I’m back again for another TIL Holiday Learning Series entry! I’m building on TIL #6 with David Klee’s (b|t) other Summit Session: Right-Sizing Your SQL Server VM. I’m very happy that I did, since he builds on some of the talking points.
DISCLAIMER: In the interest of not “exposing” each presenter’s entire session, I’m not going into great detail or documenting “everything” I pulled out. After all, I want to encourage everyone to view the session for themselves.
Here’s my list of interesting notes & tidbits:
- vCPU scheduling – we want to minimize idle time. Scheduling is how too many vCPUs can hinder, not help a VM.
- vCPU counts matter. Size for what you need TODAY, not necessarily what you MAY need in the future.
- vNUMA configuration also matters. Align with pNUMA.
- Search David’s blog for post on how to set up Perfmon end-to-end.
- Avoid using Host Memory Overcommitment, due to how SQL Server will grab all possible RAM, will cause more thrashing.
- Fantastic demo scripts for gathering & analyzing performance metrics.
- David announced that he is working on a product, that can run in the background on a SQL Server, and determine the approximate number of vCPUs & memory allocation required for that particular server. This tool will be FREE. Contact David if you wish to be a beta tester.
Must say that I was quite pleased with this session. It is aiding me in ramping up my knowledge of VMs. But not only that, but it is helping me become far more comfortable with diving into the world of virtualized SQL Servers, and understanding their real world potential and how to leverage them efficiently and effectively.
One final note – this session was shown live on PASStv, which also means that the recording is one of the few sessions that are freely available. Click here to watch it yourself!