Dell PowerEdge R810 Manual page 10

Servers: Database consolidation on Dell PowerEdge R810 servers
Our test bed setup
On the HP ProLiant DL385 server running Windows Server 2003 R2
with SP2 and one instance of SQL Server 2000, we used 4 GB of
RAM, allocating 3 GB of RAM to user processes via the boot.ini
/3GB switch as was typical in a server of its time. We used four
internal hard drives (73GB 15,000 RPM SCSI) that we configured in
two RAID 1 volumes, installing the OS on one volume and using
the other volume for SQL Server logs. We configured the external
storage as one large RAID 5 LUN containing seven 146GB 10,000
RPM disks in an HP StorageWorks MSA30 storage enclosure.
Because our goal was to emulate a 3- to 5-year-old database
server, we chose RAID 5 for the external storage, a configuration
typical of the time.
On the Dell PowerEdge R810 server running Windows Server 2008
R2 and four instances of SQL Server 2008 R2, we used 128 GB of
RAM, allocating equal amounts of RAM to each SQL Server instance
in the properties of each instance. We used two internal hard
drives (146GB 15,000 RPM 6Gb SAS) in a RAID 1 configuration,
installing the operating system and SQL Server 2008 R2 instances
on that internal volume. We used four additional internal drives in
a RAID 10 configuration for SQL Server logs (146GB 15,000 RPM
6Gb SAS). All internal drives were attached to the PERC H700
internal 6Gb SAS storage controller. We configured a Dell
EqualLogic PS5000XV storage group having two members, each
with one storage pool assigned. In each storage pool, and hence on
each array, we created two volumes, each of which contained SQL
Server data relevant to one SQL Server instance. The Dell
EqualLogic PS5000XV storage used all 146GB 15,000 RPM SAS
disks. We assigned a minimum of 20 GB of RAM and a maximum of
30 GB of RAM to each SQL Server instance to ensure equal
balancing of memory resources among SQL Server instances.
We ran only one database workload on the single SQL Server
instance on the HP ProLiant DL385 as the system memory and disk
subsystems of the system were saturated with just one database
workload. We ran four SQL Server instances, a real-world number
for the Dell PowerEdge R810, and added database workloads
evenly across the SQL Server instances making sure the average
OPM across all 24 workloads exceeded the original OPM on the HP
ProLiant DL385.
In Figure 2, we show the consolidated SQL Server layout,
consisting of four distinct SQL Server instances, each containing six
databases. Two of the SQL Server instances' data resided on one
Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV array, while the remaining two were on
the second Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV array.
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