DBA Handbooks SQL Server Hardware Glenn Berry ISBN: 978-1-906434-62-5 SQL Server Hardware By Glenn Berry First published by Simple Talk Publishing 2011 Copyright Glenn Berry 2011 ISBN 978-1-906434-62-5 The right of Glenn Berry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written consent of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 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Technical Review by Denny Cherry Cover Image by Andy Martin Edited by Tony Davis Typeset & Designed by Matthew Tye & Gower Associates Copy Edited by Gower Associates Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................11 Chapter 1: Processors and Associated Hardware .........................17 SQL Server Workload Types .................................................................................................18 Evaluating Processors ............................................................................................................19 Cache size and the importance of the L2 and L3 caches .......................................... 20 Clock speed .......................................................................................................................22 Multi-core processors and hyper-threading ................................................................23 Hyper-threading ...............................................................................................................27 Processor Makes and Models ...............................................................................................30 Intel Xeon processors....................................................................................................... 31 Intel Itanium and Itanium 2 .......................................................................................... 42 AMD Opteron processors .............................................................................................. 44 Server Motherboards: how to evaluate motherboards and chipsets .............................47 Number of sockets .......................................................................................................... 48 Server chipsets .................................................................................................................49 BIOS ................................................................................................................................... 50 Memory requirements ..................................................................................................... 51 Network Interface Cards .................................................................................................55 Choosing a Processor and Motherboard for Use with SQL Server ................................56 Summary ..................................................................................................................................58 Chapter 2: The Storage Subsystem ..............................................60 Disk I/O .................................................................................................................................. 60 Drive Types ..............................................................................................................................63 Magnetic disk drives ....................................................................................................... 64 Solid-state drives ..............................................................................................................65 Internal Storage ..................................................................................................................... 68 Attached Storage ................................................................................................................... 69 Direct Attached Storage .................................................................................................69 Storage Area Network ..................................................................................................... 70 RAID Configurations .............................................................................................................73 RAID 0 (disk striping with no parity) ........................................................................... 74 RAID 1 (disk mirroring or duplexing) ........................................................................... 74 RAID 5 (striping with parity) ...........................................................................................75 RAID 10 and RAID 0+1 ................................................................................................... 76 RAID Controllers ..............................................................................................................77 Provisioning and Configuring the Storage Subsystem .....................................................79 Finding the read/write ratio ...........................................................................................81 How many disks? ............................................................................................................. 84 Configuration: SAN vs. DAS, RAID levels ................................................................... 84 Summary ................................................................................................................................. 86 Chapter 3: Benchmarking Tools .................................................... 87 Application Benchmarks ...................................................................................................... 88 TPC-C benchmark ...........................................................................................................89 TPC-E benchmark ...........................................................................................................90 TPC-H benchmark .......................................................................................................... 92 Analyzing benchmark test results..................................................................................93 Component Benchmarks ..................................................................................................... 98 CPU and memory testing ..............................................................................................99 Disk I/O testing ............................................................................................................. 106 SQL Server-specific benchmarks and stress tools .....................................................110 Summary .................................................................................................................................121 Chapter 4: Hardware Discovery ................................................. 123 CPU-Z tool .............................................................................................................................124 MSINFO32 ............................................................................................................................. 132 Windows Task Manager ...................................................................................................... 134 Computer Properties dialog ................................................................................................135 SQL Server version information ........................................................................................ 136 Summary ................................................................................................................................ 138 Chapter 5: Operating System Selection and Configuration ..... 139 32-bit or 64-bit? .....................................................................................................................140 Advantages of 64-bit versions of Windows for SQL Server .................................... 141 Disadvantages of 64-bit versions of Windows for SQL Server ...............................144 Windows Server: Versions and Editions ...........................................................................144 Windows 2000 Server ...................................................................................................145 Windows Server 2003 ....................................................................................................146 Windows Server 2003 R2 ..............................................................................................150 Windows Server 2008 .....................................................................................................151 Windows Server 2008 R2 ..............................................................................................156 Microsoft Support Policies for Windows Server ............................................................