October 14, 2015 at 1:49 pm
Hi, we're building a new Windows physical server for our Hyperion Essbase database application, and it has quite a bit more capacity than we need. Like 20x more. The new server will have exceptionally fast storage. Wicked fast.
I have requested that we install SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition on this new server as well, for our Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) SQL database so it can reap the performance benefits, but the server guy is pushing back. He said that SQL Server will saturate all of the resources on the box, and will negatively impact Essbase performance.
We only have two Essbase databases, and they are tiny: <8 GB of disk total, and <10 GB of RAM total.
The HFM SQL database is about 2 GB in total size on disk (all files).
The new server will have 16 cores, 128 GB of RAM and 1.0 TB of fast storage (and 200 GB of RAID 1 for the OS).
Both applications tend to be idle 95% of the time, the other 5% of the time, they are chugging through consolidations, reports, calculations, or batch processes (data loads, etc). Essbase is especially disk intensive.
While it's possible that the Essbase app and the HFM app activities will collide when users hit both at the same time, based on utilization patterns, it should be the exception.
Currently, Essbase is on it's own VM, and SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition is on it's own VM. Those VMs live on separate dedicated physical hosts that are 3.75 years old. They are connected to a SAN that is probably only 10% as fast as the storage going in the new physical server.
If we don't do this, then the HFM SQL database will stay on the old server. If we do do this, then the old server will still live on to continue hosting ~20 small application repositories. If we ran into issues, we would always be able to move the HFM SQL database back to the old server.
I noticed that SQL Server 2008 has Resource Governor functionality, but it's designed to prioritize between different SQL Databases. I'm trying to make SQL Server play nice with another application altogether (Hyperion Essbase).
Thoughts on this? Does SQL Server really not play nice with other applications?
I know that SQL Server typically gets a dedicated server (so does Essbase) but in this case, the server is so over-specd, if it worked out, it would help with the value proposition and boost business productivity.
October 15, 2015 at 9:03 am
Hum... My best guess is that it should be OK. By your accounts things are very low usage and if you say you have super fast storage too...
The only thing I might say is to put a memory cap on SQL Server on that new server so you can have SQL Server ONLY take so much memory and let ESSBASE use the rest. I'd also try to have the lastest SP on SQL Server if you don't already and if you can.
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