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The baseline configuration of database files on PowerStore were located under the TarragonDB volume group. Table 3 shows the baseline storage configuration for two databases using the TarragonDB volume group.
Volume Group | Volume Name | VMware Volumes | Volume Size (TB) | Description |
TarragonDB | TarragonDB1 | Tarragon_DB1 | 1.5 | All database files |
TarragonDB2 | Tarragon_DB2 | 1.5 | All database files |
This storage configuration minimizes the number of PowerStore volumes groups. This helps management, but it is not an optimized configuration. Using multiple volumes for the most active portion of an SQL Server database has many benefits. The primary benefit is that the operating system creates an I/O queue path per storage group. The following table shows the optimized PowerStore configuration for the TarragonDB1 database.
Volume Group | Volume Name | VMware Volumes | Volume Size (GB) |
TarragonDB1 | DB1_Data1 | DB1_Data1 | 300 |
DB1_Data2 | DB1_Data2 | 300 | |
DB1_Data3 | DB1_Data3 | 300 | |
DB1_Data4 | DB1_Data4 | 300 | |
| DB1_Log | DB1_Log1 | 300 |
TarragonTempDB | TempDB1 | TempDB1_Data | 300 |
TempDB1_Log | TempDB1_Log | 250 |
The TarragonDB2 database uses the same storage group configuration. However, the volume names used “DB2” in the name. For example, DB2_Data 1 and TempDB2 are names used for the TarragonDB2 database.
The optimized storage configuration improves the number of I/O paths and benefits performance monitoring, storage snapshots, and replication. In terms of monitoring storage, the enterprise can view metrics for each part of the database with the optimized configuration. This provides the capacity to continually scale capacity and performance as the database grows.
Not all parts of the SQL Server database are needed for snapshots. Using this optimized configuration, the DBA can granularly select what to snapshot, which saves storage capacity. The same is true with replication, as the database administrator can select the part of the database that requires protection. By replicating only parts of the database, the enterprise benefits from using less network bandwidth.