Chapter 3. Physical server design
In this chapter, we’ll cover
- Disk allocation size and partition offset
- SQLIO and SQLIOSIM
- Benefits of a 64-bit platform
- NUMA architecture
- Server consolidation and virtualization
Chapter 2 addressed the important issue of determining I/O requirements and building a storage system to match. The selection of server components is directly related and will be the focus of this chapter.
In this chapter we look at various server components, including the CPU, memory, disk, and network. We explore the important properties of these components and their impact on SQL Server from both performance and fault tolerance perspectives. This chapter concludes by focusing on the ever-increasing march toward server consolidation and virtualization.
As hardware components simultaneously increase in speed and capacity while falling in price, one of the consequences is a tendency to spend less time analyzing the precise performance requirements of a database application. Today’s off-the-shelf/ commodity database servers from the major system vendors are both powerful and flexible enough for almost all database implementations. Given that, regardless of the available power, one of the fundamental truths of any computing system is that there will always be a bottleneck somewhere (and in most cases, particularly for SQL Server systems, the bottleneck is usually in the disk subsystem), making disk configuration an important DBA skill.