I am soon to setup a new server that has RAID 5 (3 discs 146GB/10K) up front,
and RAID 1 (2 discs 146GB/10K) on the backplane. The OS will be Win 2003
ENT. This will be a dedicated SQL Server that will eventually be clustered -
using SQL 2000 ENT. Any suggestions on how to configure? For example,
install OS on backplane? Install MDF's up front and LOG's on backplane? Any
wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

--
John

Hi John,

Determining the best configuration for your SQL Server has a few ground
rules, but also depends on how the data will be accessed. Assuming it will
be an OLTP system, some general rules of thumb are to separate out data
from logs and to put the OS on a different volume as well (3 volumes).

Ideally, you'd put the logs on a RAID1 (or RAID10) volume by themselves by
adding a third volume, reducing the seek and latency to update the
transaction logs. Because different areas of the data, presumably, will be
accessed during normal usage, it is not so relevant to be concerned about
maintaining linear write operations. Note that with RAID5 you are
incurring some I/O performance penalties as RAID5 needs two reads and two
writes to the volume, but you get redundancy and scalability with the
minimum 'lost' space penalty.

If I were to configure your system, I'd most likely put the logs and the OS
on the RAID1 backplane as the OS will receive little other direct use.
Also, as the backplane is configured as RAID1 you'll have great redundancy
and performance.

That said, to really tune your system will involve both good planning and
monitoring typical usage patterns. If possible, you should monitor your
system under load in a dev/test environment prior to final rollout. You
can use both SQL Profiler and the SQL Server counters for System Monitor to
analyze the performance of your system. Check processor, disk and memory
activity and load.

There are some good articles in Books Online that point to the right areas
to monitor. Please see the articles titled:

Identifying Bottlenecks
Monitoring CPU Usage
Monitoring Disk Activity
Monitoring Memory Usage

For more information about performance tuning and configuration, the book
"SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning" from MS Press (ISBN 0-7356-1270-6) is
a great resource and is readily available from most popular book resellers.

HTH!

Sincerely,

Dana Brash
Microsoft Online Partner Support
================================================== ===
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

--------------------

Hi

And if you want to cluster it later, wipe the drives, expect to re-install
the OS, setup clustering and then install SQL Server.

Regards
Mike


""Dana Brash"" wrote:

Thank you both for the very valuable feedback.
John

"Mike Epprecht (SQL MVP)" wrote: