August 23, 2012 at 12:06 pm
Hi Guys,
I'm filling in for DBA skills at a company I'm contracting with. They've asked me to advise ViaWest on setup of their new SQL Server that supports a retail web app poised for some huge growth in the next 24 months. Current web app has serious suck-age but will be up at least another 6 months before its miraculous replacement moves to prod. The current web app has very high tempdb use and frequent blocking issues. Total prod db size is about 15 GB.
The new box will have 32 GB of memory and the following drives:
C: (RAID 1, 50 GB, OS + 50 GB for SQL Server 2008 R2)
D: (RAID 1, 43 GB, Logs)
E: (RAID 1, 30 GB, TempDB)
F: (RAID 5, Database Files)
Questions:
Which one would you partition for the backup files?
Setting for MaxMemory? Total RAM is 32 GB.
What else should I think about here?
Many thanks!
August 23, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Should only us guys answer? The gals here are pretty smart too (at least one is a lot smarter than me). 🙂
Also, you should probably edit your post to remove your customer's name. It has been my experience as a consultant/contractor that most customers would not want you to identify them like this.
It's unclear to me why you need to partition one of the drives for backups. Could you explain that a little more?
What I can say is that in general, Raid-5 has a high degree of suck-age for Databases, especially for the Log files, but its a bad choice even for the database files. So you might want to start with that.
[font="Times New Roman"]-- RBarryYoung[/font], [font="Times New Roman"] (302)375-0451[/font] blog: MovingSQL.com, Twitter: @RBarryYoung[font="Arial Black"]
Proactive Performance Solutions, Inc. [/font][font="Verdana"] "Performance is our middle name."[/font]
August 23, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Hmmmm, don't see my customer's name in the post, just the co-lo that probably appreciates the advertising.
My apologies if Guys is considered sexist, I tend to consider it generic but of course it is not. Corrected to Guys & Gals.
The RAID 5 is not my choice and not changeable at this time.
The reason for partitioning would be to separate sequentially written data from randomly written data.
From my perspective either C or E would be the best one to partition for the logs but I just thought I'd see what the community (of all genders) had to bring to the table.
Suitably chastened, Fly Girl
August 23, 2012 at 4:52 pm
Fly Girl (8/23/2012)
Hmmmm, don't see my customer's name in the post, just the co-lo that probably appreciates the advertising....
Ah, I see. Never mind then. 🙂
[font="Times New Roman"]-- RBarryYoung[/font], [font="Times New Roman"] (302)375-0451[/font] blog: MovingSQL.com, Twitter: @RBarryYoung[font="Arial Black"]
Proactive Performance Solutions, Inc. [/font][font="Verdana"] "Performance is our middle name."[/font]
August 23, 2012 at 11:31 pm
Hi Fly,
My advice is use all are in RAID 5 because you will safe on Data side.
Let me know why you want to go with Raid 1 for except Data? as of my knowledge all are very important in this situations.
Thanks & Regards
Satish
August 23, 2012 at 11:48 pm
28GB sounds ok for max server memory if this is a DB server.if you have allocation contention on your tempdb data file try with increasing tempdb data files to 1/4 of the number of CPU cores and again check to see wheather the allocation contention still exists. if so increasing up to 1/2 should solve the problem in most cases.also grant lock pages in memory right to the sql server service account using win group policy edit.also grant the "perform volume maintanace" to the sql service account in the same way.there's alot to list
Pooyan
August 24, 2012 at 12:42 am
as per your server h/w disk configuration, might be useful as following condition
what is your server model?
what OS version to be installed?
How many disk array controller that server?
If server have two array controller, you can configure RAID 1 for first array, and second array for data files.
In single array controller, you can configure RAID 5 for all your disk partition. so you can get better application performance.
rgds
ananda
August 24, 2012 at 11:53 am
OK, you are going beyond my level here. I'll have to assimilate this one bite at a time.
Note that the contract/specs for the server pre-dates my involvement. The box is at a co-lo and I will not physically be configuring it, though I can certainly make tweaks after the fact to SQL Server options.
OS will be Win Server 2008, 64 bit.
August 24, 2012 at 1:14 pm
You don't say how many disks are used in the RAID-5 nor how much space is available. Your comment about the current database being about 15GB tells me that the database is relatively small. I would change the RAID-5 to to RAID-10, it will provide redundancy and improve performance over RAID-5.
August 24, 2012 at 1:36 pm
The server and disks are at a co-lo and everything has been purchased. In looking back through the info I have, I don't actually see the size of the RAID5.
The disks are:
2-disk RAID1s and a 3-disk RAID5
An admin/dba at the co-lo will be setting them up (thank heavens!).
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