Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure: Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Deployment and Performance Best Practices > Testing and validation
This section provides a detailed summary and description of the tests that were performed to validate the Microsoft SQL Server 2022 performance with Azure VMs hosted on Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure cluster. HammerDB workload tool is used for the database performance test. HammerDB is a workload stress-testing tool for multiple types of databases, including SQL Server. It mainly focuses on schema creation, data loading and simulating transactional and analytic workload. The results of these workload tests further derives meaningful information from the environment such as hardware performance comparison and software configuration validation. For more information, see the HammerDB official site.