Database Reference
In-Depth Information
and understand their impact so as not to generate any REGs (résumé-generating events).
It is important to know
why
you are making a particular setting change before you make
that change. What may initially be a harmless configuration change can have serious
downstream implications to the environment.
Tip
Do not work on these performance tests in a vacuum. Depending on the goals,
size, and configuration, assistance and buy-in may be necessary from the DBA,
Network, and SAN teams—and critical to the success of this initiative. Use this
as an opportunity to educate your coworkers on the benefits of virtualizing SQL
Server.
We are creating this test in total isolation in our vSphere 5.5 environment. The vSphere
5.5 lab we used for this configuration consists of two IBM x3650 M2 hosts, each with
128GB of RAM. These hosts are connected via fiber channel to an EMC VNX. The
LUNs are configured in a Data Store Cluster configuration. Each data store is
approximately 1TB in size. Each physical host has seven 1GB NICs available, and we
are using distributed virtual switches on the ESXi hosts. We have carved out a
dedicated VLAN for the purposes of this test so as not to affect other workloads running
on these hosts. We stood up the Active Directory Domain Services Server, SQL
Servers, and Windows 8.1 virtual machines from Microsoft ISOs. We downloaded
vCOPs, Hyperic, and Virtual Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) virtual appliances and have
these running to provide us telemetry of our virtual environment. VMware vCenter
Server is running as a virtual machine in our configuration.
What We Used—Software
Here is a list of all the software used:
vCenter Server 5.5
Two ESXi 5.5 hosts
One Windows Server 2012 Standard running Active Directory Domain Services
(AD DS) along with DNS
Two Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition Servers, each running SQL Server
2012 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 1
One Windows 8.1 x64 desktop
Dell DVD Store 2.1
Strawberry Perl for x64 Windows
Unix-to-DOS conversion utility
