How to configure SQL Server for SSDs and VMs

VMs, SSDs and SQL Server—Oh, My!

Joey D’Antoni

» Joey has over 15 years of experience with a wide variety of data

platforms, in both Fortune 50 companies as well as smaller organizations

» Principal Consultant, Denny Cherry and Associates

» He is a frequent speaker on database administration, big data, and

career management

» He is the co-president of the Philadelphia SQL Server User’s Group

» He wants you to make sure you can restore your data

Joeydantoni.com

AGENDA

How SSDs Change the

Game

Being a DBA in a Virtual

Environment

Managing Your SSD

Environment

Storage Policy for Databases

Maximize Your Benefits

3

V M s , S S D s A n d S Q L S e r v e r , O h M y

© 2015 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

SPINNING DISK DRIVES

Hard Drives can only spin at 15,000 RPM.

Hard Drive Performance has improved approximately 10x (1988-2008)

Have grown many fold in capacity

During the performance improvement CPU speed increase 10000x

WHY IS STORAGE THE BOTTLENECK?

MEMORY VERSUS HARD DRIVES

SOLID STATE DRIVES

7© 2015 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

WHY ARE SSDs SO MUCH FASTER?

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T H E L AW S O F P H Y S I C S


SAN TERMS

Disk Array—The physical array behind your SAN (a bunch of hard drives)

LUN—Logical Unit Number, but in practical terms, what your SAN admin will call a disk that he presents to your server

Fibre Channel—Cable connection to SAN

IOPs—I/O Operations Per Second—the way your SAN admin measures performance

HOW DOES THIS WORK IN A SAN?

Add Spindles to Add IO Performance

Performance of ONE PCI-E SSD card

• 235,000 8k Random IOPS 20µs latency

You’d Need 3500 15k RPM Spinning Disks in RAID 10 to achieve that level of performance


SO HOW DO I BENEFIT THE MOST?

Treat SSDs as limited resource

• Use Data Compression where possible

Where does SQL Server bottleneck on IO?

• TempDB—SQL Server uses TempDB for EVERYTHING

• Hot Datafiles—what is your busiest database?


ALL FLASH ARRAYS


Not just pure speed

Software benefits

Write leveling (randomization)

Compression

Caching

Oh, and Pure Speed Peugeot 905, 24 Hours of LeMans1993, 391 kph/242 mph, MulsanneStraight

MODERN STORAGE ARRAY ARCHITECTURE

Stripes all data across all devices in array (768 kb – 1 MB)

Minimizes impact of any hot spotting

Increases overall performance of array

Makes data file placement far less important than in the past


OLD ARCHITECTURE


Data Files

TempDB

Transaction Logs

MODERN ARCHITECTURE


All data is striped across all devices in the array

HYBRID ARRAYS

Mix Performance and Price

• Common config

• SSD Tier

• Fast Spinning Tier

• Dense Spinning Tier

Rely on striping for performance gains

Your storage admin can’t tell you where data is


DATA FILE LAYOUT

It depends

If using all flash configuration:

• Consider Hot Spots

• Most arrays are smart enough to distribute workload

• If on smart array, there’s no real reason to layout data files

If using hybrid array—see next slide

Always protect your data


HYBRID ARRAY POLICY

SSD SSD SSD

15K Fibre Channel 15k Fibre Channel 15k Fibre Channel

10K SATA 10K SATA 10K SATA

Log

DataTemp

DB

TempDB (2)

HYBRID ARRAYS FILE LAYOUT

•TempDB Performance

•TempDB Normal

•Transaction Logs

• Data Files Performance

• Data Files Normal

Separate Volumes by SAN Policy

19 |

ALL FLASH LAYOUT

It doesn’t matter!

Software eliminates sequential write performance issues

Data is striped across entire array for protection

20 |

ARRAY BASED

COMPRESSION

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W H AT D O E S T H I S M E A N F O R D ATA B A S E S ?

ARRAY BASED COMPRESSION

Needs more research

Early consensus from two storage vendors is positive

Keep using Data Compression

Keep using Columnstore

Not just IO benefits, but memory improvements

22 |

What is the Impact of Virtual

Machine Performance?

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DATASTORES

It can be easy to overwhelm storage if not enough storage devices are presented

Datastores will correspond to SAN policy groups

VMs Love Fast IO

DRIVERS AND STORAGE CONFIG

Avoid Lazy Zeroing on Drive Volumes

• Thick Provision Eager Zeroed

Group VMDK files of each storage type

(TempDB, Logs, Data) in storage pools

Use ParaVirtual iSCSI drivers for optimal

performance

25 |

VIRTUALIZING SQL SERVER

Reserve memory for production workloads

Also reserve memory in Hypervisor for Prod Servers

Configure storage and data files based on SAN policy

Baseline IO performance

VIRTUALIZING SQL SERVER

Think carefully about using lock pages in memory*

Enable optimize for ad-hoc workloads

DON’T OVERALLOCATE CPUs

DPA WITH VM OPTION

» See correlations

between SQL

Server performance

and VM resources,

the physical host,

storage and the

network

» Identify root cause

of issues impacting

end user response

time

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SUMMARY

Understand impact of storage to your SQL Server

Solid State Drives are FAST!!!!

Gain understanding of the type of array that you are working on

Design your SQL Server architecture to take advantage of that

Understand your virtualization environment of how this all works together

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FREE TRIAL

• Try Database Performance Analyzer with VM Option FREE for 14

days

• Improve performance

• Quickly identify root cause of issues that impact end-user response time

• See historical trends over days, months, and years

• Understand impact of VMware® performance

• Agentless architecture, installs in minutes

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R E S O LV E P E R F O R M A N C E I S S U E S Q U I C K LY


www.solarwinds.com/dpa-download/

THANK YOU


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How to configure SQL Server for SSDs and VMs

Technology

Transcript of How to configure SQL Server for SSDs and VMs