SQL Server 2008 introduces a new feature, the Resource Governor, which provides enterprise customers the ability to both monitor and control the way different workloads use CPU and memory resources on their SQL Server instances. This paper explains several practical usage scenarios and gives guidance on best practices.

The Resource Governor is a new feature in the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise. It provides very powerful and flexible controls to dictate and monitor how a SQL Server instance behaves in terms of CPU, memory and response time.

This white paper is targeted at IT professionals and database administrators responsible for managing scale, concurrency, high availability, consolidation, virtualization, or service level agreements for the SQL Server instances in their production environments. In this paper you are shown various ways in which you can use the Resource Governor to analyze and streamline the way resources are utilized within your SQL Server instances, by explaining:

• How the Resource Governor works, including limitations and best practices.
• Methods for building a consolidation plan, and testing those methods.
• Techniques for preventing runaway queries, or at least minimizing their impact.
• Approaches to meeting service level agreements (SLAs) driven by response time and concurrency.
• Basic ideas about implementing a chargeback system to recover resource costs.
• Ways to monitor SQL Server using new Resource Governor functionality.

The paper will highlight several common usage scenarios, help you decide when and where to use the technology, and outline best practices when using the Resource Governor.

Note: If you are not familiar with the Resource Governor, it would be helpful to have a basic understanding of how the feature works. The Appendices in this article will help outline the core fundamentals, and point to official documentation where appropriate.

Because this paper is very long (70 pages), reading it in an online format such as the Library becomes impractical, so we offer it as a downloadable Microsoft Word document.

 - Download “Using the Resource Governor” from the Microsoft Download Center

 - Ask a question in the SQL Server Forums

 - Send Feedback on the white paper