Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure: Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Deployment and Performance Best Practices > Test methodology
To validate the performance of SQL Server on Azure VM instance using Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure cluster, a TPROC-C OLTP workload profile is used in HammerDB tool. The TPROC-C workload typically generates a transactional workload that runs specific set of queries in SQL Server. These database transactions are measured in TPM (Transactions per minute). For this whitepaper, the SQL Server database is populated with 300 GB of data and multiple virtual users were configured to get the optimal TPM numbers. The lab was setup as per the System Architecture section in this document.
A separate load generation Azure VM with windows server 2022 was deployed to run the HammerDB clients that connect to the database through the network and generate the transactions. A single HammerDB VM is used to run three instances of HammerDB software, each connecting to individual SQL Server database as shown in the following figure. Multiple tests were run by using different numbers of virtual users.