August 13, 2007 at 10:56 am
have been charged with setting up a SQL enterprise in our environment. we have quite a few independant SQL servers in our datacenter that run independantly of each other. management wants to go to an itanium server to combine most of the individual servers into the itanium server and run instances from it. i need to come up with some testing parameters to compare what the databases are doing now and what it would look like on the new itanium box. some of the databases will be copied to the new server for testing purposes. since the existing databases are running on proliant platforms now, i am not sure how to compare apples with apples to come up with a meaningful answer. also we will be running SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 databases on the new box.
hence my questions,
is there a tool that will allow me to perform measurements for performance, structure, setup, etc... on the existing servers that will compare to what i get on the itanium?
Are there any kind of out of the box testing i can do to just measure performance in general
any third party tools that anyone has come across that will allow us to measure our environment now and continue to help us manage it once the new enterprise SQL is in place
i know the questions are covering a broad spectrum here. I am just trying to get a sense of where to start on this to give me the results i am needing.
Thanks for any help available
August 13, 2007 at 12:09 pm
First, find out if the applications that work with these databases will work with named instances. Contact application vendors for approval
Second, think how do you plan to maintain security.
Third, named instances will run on different ports. Contact vendors and application developers if connection strings can be changed for all applications to reflect port numbers. It is possible if a lot of people are connecting to different SQL Servers, you will need to create and push to the clients cliconfg aliases for the new named instances/ports
In addition, better have a very good DRP in case this one server is off the network.
Performance should be considered after the listed topics.
Regards,Yelena Varsha
August 13, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Consider implementing a progressive migration plan so that metrics can be taken over time.
Since your shared resources (CPU, Memory, Disks, Network Cards) will become your bottlenecks, understanding how they are being used today by each database is important; you may want to create a database-specific resource consumption graph for each resource; this will allow you to see which applications may compete with each other and plan resource allocation accordingly.
For example an application that consumes significant Disk IO may be placed on its own spindles, while an application that consumes a lot of Network IO may need its own NIC Card.
Finally, one thing to keep in mind is that you may be able to install multiple NIC cards and affinitize some or all SQL instances to a NIC (depending on the number of database instances you need); this could alleviate the need to have ports other than the default 1433 and avoid the need to reconfigure your applications.
Good luck!
Herve Roggero
hroggero@pynlogic.com
MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD
SQL Server Database Proxy/Firewall and Auditing
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