Best Practices and Sizing Guidelines for Transaction Processing Applications with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 using EqualLogic PS Series Storage A Dell EqualLogic Best Practices Technical White Paper Dell Storage Engineering March 2013

Revisions Date

Description

March 13, 2013

Initial release

March 18, 2013

Corrected links

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BP1032 | Best Practices and Sizing Guidelines for Transaction Processing Applications with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 using EqualLogic PS Series Storage

Table of contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Feedback ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 5 Executive summary .......................................................................................................................................................................... 6 1

Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................ 7 1.1

Objective........................................................................................................................................................................... 7

1.1.1 Audience ........................................................................................................................................................................... 7 1.2 2

Product overview ..................................................................................................................................................................... 10 2.1

3

4

5

6

Terminology ..................................................................................................................................................................... 8

Dell EqualLogic PS6100 Series ................................................................................................................................... 10

Database application workloads ............................................................................................................................................ 11 3.1

Online transaction processing ..................................................................................................................................... 11

3.2

SQL Server I/O ................................................................................................................................................................ 11

Test configuration ................................................................................................................................................................... 13 4.1

Physical system configuration .................................................................................................................................... 13

4.2

High-level system design ............................................................................................................................................ 14

I/O profiling using IOMeter .................................................................................................................................................... 17 5.1

Block size and capacity utilization I/O stu