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The physical architecture was designed to represent the infrastructure that customers use for their SQL Server databases. Figure 1 shows that the compute layer includes three Dell PowerEdge R750 servers. Each PowerEdge R750 was configured identically to ensure consistent test results. Two Intel Xeon Gold 6334 processors with eight physical cores each were used, for a total of 16 cores. The default server configuration enables logical processors, which means at the hypervisor layer 32 cores were available. A detailed configuration is shown in the following table:
Component | Detail |
Processors | 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6334 processors
|
Memory | 16 x 64 GB 3200 MHz Memory, Total of 1 TB |
Network Adapters | Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet BCM5720 (embedded NIC) Broadcom BCM57504 25GbE QP NetXtreme-E OCP |
HBA | 2 x Emulex LPe35002-M2-D 2Port 32 Gb |
Storage controller and hard drives | BOSS-S1 controller card + with 2 M.2 480 GB (RAID 1) |
To learn more about the server, see the Dell PowerEdge R750 technical guide.
Dell Connectrix switches provided connectivity from the servers to the PowerStore storage array. The Connectrix DS-6620B is designed to support medium-to-large database deployments. The Connectrix configuration used in these tests included 20 active 32Gb/s ports to optimize the connection to the PowerStore storage.
A PowerStore 1000T storage array was used to validate the best practices. The PowerStore 1000T offers entry-level data services like snapshots, replication, and other features in a small footprint. The PowerStore configuration included 21 NVMe drives, each 1.9 TB in size. The PowerStore also had 2 x NVMe NVRAM drives, each 8.5 GB in size. Full details of the PowerStore 1000T configuration are described in the following table:
Component | Detail |
Processors | 2 x Intel(@) Xeon(R) Silver 4108 CPU @ 1.80GHz per Node |
Nodes | 2 Nodes (1 appliance with 2 nodes) |
Cache size | 192 GB per node |
Drives | 21 x 1.9 TB NVMe |
Total usable capacity | 28.35 TB |
Many production database systems use dedicated infrastructure. To validate SQL Server best practices, all Dell infrastructure was reserved for the database. No parallel workloads were running and competing for CPU, network, and storage resources. This approach of validating best practices in a dedicated environment eliminated extraneous variables that might impact test results. Many of our customers’ environments have been consolidated and challenges can arise when tuning one database system on shared infrastructure.