June 20, 2011 at 11:18 am
Is there any there any kind of best practice in regards to numbers of databases on a single instance? I know that the max number is 32,767, but that is just a silly, high number 🙂
We're trying to determine if we should create a separate instance for our new Sharepoint farm, since there could be upwards of 30 dbs. The new instance would go on servers with already existing instances. We would have to redistribute memory and find new disk space, as the servers are clustered. Other than tempdb contention and possible dba preference, are there any other arguments as to why the Sharepoint databases should go on a separate instance?
6 quad cores
2.60 ghz
63.9 GB memory
Thanks in advance!
June 20, 2011 at 11:27 am
It's a load issue, not a number of databases. I know people that have had upwards of 500 databases on an instance, and it's worked well, but each was low load.
A single database can overwhelm hardware in some cases.
Is this a completely new instance, meaning none of these databases have existed before, or is this a migration of an instance from another physical server?
June 20, 2011 at 11:36 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (6/20/2011)
It's a load issue, not a number of databases. I know people that have had upwards of 500 databases on an instance, and it's worked well, but each was low load.A single database can overwhelm hardware in some cases.
Is this a completely new instance, meaning none of these databases have existed before, or is this a migration of an instance from another physical server?
It is a migration from another instance, so I am planning on monitoring the databases to see what the load looks like. I guess I'm more concerned about the future aspect of it. If other applications are added to the farm with more database backends, will my instance be able to support it? Will it be a nightmare to manage, since Sharepoint uses the same database names with different guids?
Is there really a purpose in having multiple instances on the same hardware, other than for easier management, if load is the main issue?
June 20, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Multiple instances are being used for two main reasons
1 - licensing (some cheaper benefits here over separate servers/VMs)
2 - tempdb loads - If you have heavy tempdb (and lower memory/CPU), you can gain some performance by splitting tempdb to a new instance and separating the files on different spindles.
You might have issues later, but they are typically hardware based. Moving your instance again might be easy, might not. Typically migrating a SQL Server instance to a new host isn't that bad, though it does result in downtime.
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