March 20, 2011 at 2:49 pm
After some searching around, I figured I'd hit up SSC for hardware opinions.
The business wants a new physical server that is going to hold 2 64-bit enterprise DB instances. 1 encrypted with TDE, 1 not.
We are expecting read/write to be 70/30 with medium volume. DBs are expected to grow at a gb or 2 a month.
The business also wants to use this server as the web server as well.
Memory and disks shouldn't be a problem.
We are trying to keep costs down with enterprise licensing and only using 1 processor.
I'm a bit worried about the serving up pages and data on the CPU.
March 20, 2011 at 3:01 pm
Honestly, there's no way for us to tell, it depends completely on the workload. I've seen servers that ran fine on a single dual-core, I've seen servers stressed and struggling running on 8 quad-cores.
I can tell you that few normal workloads are CPU bound unless you've really skimped on the processors or have really poorly written queries, disk bottlenecks tend to hit first. Oh, and IIS sharing with SQL is generally not recommended, for security as well as performance reasons
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
March 20, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Understandable. It's a general question but I figured I get some other's opinions.
The code is fairly simple from what I have seen so far. I'm just worried about TDE and IIS on the same machine.
March 20, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Forget TDE, IIS should not share with SQL. Security reasons are the main ones, performance can be handled by throwing more hardware.
Without testing and benchmarking, there's really nothing useful that can be said about potential performance, especially with so little information
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
March 20, 2011 at 10:35 pm
Yin Halen (3/20/2011)
We are trying to keep costs down with enterprise licensing and only using 1 processor.
If you are worried about having enough CPU power while keeping licensing costs down I would suggest going with the Intel X5680 or X5690 CPU. 6 core with HT, so you have 12 processing threads.
Of course as someone else mentioned IIS probably shouldn't be on the same server, but if it is just an internal IIS server that isn't as much of a problem. (You could always run the IIS server in a VM.)
March 21, 2011 at 12:19 pm
GilaMonster (3/20/2011)
I can tell you that few normal workloads are CPU bound unless you've really skimped on the processors or have really poorly written queries, disk bottlenecks tend to hit first. Oh, and IIS sharing with SQL is generally not recommended, for security as well as performance reasons
The only CPU bound workload I've seen was a database that uses SQL 2008 compression (PAGE or ROW) doing index rebuilds; that was CPU bound on a quad socket quad core box.
+1 on never share IIS with SQL for security reasons.
March 21, 2011 at 1:19 pm
Thanks for the replies. I knew I was opening up a can of worms even mentioning IIS and SQL on the same machine.
I've stated my concerns to those in charge but their eyes are on the budget.
I also recommended VMs but that was pushed aside as well.
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