Database Solutions Engineering -...

Microsoft® SQL Server® in a VMware® Environment on Dell™ PowerEdge™ Blades and Dell EqualLogic™ Storage A Dell Technical White Paper

Database Solutions Engineering By Anthony Fernandez

Dell Product Group

April 2009

Microsoft SQL Server in a VMware Environment on Dell PowerEdge Blades and Dell EqualLogic Storage

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THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.

© 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell, Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell.

Dell, the DELL logo, the DELL badge, EqualLogic, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries; Microsoft, SQL Server, and Windows Server are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. Cisco is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems, Inc. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell Inc. disclaims any proprietary interest in trademarks and trade names other than its own.


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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ........................................................................................................................... 4

INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................... 4

REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW .................................................................................................. 5

DEPLOYMENT CONSIDERATIONS ........................................................................................................... 7

SCALE‐UP VERSUS SCALE‐OUT STRATEGIES .................................................................................................. 7

BEST PRACTICE FOR VIRTUALIZATION .......................................................................................................... 7

SERVER CONSIDERATIONS ........................................................................................................................ 8

NETWORK CONSIDERATIONS .................................................................................................................... 8

CPU CONSIDERATIONS ......................................................................................................................... 11

MEMORY CONSIDERATIONS ................................................................................................................... 12

BOOT FROM SAN CONSIDERATIONS ......................................................................................................... 13

STORAGE CONSIDERATIONS .................................................................................................................... 13

SQL SERVER PERFORMANCE EVALUATION ........................................................................................... 15

TEST METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................................... 16

SCALE OUT VIRTUAL MACHINES ON A SINGLE BLADE .................................................................................... 16

PHYSICAL VERSUS VIRTUAL OTLP PERFORMANCE ........................................................................................ 18

CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................................... 19

APPENDIX ........................................................................................................................................... 20

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................ 21

CONTENTS


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Executive Summary This white paper provides an overview for deploying SQL Server in a virtualized environment for VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4 (U4) running on the latest PowerEdge M610 and M710 blade servers and EqualLogic PS6000XV iSCSI storage arrays.

The goal of this white paper is to introduce the basic concepts behind running SQL Server in a virtualized environment. It includes discussions of the deployment process and sizing considerations for backend EqualLogic storage and servers in blade chassis. It also includes blade virtual machine (VM) creation and SQL Server sizing for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads in a virtualized environment with VMware.

The tests detailed in this white paper reveal potential bottlenecks and provide best practices recommendations to mitigate the effects of these bottlenecks, including recommended VM and workload sizes supported on the blade server/storage combo.

Introduction To simplify the design and deployment of a virtualized infrastructure, Dell offers a Solution Architecture for PowerEdge blade servers, VMware, and EqualLogic. The bundle provides configuration and best practices to achieve full redundancy—with no single point of failure, scalability, and ease of management.

This white paper uses the Solution Bundle to examine the considerations and deployment of SQL Server in a virtual environment running on PowerEdge M610 and M710 blade servers, VMware ESX Server 3.5 U4, and an EqualLogic virtualized iSCSI SAN. The solution is designed to scale as an enterprises grows, while still maintaining a small physical footprint—thus reducing power consumption and cooling requirements. As datacenter demands increase, typically hardware requirements, too; this, in turn, increases space requirements, power consumption, and cooling costs that affect the bottom line.

VMware offers an innovative solution that allows multiple instances of operating systems to run on the same physical hardware. This virtualization technology has multiple benefits—for example, maximizing hardware resource utilization and providing logical separation of applications running on the same hardware. It also increases system availability.

VMware offers a high‐performance platform on which to consolidate applications within a data center. It provides a rich set of features for management and high availability, helping organizations to reduce the management and down‐time overhead associated with data centers that manage information in silos.

Using VMware with Dell blade servers helps simplify IT organizations by unlocking the capabilities of physical hardware to allow data centers to grow and expand or simply consolidate hardware.

As virtual machines proliferate in enterprise environments, typically the complexity of the underlying storage does, too—potentially eliminating gains achieved through increased server hardware utilization and power and cooling reductions. With EqualLogic iSCSI storage virtualization technology, customers can realize similar gains at the storage layer.

The benefits of EqualLogic iSCSI storage include:

• Virtualized storage enables seamless rebalancing as array members are added.

• By leveraging Ethernet infrastructure, no specialized hardware is required for storage traffic.

• Ease‐of‐management and high‐availability features are included by default.


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• Complete integration with VMware and Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) framework simplifies creating snapshots and clones.

Audience and Scope This white paper is intended for customers, partners, solution architects, storage administrators, and database administrators who are evaluating, planning, or deploying virtual machines and require an overview of various considerations and key points for sizing and deploying SQL Server in a virtualized environment. Basic knowledge of iSCSI and VMware concepts is helpful.

This white paper also provides a reference for deploying SQL Server 2008 in a virtual machine with Windows Server® 2008 in a VMware ESX 3.5 U4 virtual environment. VMware ESX 3.5 U4 is installed on an M610 blade server that is connected to EqualLogic iSCSI storage. Setup and configuration for high‐availability features such as VMware VMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and VMware High Availability (HA) are outside the scope of this paper. For more information on these features, visit http://www.dell.com/vmware.

Reference Architecture Overview A solution that includes PowerEdge blade servers, EqualLogic storage, and VMware infrastructure enables architects to easily design and deploy fully‐redundant and highly‐performing virtual solutions. Using a building block approach, this solution virtualizes PowerEdge servers, Cisco® switches, and EqualLogic iSCSI Storage.

Error! Reference source not found. provides a high‐level overview of the solution.

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Single-Tier with Stacking In a Single Tier with Stacking strategy, I/O modules in fabric B are stacked to provide a VBS for iSCSI traffic. This configuration supports up to two EqualLogic storage arrays. Blade I/O modules provide direct connectivity with EqualLogic storage arrays (see Figure 3).

Single Tier means that additional standalone switches are not required between the chassis modules and the EqualLogic arrays.

Figure 3 depicts Fabric B stacked to provide a single VBS that is directly connected across all network uplinks from the active and passive storage controllers. For simplicity, the individual connections are not shown. For complete cable diagrams, visit http://www.dell.com/vmware.

Multi-Tier with Stacking To mitigate the limit of two storage arrays in the Single Tier with Stacking method, you can employ a multi‐tier configuration in which fabric B I/O modules are stacked and linked to externally‐stacked switches. To accommodate future growth, enterprises can start with the Single Tier with Stacking model described in this white paper, and very easily reconfigure the switches into a Multi‐Tier with Stacking as they add more EqualLogic storage arrays to the infrastructure.

Table 2 describes the blade switch models used for this configuration.

Figure 3: Single Tier with Stacking

Active Links

Passive Links

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Cisco 3130 Blade Switch in Stacking mode

TwinGig Converter Modules with 1GigE Small Form‐Factor Pluggable Ports.

1GigE uplink Ports


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Table 2: Blade Switch Models Model Description Recommendation CBS3130G-S 1‐Gigabit Ethernet stacking‐capable switch

— utilizes TwinGig modules only Recommended for iSCSI traffic (no 10GbE receiver support on Storage end)

CBS3130X-S 10‐Gigabit Ethernet stacking‐capable switch — utilizes TwinGig and X2 modules

Recommended for virtual machine management and VMotion traffic utilizing 10GB uplinks to other networks

The iSCSI bandwidth available for fabric B can satisfy the majority of OLTP workload requirements. In these cases, the M610 blade fabric configuration described in Figure 4 can serve as the best practice.

Typically, DSS workloads have increased demands on the storage bandwidth requirements, which can exceed the capacity of Fabric B. In these cases there are two options. The first option is to make compromises, re‐tasking half of the available bandwidth allocated to public / management tasks (Fabrics A) to the storage (Fabric B and C). The second option and best practice is to address your increased I/O demands with a server product that has been designed for exactly this use case. The M710 blade maintains the same amount of processing power, but increases the amount of available memory, and doubles the available PCI‐e slots for I/O interfaces (see Figure 5). By doubling the amount of available I/O interfaces, users can configure the I/O fabrics with enough bandwidth to meet larger throughput demands.

Figure 4 and Figure 5 outline the mapping between I/O modules, mezzanine adapters, and LOMs for each blade server.

Figure 4: M610 Mapping of LOMs and Mezzanine adapters


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Figure 5: M710 Mapping of LOMs and Mezzanine adapters

CPU Considerations Both M710 and M610 servers support two‐socket, quad‐core processors, for a total of eight physical cores. The next generation of Intel microarchitecture features will provide Intel Turbo Boost Technology and Intel Hyper‐Threading Technology to increase the base frequency and number of cores per thread.

Table 3 describes the recommended processors for specific CPU‐requirement levels.

Table 3: Recommended Processors CPU Requirements Virtual Machine Applications CPU Type High Performance SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange Server X5500 Series

Balanced Performance/Efficiency

Management Applications, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), Symantec, CommVault, Quest, etc.

E5500 Series

High Efficiency Infrastructure Systems such as DNS, DHCP, Domain Controller, etc.

L5500 Series

Depending on the types of database workloads that must be accommodated, SQL Server can take advantage of multiple virtual CPUs (vCPUs). You can configure virtual machines with one, two, and four vCPUs. In addition, you can configure MAXDOP on SQL Server to set the degree of parallelism required for a specific workload.

If you are deploying a new architecture, Dell recommends starting with two vCPUs to establish a baseline for SQL Server performance. In other words, verify whether two vCPUs are capable of maintaining service‐level agreements (SLAs) for applications accessing the database, leaving enough room for CPU spikes. Over assigning vCPUs to a virtual machine can result in unnecessary virtualization overhead. For example, if the CPU utilization pattern on a virtual machine with four vCPUs is between 10‐20%, reducing


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to two vCPUs should result in 20% to 40% utilization while still allowing for workload spikes, offering a more efficient utilization of resources at the hypervisor layer. In addition, if the virtual machine is in a VMware Infrastructure 3 with DRS, resources are more efficiently balanced.

Before you begin, ensure that virtualization technology is enabled on the BIOS (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Enabling Virtualization Technology (VT) on BIOS

Memory Considerations VMware ESX is very efficient at managing memory resources for virtual machines through various techniques, including memory page sharing, memory ballooning, and swap file usage. These mechanisms enable optimized memory management for all virtual machines. A key benefit of ESX memory management is memory over commitment, which makes it is possible to provision more virtual memory than physical memory. By dynamically expanding and contracting the allocated virtual memory of each virtual machine and sharing memory pages that are common across all virtual machines, ESX can reassign unused memory space to additional virtual machines.

For memory‐intensive SQL Server virtual machines, reservations guarantee that memory is not paged out or ballooned (see Figure 7).

If the ESX‐based server is part of a cluster using DRS, ensure there is enough physical memory to support any additional virtual machines that may failover or require migration.

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Figure 7: Memory Allocation – Virtual to Physical Mapping


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Boot from SAN Considerations Boot from SAN allows a blade server to access the SAN during the BIOS boot‐up phase that loads the operating system. The benefit of this method is that hardware replacement is simplified as the operating system resides on external SAN storage. However, the same fabric is shared between operating system specific I/O and SQL Server.

For the purpose of this white paper, we installed ESX on the internal hard drives as RAID 1. This method simplifies characterization of the I/O subsystem utilized by SQL Server workloads.

Storage Considerations There are two methods in which to connect ESX to EqualLogic iSCSI storage: at the ESX host level and at the guest operating system level.

Host Initiated (VMKernel) Dell recommends a Host Initiated connection method for the reference architecture. ESX establishes a single session per iSCSI volume target; for this reason, you should configure NIC teaming at the virtual switch level, and EtherChannel at the physical switch level (see “Deployment Overview”).

Since ESX 3.5 U4 establishes a single iSCSI session per target volume, Dell recommends creating at least one volume per storage port to fully utilize storage virtualization and load balancing capabilities. Once ESX establishes a session with the target volume, you can configure the volume with a VMFS file system or Raw Device Map (RDM). VMFS is the preferred method for disk format, as it stores multiple virtual machines on a single volume. In addition, it provides added functionality for high availability, such as integration with EqualLogic ASM/VMware editions to create VSS‐aware snapshots and backups.

With a Raw Device Map (RDM), ESX does not use a VMDK file system. The virtual machine can be formatted as a local disk that provides direct access to the underlying storage, as it doesn’t virtualize SCSI commands. This method is useful for virtual machines that require direct access to storage, such as when Microsoft Cluster Server is deployed with the virtual machine.

Guest Operating System Level The Guest Operating System Level method allows the guest operating system to establish an iSCSI session through the Microsoft iSCSI initiator and the EqualLogic Device‐Specific Module (DSM) to storage via standard virtual NICs. If multiple virtual NICs are available at the guest, you can achieve load balancing through the multi‐path I/O (MPIO) driver. Both methods—EqualLogic Auto‐Snapshot Manager (ASM) and Auto‐Snapshot Manger VMware Edition (ASM/VE)—allow VSS‐aware backups and snapshots.

Storage Configuration For this configuration, we deployed two types of volumes on the EqualLogic storage: volumes for virtual machine operating systems and volumes for database files using Host Initiated sessions with VMKernel.

Virtual machine operating system files are stored on two 300GB volumes formatted with the VMDK file system. Database files for each Virtual Machine are stored on individual volumes configured as VMDK.

Figure 8 shows the operating system files for each virtual machine stored within a larger volume. The database files for each virtual machine are stored on individual volumes. It shows the data flow from virtual machine through the virtual switch with two NICs in a teamed configuration connected to the Cisco Blade switches on Fabric B.


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Load Balancing Configuration For load balancing, configure NIC teaming and load balancing with IP hashing. For a detailed description of each option, refer to the Virtualization Reference Architecture at http://www.dell.com/vmware.

Enable Cisco EtherChannel on ports that are configured for iSCSI traffic to enable load balancing of traffic between the ports. See the Appendix for configuration details.

SQL Server 2008

Windows Server 2008

D:\ C:\

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NIC teaming with IP Hashing for Load Balancing

Figure 8: Network and Storage Access Layout

Figure 9 vSwitch Properties – Enable Route based on IP Hash


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SQL Server Performance Evaluation This study evaluates the scalability of running SQL Server in a virtual environment. The goal if this test is to find the number of virtual machines that can be deployed in a virtual environment, each running a light to medium OLTP workload that is representative of a typical database environment. The workload assumptions are listed on Table 7. In addition, this study compares four virtual machines versus one physical server running four times the user load of one virtual machine.

We conducted tests on the configurations detailed in Tables 4, 5, and 6:

Table 4: Physical Server Configuration PowerEdge Server M610

Processors Two quad‐core Intel Xeon X5550 2.66GHz, L3 8MB processors

Memory 12GB (6x2GB RDIMM 1066MHz)

Internal Hard Drives Two 15K 73GB RAID1 for the operating system

Operating System Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise Edition x64

Database SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64

Table 5: ESX Server Configuration PowerEdge Server M610

Processors Two quad‐core Intel Xeon X5550 2.66GHz, L3 8MB processors

Memory 48GB (12x4GB RDIMM 1066MHz)

Internal Hard Drives Two 15K 73GB RAID1 for ESX installation

Operating System ESX 3.5 Update 4

Table 6: Virtual Machine Configuration Virtual Processors Two vCPUs

Virtual Memory 4GB

Guest Operating System Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64

Database SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64


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Test Methodology To simulate user workload, we deployed a TPC‐E schema to simulate an online trading broker. The focus of this study was not to find the maximum number of transactions a system can yield, but rather to simulate a common SQL Server OLTP workload. The assumptions we used are detailed in Table 7.

Table 7: Workload Assumptions Resource Utilization

CPU 20%

Memory 40%

Network IO <5%

Disk IO <10%

User connections 10

IO Size 8KB

Workload Type OLTP

Test Run Interval 30 Minutes

Scale Out Virtual Machines on a Single Blade The first test we performed was a scale‐out test to find the maximum number of virtual machines the configuration will support. We started with one VM with 10 user connections performing queries and recorded the average amount of transactions per second, ESX Server CPU Utilization and ESX Memory Usage during the test run. After we attanded the results for the first test run or baseline, the subsequent test runs added an additional VM with the exact configuration.

We found the performace to scale well until eight VMs ran concurrently on the system. Since each virtual machine has two vCPUs, the aggreate vCPU count is sixteen vCPUs. This results in over commitment of two vCPUs to one physical core (2:1). With this configuration, one VM with two vCPUs per one physical core results in near linear performance throughput. We were able to scale to eleven virtual machines with some performance gain; however, adding a twelfth VM resulted in system saturation and no overall improvement. Figure 10 shows the results of the scale‐out test.

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Appendix The following section describes how to configure Cisco 3130 Series blade switches for a VMware virtual environment.

Enable Spanning-Tree

CiscoBStack>enable

CiscoBStack #configure terminal

CiscoBStack (config)#port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip

CiscoBStack (config)#spanning-tree mode rapid-pvst

CiscoBStack (config)#exit

CiscoBStack#exit

CiscoBStack#show spanning-tree summary

Create EtherChannel 8

CiscoBStack>enable


CiscoBStack (config)#interface Port-channel 8

CiscoBStack (config-if)#switchport access vlan 20

(will create a vlan20 automatically)

CiscoBStack (config-if)#switchport mode access

CiscoBStack (config-if)#switchport nonegotiate

CiscoBStack (config-if)#flowcontrol receive on

CiscoBStack (config-if)#exit

CiscoBStack#exit

Enable EtherChannel on Port 8 for M610 Server on slot 8.

CiscoBStack>enable


CiscoBStack (config)#interface range GigabitEthernet 1/0/8, GigabitEthernet 2/0/8

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#switchport access vlan 20

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#switchport mode access

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#switchport nonegotiate

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#flowcontrol receive on

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#storm-controll broadcast level 5.00


21

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#storm-controll multicast level 5.00

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#channel-group 8 mode on

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#spanning-tree portfast

CiscoBStack (config-if-range)#exit

CiscoBStack (config)#exit

CiscoBStack#show interface Port-channel 8

Port-Channel8 is up, line protocol is up (connected)

Members of this channel: Gi1/0/8 Gi2/0/8

After all settings have been configured for all switch ports that will utilize VMKernel for iSCSI traffic, copy the running conifg for startup.

CiscoBStack#copy running-config startup-config

References Dell Solutions Engineering

• http://www.dell.com/sql

• http://www.dell.com/vmware

Dell Services

• http://www.dell.com/services

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Virtualization in the Dell Scalable Enterprise

• http://www.dell.com/downloads/ap/POWERSOLUTION/CN/PowerJanuary2007/January07_66_70.pdf

Performance Study: SQL Server Performance in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment

• www.vmware.com/files/pdf/SQLServerWorkloads.pdf

Best Practices: Microsoft SQL Server and VMware Virtual Infrastructure

• http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/sql_server_virtual_bp.pdf

The Role of Memory in VMware ESX Server 3

• http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_memory.pdf

Dell EqualLogic VMware View 3

• http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/dell/dell-vmware-desktop-wp-r208q4.pdf

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