan Lawhon <lawhonac at hiwaay.net> wrote: > Why in the world you would want to have multiple full up SQL Server > editions > installed on the same machine is beyond me. (It's kind of like: "Why would > you want to have three copies of Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 > installed on drives C:, D:, and E: of your hard disk when you really need > only one operating system?) A good reason of why to run multiple instances is maintenance, security and cost. If you are running for example Sql Server 2005 and Sql Server 2008, you can apply all OS patches on one machine and have a smaller window of downtime while the hardware reboots. if all the instances are of the same version then patching is even quicker and easier. Security wise it's nice to have separate instances because there are times that a particular software vendor will want sa access and isolating them to their own instance is nice because they don't have immediate access to the rest of the data. Another added benefit for our team is that we've created instances that segment our business so all sales databases run in one instance all service db's run in another, etc. if there is a drastic change that is required and we need to restart the instance (seldom needed, but it happens) then we only need to restart the one instance. Additionally if you are using instances you save on licensing costs, you don't have to pay extra to have another named instance, but you do need to watch out for how many cals you are using (if you are running a per-processor license, then it's even better as you don't care how many connections there are) I hope this helps... -Francisco http://bit.ly/sqlthis | Tsql and More... <http://db.tt/JeXURAx>