SQL Server - best practices for SMB
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We run SQL 2012 as a VM (VSphere) for the back end of Epicor on a server that is OBR10 (all 10K SAS drives, not SSD). There are several other VMs on that server. We have the OS on C and then 1 vHD for logs, 1 for TempDB, and one for the databases.
If the server you get has enough IOPs to blow your current IOPs requirements of existing workloads out of the water, you should be fine (I would think).
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If it makes you feel any better, have a look at this - http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/293044-the-quest-to-virtualize-an-epicor-erp-system.
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@NetworkNerd Thanks. That's an interesting read. How many concurrent users do you have on Epicor?
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@coliver said:
I was told by our SAP vendor that they can't guarantee performance if it wasn't on a physical box.
I'd be interested to know how they could guarantee performance on a physical box. Surely there are too many variables at both the hardware and software level to guarantee anything?
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@scottalanmiller said:
DBAs aren't the ones who should be making these decisions anyway, they don't know systems. They know databases.
I wouldn't know. I'd have thought a DBA should have a good understanding of storage, and equally a storage guy should have a good understanding of mainstream databases.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Remind them that the world's biggest databases, once doing literally trillions of transactions per day are all virtualized and don't use individual disks like that.
Quite. It's ironic that Microsoft is explicitly saying that their preferred installation is hosted on Azure. The majority of their marketing for the latest release of NAV is focussed on Azure. You won't currently get any Microsoft employee saying virtualisation is bad.
I'm not engaging my partner. I'm just telling them how it will be. Life's too short to argue about the merits of virtualisation to people who only like to stick with what they know.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
DBAs aren't the ones who should be making these decisions anyway, they don't know systems. They know databases.
I wouldn't know. I'd have thought a DBA should have a good understanding of storage, and equally a storage guy should have a good understanding of mainstream databases.
DBAs really don't. Both fields are a specialty. Most DBAs know zero about storage. Most storage people know almost nothing about databases.
Storage, however, is storage and the idea that you need much knowledge about databases to know how to set it up is a myth. It's one of those thing propagated by the database people because they don't want to be "just another app" but feel like their needs must be special and require special knowledge. They do not.
There are a few things to know, but they are not database specific. Like what is the read/write ratio, is it random or sequential, what kind of app level caching takes place, etc.
Database specific things that need to be known and understood are things like SQL Server's unique ability to do "application level RAID" if you want to get hard core performance. This requires serious coordination between DBA and Storage Team and I've never heard of anyone considering it. Unless going to that level, no DBA should be involved and storage should treat it like any generic random access, write heavy file.
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Just doing some background reading. Turns out my new NAV partner doesn't get involved in SQL server installs anyway, so I don't know why they were raising any objections. So I'm on my own (gulp!).
Just read this:
http://sqlmag.com/sql-server/sql-server-virtualization-tips
Five tips:1. Take advantage of Second Level Address Translation
I've never heard of this before, but I presume this will just happen on my new Proliant, without me doing anything.2. Don't Overcommit Your Physical Processors
This is standard virtualisation practice, so I'm cool with it. Plus, I'm limited to four cores with my SQL Server licence anyway.3. Use Dynamic Memory
"In order for SQL Server to take advantage of dynamic memory, the guest OS must be able to recognize hot-add RAM". Hmmn, I've never heard of hot-add RAM before. However, further reading says that the Standard edition doesn't support it anyway, so I can forget about this.4. Use Fixed Virtual Hard Disks or Pass-Through Disks
I generally use dynamic VHDs, but our ERP system will be relatively small, so will used a fixed VHD. Pass-through disks look like overkill, so I won't bother with them.5. Don't Use The Default Storage Configuration
Hmmn, they're saying use separate disks for data and log files. Don't use OBR10. I thought this was an old-fashioned concept since disk speed hasn't improved whilst everything else? So lack of IOPS becomes your constraint, and lack of IOPS can only be solved by more spindles.Next read is this:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/SQL_Server_on_VMware-Best_Practices_Guide.pdf
but it's a bit heavier, so may wait until bedtime reading. -
@Carnival-Boy said:
@NetworkNerd Thanks. That's an interesting read. How many concurrent users do you have on Epicor?
We have 14 data collection users and 30 office users if memory serves. The data collection users are for use out in the shops, and the menus have limited functionality compared to the full office user experience.
We also use SSRS to generate reports for Epicor (which runs on the same SQL Server as the Epicor database).
But what makes us a bit unique is that my boss has written some ASP pages that allow people to pull Epicor data from our company intranet site. Many reports are now generated from that area rather than in the Epicor application itself.
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I know Epicor recommends you use the Paravirtualized ISCI adapter for best performance as well as VMXNet3 and thick eager zero provisioned disks. They even tell you to reserve the CPU and memory for best performance of the VM (which we haven't done much of, really).
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And how is your performance? I assumed you had more users based on your specs, so I'm guessing (hoping) you're flying. I hadn't heard of a Fusion IO card, but RAM seems really cheap at the moment so I'd probably always spend money on that rather than anything else, although SQL Server Standard is limited to 64GB. I think the Fusion card only kicks in when SQL can't get data out of RAM so wouldn't get used that much, depending on how big your database is (how big is it, by the way?)
For our existing, out-going ERP system, most of our reports are written by me in ASP (classic ASP) directly accessing the database. I also use ASP for writing data a lot of the time, avoiding the ERP client entirely. I love classic ASP, but really need to retire it and learn something a bit more up-to-date.
I'm planning on running the application server and SQL server on the same VM, rather than splitting them like you did. I'm not sure what the benefits are of splitting them?
Anecdotally, I hear that Microsoft have done a great job of improving performance over the last couple of versions of Dynamics NAV. The new version is supposed to considerably faster than the previous one. So hopefully everything will be fine. Their goal is for everyone to run it on Azure so they have a stake in performance that perhaps other ERP vendors, like Epicor, don't have. Whilst the worse the performance is the more revenue they would get from Azure as people have to purchase more resources, if it's slow it would create a negative image of Azure and put people off going down the cloud route.
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What language did you use for classic ASP? JScript and VBScript were the most popular, if I remember.
ASP.NET with C# is pretty powerful and easy to use.
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VBScript.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
And how is your performance? I assumed you had more users based on your specs, so I'm guessing (hoping) you're flying. I hadn't heard of a Fusion IO card, but RAM seems really cheap at the moment so I'd probably always spend money on that rather than anything else, although SQL Server Standard is limited to 64GB. I think the Fusion card only kicks in when SQL can't get data out of RAM so wouldn't get used that much, depending on how big your database is (how big is it, by the way?)
For our existing, out-going ERP system, most of our reports are written by me in ASP (classic ASP) directly accessing the database. I also use ASP for writing data a lot of the time, avoiding the ERP client entirely. I love classic ASP, but really need to retire it and learn something a bit more up-to-date.
I'm planning on running the application server and SQL server on the same VM, rather than splitting them like you did. I'm not sure what the benefits are of splitting them?
Anecdotally, I hear that Microsoft have done a great job of improving performance over the last couple of versions of Dynamics NAV. The new version is supposed to considerably faster than the previous one. So hopefully everything will be fine. Their goal is for everyone to run it on Azure so they have a stake in performance that perhaps other ERP vendors, like Epicor, don't have. Whilst the worse the performance is the more revenue they would get from Azure as people have to purchase more resources, if it's slow it would create a negative image of Azure and put people off going down the cloud route.
Performance was very good on Epicor 9, but it seems a little slower overall in Epicor 10. I have been monitoring that very closely, and I am seeing that we still seem fine in terms of the number of IOPs the server has compared to its workload, even with an increased number of users.
The real reason for splitting was encapsulation. There may be times when we need to reboot the application server but want to keep the SQL server running for people to be able to access our intranet system using the classic ASP pages my boss has written.
The database is about 36 GB now (maybe a little smaller but very close). It dropped in size by a factor of 5-10% in the upgrade. Epicor split their database into multiple schemas in version 10, and I know that made updating some of the ASP pages tough for my boss. And the custom fields that were part of normal tables for jobs, orders, etc. are now split off into user defined tables, causing many, many additional join statements to be added to code (which I feel pretty confident is slowing some things down, especially since the user-defined tables did not get indexes applied to them like all the other tables). I think we may still have some tuning to do. We have a 4-core SQL license, and thus far we are not pushing it, but I think we had some oversight in the upgrade regarding SSRS. That is the new engine for all reports, whereas they were Crystal Reports that ran mostly on the application server in the previous version. In this version the SQL Server takes a hit. I have beefed up the RAM to 50 GB this weekend with 40 GB of that reserved. I set the SQL memory limit to 40 GB as well.
But we have another problem going on right now with our web server being on the fritz and still physical. We have to find a way to get that moved very soon and are working on creative solutions.
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Quick question on SQL Server.
I'm installing it on OBR10, so no issues there. I will install the OS on it's own partition (C:). SQL Server will also be installed there (C:\program files). I will then create at least one extra partition for the database(s).
Is it best practice to install databases on a single partition (E:), or should I create separate partitions for data, logs and tempdb (E:,F:,G:).
This isn't a performance issue, obviously (unless it effects fragmentation in any way?). But from an admin perspective, is there any benefit to creating extra partitions? I would have thought that one of biggest risks with a database is running out of space and keeping an eye on space on one partition is easier than three.
I've googled and can't find any answers. Lots of discussions on the merits of physically separating data and logs, but not much on logically separating them. I guess this means it doesn't matter too much, but I need to make a decision one way or the other.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Quick question on SQL Server.
I'm installing it on OBR10, so no issues there. I will install the OS on it's own partition (C:). SQL Server will also be installed there (C:\program files). I will then create at least one extra partition for the database(s).
Is it best practice to install databases on a single partition (E:), or should I create separate partitions for data, logs and tempdb (E:,F:,G:).
This isn't a performance issue, obviously (unless it effects fragmentation in any way?). But from an admin perspective, is there any benefit to creating extra partitions? I would have thought that one of biggest risks with a database is running out of space and keeping an eye on space on one partition is easier than three.
I've googled and can't find any answers. Lots of discussions on the merits of physically separating data and logs, but not much on logically separating them. I guess this means it doesn't matter too much, but I need to make a decision one way or the other.
We have our split up to OS, Data, and Logs. Not sure if it is best practice or not, it was recommended by both of our ERP vendors.
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@coliver said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Quick question on SQL Server.
I'm installing it on OBR10, so no issues there. I will install the OS on it's own partition (C:). SQL Server will also be installed there (C:\program files). I will then create at least one extra partition for the database(s).
Is it best practice to install databases on a single partition (E:), or should I create separate partitions for data, logs and tempdb (E:,F:,G:).
This isn't a performance issue, obviously (unless it effects fragmentation in any way?). But from an admin perspective, is there any benefit to creating extra partitions? I would have thought that one of biggest risks with a database is running out of space and keeping an eye on space on one partition is easier than three.
I've googled and can't find any answers. Lots of discussions on the merits of physically separating data and logs, but not much on logically separating them. I guess this means it doesn't matter too much, but I need to make a decision one way or the other.
We have our split up to OS, Data, and Logs. Not sure if it is best practice or not, it was recommended by both of our ERP vendors.
We're in the same boat. Though I'm sure the split is from old school separate drive groups (separate RAID'ed drives).
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@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Quick question on SQL Server.
I'm installing it on OBR10, so no issues there. I will install the OS on it's own partition (C:). SQL Server will also be installed there (C:\program files). I will then create at least one extra partition for the database(s).
Is it best practice to install databases on a single partition (E:), or should I create separate partitions for data, logs and tempdb (E:,F:,G:).
This isn't a performance issue, obviously (unless it effects fragmentation in any way?). But from an admin perspective, is there any benefit to creating extra partitions? I would have thought that one of biggest risks with a database is running out of space and keeping an eye on space on one partition is easier than three.
I've googled and can't find any answers. Lots of discussions on the merits of physically separating data and logs, but not much on logically separating them. I guess this means it doesn't matter too much, but I need to make a decision one way or the other.
We have our split up to OS, Data, and Logs. Not sure if it is best practice or not, it was recommended by both of our ERP vendors.
We're in the same boat. Though I'm sure the split is from old school separate drive groups (separate RAID'ed drives).
Yep, I was thinking the same thing, when the performance of an individual drive/array wouldn't be enough for the entire database server.
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I always install SQL to C and then make a new virtual disk for the data and logs. then a third vdisk for the local SQL backups.
Strictly for ease of seeing usage at a glance. No performance concerns.
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I've planned on only one vdisk. I hadn't considered creating more than one.
