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PowerStore offers multiple features for managing and monitoring storage volumes with physical (bare metal) SQL Server hosts. The following sections describe how PowerStore enterprise features enable and augment SQL Server storage management and observability.
PowerStore presents storage to external hosts through either block or file interfaces. Block storage is commonly used for SQL Server workloads due to the various speeds and protocols that are offered which make it ideal for performance. Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NVMe-oF are available for SQL Server high-bandwidth storage workloads such as analytics that can generate a large amount of large block I/O. Instructions and best practices for configuring hosts can be found in the Dell Technologies E-Lab Host Connectivity Guides.
Before you create objects or deploy workloads on PowerStore, we recommend reviewing the following guides for best practices and tuning recommendations. We recommend applying these changes before deploying workloads because some changes require a reboot of the PowerStore appliance nodes. For resiliency, ensure that external hosts are connected through multiple paths, or multipath, to the PowerStore appliance.
Follow recommendations for configuring external hosts in the Dell PowerStore: Best Practices Guide. In addition, when running SQL Server on virtual machines with VMware ESXi hosts, review the guidance in the Dell PowerStore Virtualization Infrastructure Guide and Dell PowerStore: VMware vSphere Best Practices white paper.
PowerStore supports boot-from-SAN for environments that want to further virtualize storage resources. In addition to the storage virtualization benefits, Boot-from-SAN can also be used to protect the operating-system configuration and allow for quick recovery. This configuration can be beneficial in environments where the recovery time objective (RTO) is strict.