MS SQL Server Best Practice Guide on Scale HC3

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Below is a snippet of our Microsoft SQL Best Practices Reference Sheet available via our Customer and Partner support portals. This is designed to help any users on HC3 better understand common best practices with SQL maintenance and setup, as well as how to best utilize your HC3 system for your SQL servers.

Pre-Installation and Migration Tasks

Spend time before transitioning to the HC3 system to understand your needs throughout the year. Month-end, quarter-end, and year-end activities could be more resource intensive than daily requirements. Plan to utilize the HC3 system HEAT capabilities for high-utilization “seasons.”
Run the Sql Server Best Practice analyzer on existing databases to look for possible improvements prior to migrating to the HC3 system.
Spend time testing SQL Server configurations prior to deploying to live operations on the HC3 system.
Don’t oversize your installation and deprive other VMs of necessary resources.
Make sure all applicable guest OS patches are applied before migration.

Windows Guest Configuration

Make sure Receive Side Scaling (RSS) is enabled. It is configured to be enabled by default.
Format data and log file drives as NTFS with a 64 KB allocation unit size. To verify that your drive has been formatted properly, run fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo from the command line.
Set power management to High Performance in the guest OS.
Use 64-bit version of Windows guest OS.
Do not configure data or log file drives as Dynamic drives in disk management.
Add your SQL service account to the “Perform Volume Maintenance Task” in Windows Security Policy to use Instant File Initialization (IFI).
Reduce the size of your page files to the minimum possible. The OS should be configured with a sufficient amount of physical memory.

SQL Installation Guidelines

Keep the OS, data files, log files, and backups on separate drives so that you can assign a different HEAT flash priority to data and log file drives if necessary.
Don’t set databases to grow by a percentage. Use set increments.
Be sure to right-size your database.
Use the 64-bit version of SQL Server.
Spread high IOP databases across multiple VMs as opposed to multiple instances on the same SQL server.
Make sure all applicable SQL Server patches are applied.

Much more information in this guide is available using the following links (or by logging in and searching "SQL")

Customer portal
Partner portal

JaredBusch

You actually get your SMB clients to plan ahead? /gasp!

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@jaredbusch said in MS SQL Server Best Practice Guide on Scale HC3:

You actually get your SMB clients to plan ahead? /gasp!

We try!