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This section provides a thorough description and explanation of the tests performed to verify the compatibility of the platform running SQL Server 2022 with Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud. Database performance testing was carried out using the HammerDB benchmarking tool.
HammerDB is the benchmarking and load testing program for the most popular databases. It is primarily concerned with schema building, data loading, and the simulation of any transactional or analytic activity. Due to these stress testing, valuable information from the environment is derived, such as hardware performance comparisons and software configurations.
The test case shows the performance of a single SQL Server 2022 database instance and multiple SQL Server instances using APEX Block Storage volumes running in AWS. The APEX Block Storage pool uses AWS instance stores with four x 7.5 TB NVMe SSD drives on each Amazon EC2 instance. The number and size of NVMe SSD drives per instance are based on the AWS EC2 instance type selection. The NVMe SSD drive throughput is not shared with other instances, hence, no I/O reservation is necessary nor is I/O throttled. The total capacity of APEX Block Storage EC2 instances all together is 90 TB.
A TPROC-C (TPCC-like, transactional) workload was simulated using the HammerDB benchmark test tool to assess the performance of SQL Server 2022 on Windows Server 2022.
A TPROC-C database with 1000 GB of data per SQL Server 2022 instance was used for this reference architecture, and many virtual user tests were run at regular intervals to achieve higher IOPS. The HammerDB was run on a load generating EC2 Instance to generate real-time client/server situations. Multiple runs were carried out by simulating many virtual users.
The goal of the tests was to demonstrate the following: