What are the best counters or KPIs to identify what drives would benefit from EFD’s and can be used to reflect before and after performance metrics?
EFDs (Enterprise Flash Disks) or SSDs (Solid State Disks) are all the rage today for systems which have very high IO load requirements. But knowing if your disks would benefit from this technology can be a bit of a problem if you don’t know where to look. After all these disks are not cheap. Some […]
What should be done for a Transaction log drive (array) to make sure the log records are ON the disk, even if the power fails?
This is a great question that I got a while back during a web cast that I did during the 24 Hours of PASS. Most storage arrays, at least the better quality ones, have a battery within them which will keep a portion of the array online in the event of a power outage. While […]
Given that LiveMotion, etc give you high availability in the event of a server failure, why would you put a SQL cluster on VMs?
This question comes up every once and a while when designing a virtualization solution for someone. When building a virtualization solution (either Hyper-V or VMware) you get some great free HA solutions included when you build a cluster so why would you want to go through the pain of creating a Windows cluster under an […]
A service restart is a service restart
Every once and a while I run across someone who thinks that the way to correctly restart the SQL Server service is to use the SQL Server Configuration Manager. That’s just not the case. You can restart the services from SSMS (if your account has rights), or from the service applet in Administrative Tools, or […]