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39 BP1032 | Best Practices and Sizing Guidelines for Transaction Processing Applications with Microsoft SQL Server 2012
using EqualLogic PS Series Storage
• On iSCSI SAN switches, spanning tree should be disabled on switch ports connecting to end devices
like server and storage ports. The Portfast setting should be enabled in the switch configuration for
these ports.
Note: General recommendations for EqualLogic PS Series array network configuration and performance
is provided in the document titled EqualLogic Configuration Guide at http://en.community.dell.com/dell-
groups/dtcmedia/m/mediagallery/19852516/download.aspx.
7.3 VMware vSphere ESXi Server/VM
The lab test environment for this paper was comprised of a VMware ESXi server to host the SQL Server
database virtual machines as well as the Benchmark Factory work load simulation, vCenter, and Active
Directory virtual machines. The following best practices are applicable for running VMware ESXi based
virtual machines in conjunction with EqualLogic storage and/or Microsoft SQL Server environments.
For these tests, iSCSI SAN storage access was setup for Windows based virtual machines to use a direct
access path and the guest OS (Windows) iSCSI initiator
• Select performance optimized network adapters of VMXNET3 type for guest network adapters
connected to the SAN network (VMware tools required in the guest operating system).
• Enable jumbo frames (large MTU) for the virtual switches assigned to SAN traffic (iSCSI).
• Enable TSO (TCP segmentation offload) and LRO (large receive offload) in the guest VM NICs for
iSCSI traffic.
• When using guest iSCSI initiator, install the Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools (HIT) kit for
Windows within the guest OS. This installs the EqualLogic DSM for the Windows Server MPIO
framework. The DSM provides multi-path optimizations tailored to the EqualLogic storage arrays.
Note: The iSCSI volumes were natively formatted as NTFS and directly accessed within the Windows
2008 R2 Server VM.
When using the VMware ESXi software iSCSI initiator within vSphere host instead of within the virtual
machine, install EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) for vSphere to manage iSCSI
connection management and load balancing.
7.4 SQL Server best practices
The following best practices were implemented for the tests documented in this paper.
7.4.1 Database volume creation
• Use Basic disk type for all EqualLogic volumes.
• Use default disk alignment provided by Windows 2008 or greater.
• Use NTFS file system with 64 KB allocation unit for SQL database and log partitions.