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The following test scenarios were used with the test methodology:
The key best practices used in the tests are available in the Best practices section.
The objective of this test is to measure a single Azure VM database performance on the Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure cluster. A single VM of 64 CPUs and 64 GB was created for this test. In this test, a single HammerDB instance generates an OLTP workload against the single SQL Server instance for 15 minutes with multiple virtual users to generate database TPM. For more information about configuration of the VM, see SQL Server Azure VM configuration.
The following figure shows the single instance database test performance results:
As shown in the above test results, a TPM of 598 K is achieved with 200 virtual users, while maintaining a consistent average read I/O latency well under 1 millisecond (0.15 millisecond is equal to 150-microseconds average read I/O latency) on Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure cluster.
Note: The database size for this test was 300 GB and only 60 GB RAM was assigned for the SQL Server from the total 64 GB of available RAM.
The objective of this test is to measure the database performance of three Azure VM on Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure cluster. Three VMs of 64 CPU and 256 GB RAM are used for this test. In this test three HammerDB instances are running the workload against three SQL Server instances simultaneously for 15 minutes with multiple users to generate the database TPM.
The following figure shows the performance test results of the three instances database test:
As shown in the above test results, a TPM of 3.4 million is achieved with 500 virtual users while maintaining a constant average read I/O latency well under 1 millisecond (0.48 millisecond is equal to 480-microseconds average read I/O latency) on Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure cluster.
Note: The database size for this test was 300 GB and only 64 GB RAM was assigned for the SQL Server from the total 256 GB of available RAM.
This section focuses on the scalability test of three SQL Azure VMs on the Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure cluster. Each VM was configured with 16 CPUs and 64 GB RAM. SQL Server database layout was configured as per the SQL Server files layout.
The test started with one VM and one HammerDB instance. With each iteration VMs were added as shown in the following table:
Test Iteration | VM1 | VM2 | VM3 |
Iteration 1 | Active |
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Iteration 2 | Active | Active |
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Iteration 3 | Active | Active | Active |
The above table explains the test sequence used for this test. In Iteration 1 only VM 1 is active whereas in Iteration 3, three VMs are active simultaneously.
The following graph shows the TPM performance with linear scaling of one, two, and three VMs on the Dell APEX Block Storage cluster. After multiple iterations with different virtual users, maximum TPM numbers are achieved with 150 virtual users for every iteration. The latency observed for all the scaling tests are well under 1 millisecond.
This test shows that the performance of Microsoft SQL Server 2022 on Azure VM instances using Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure cluster increases linearly as the number of Azure VM instances is scaled.