Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > Guides > Dell ObjectScale and Integrated Systems for Data Analytics using Microsoft Azure HCI and SQL 2022 > Solution recommendations
This solution was designed using non-converged network topology. This design entails the allocation of a dedicated Network Interface Card (NIC) for management and virtual machine communication, alongside a distinct NIC exclusively assigned for backend Storage Spaces Direct traffic. This separation not only enhances network resiliency, optimizes performance, the overall performance, reliability, and manageability of your hyperconverged infrastructure.
Dell ObjectScale is provisioned in a separate OpenShift Cluster and connected using 25 GbE switch. This separation allows the independent scaling of Object Storage.
Selecting the optimal size for virtual disks, allocating virtual memory, and assigning vCPU in alignment with the specific configuration is integral to establishing a consistent architecture. Dell Technologies recommends avoiding oversubscribing resources.
Storage Spaces Direct provides few options for deploying volumes such as mirroring, parity, or a combination of both. We recommend creating mirrored volumes for production SQL Server data because they provide the maximum performance with the lowest overhead and we recommend mirror accelerated parity volumes for VM OS drives as they combine the benefits of Mirror and Parity configurations by creating a small fast mirror layer over a larger parity pool. In Mirror Accelerated Parity the system first creates a small mirror set containing frequently accessed data blocks, then places infrequently accessed data into parity stripes. This approach improves overall performance and maintains decent fault tolerance.
For non-production low-performance use cases, we recommend creating parity-based volumes, as they consume comparatively less disk space, but come with a higher computational overhead, potentially impacting write performance.