Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

Scott Cadillac — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:39:33 GMT

What is a SAN? Or a LUN or HBA for that matter?

At least spell out the acronym once somewhere in the article. Or was this a coded message not intended for public consumption?

Sorry, I couldn't help it :-)

multiple drive letters

Ira Pfeifer — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 18:53:37 GMT

Glad to see you're going to be writing about SANs and SQL. I've got a question for you in this area:

I've heard that multiple logical drives are better than one when holding everything else constant because Windows will maintain separate queues for each. Example: 3x 10-disk LUNs, striped metaLUN or metaLUNs across all 30. Is it better to have a single large stripe that produces one logical drive, or 3 smaller ones?

I can see the advantage of separate queues, but will it produce a significant difference in IOs? Alternately, can it be more efficient to have a single queue that can be better optimized by write-reordering?

My testing so far has been inconclusive, so I'd like to get your take on the relative performance of single vs. multiple drives. Thanks - hope to read more SAN columns in this blog!

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

premm — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 22:21:28 GMT

Hello Scott: Fair comments. We wrongly assumed that readers would know the abbreviations. Here they are: SAN - Storage Area Network, LUN - Logical Unit Number, HBA - Host Bus Adapter.

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

premm — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 22:28:20 GMT

Ira: You raise an interesting question. We plan on addressing this topic in a future Blog. Meanwhile, there are some operations in SQL Server where having multiple logical devices (either through mount volumes or LUNs) can result is better performance under some conditions. Generally, the impact is small.

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

satyaskj — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 19:03:30 GMT

A good recommendation about using RAID 10 in this case, but you haven't mentioned about placement of TEMPDB in this case and on which RAID. And also it is useful if you can mention/explain to have a seperate files/filegroups are place on different disk groups.
Thanks.

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

Stu — Mon, 15 May 2006 14:47:10 GMT

Thank you for addressing the topic of SQL on a SAN. Can you expand your commentary to include redundant SANs? For example, if a single SAN can be viewed as a single point of failure and thus my client requires two SANs for redundancy (in geographically dispersed facilities), what factors should be considered for SQL Server 2005?

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

Premm — Mon, 15 May 2006 17:13:44 GMT

SQL Server 2005 provides an ability (at Database granularity) to produce a mirror copy at a secondary site which can provide protection from a SAN failure. Both SQL Server 2005 and 2000 also support Log Shipping that achieve similar results, but with some what more latency because transaction log backups are generally taken less frequently. Many installations use other products (either from SAN vendors or from third parties) that replicate the data (at various levels of granularity) to obtain protection from SAN failure. The granularity can be at database, instance or at volume level allowing flexibility to meet the high availability requirements.

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

st8floorsup — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:50:12 GMT

Best practices say to have a separate drive for OS, log files, data files, and full text indexes. So, if you have a SAN does it make this practice mute?

In theory you can have multiple LUNs sharing the same physical drive, right, which would violate best practices?

constraints on using sans with sqlserver

jadeflon — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:50:02 GMT

We dont have space in one SAN.

We bought another SAN toget more space.

Is it a bad or unsupported practice to use that new SAN?

Should we move the data from one database to the other SAN so that we have all its data ina single SAN?

Whatis this is not possible?

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

premm — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:06:53 GMT

Jadeflon: For SQL Server data integrity, it is essential that all basic IO tenets are honoured - including the one about log write ahead. Please discuss with your SAN vendor if splitting the data on two SANs still meets all the tentes. You can read more about these on the website http://www.microsoft.com/sql/alwayson/default.mspx

Till you get a confirmation from your SAN vendor, it may be safer to keep all the data on the same SAN.

Some SQL Server Tuning Tips

sKatterBrainZ — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:50:32 GMT

There are quite a few places to find information about improving the performance of your SQL Server machines

re: Deploying SQL Server 2005 with SAN #1

orbhot — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:16:15 GMT

Scott Cadillac said:

What is a SAN? Or a LUN or HBA for that matter?

Duh, what does SQL mean? Try Googling if you don't know widely used terminology. ;)

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