Hardware Sizing Guide Question

NickA

OK, let me start by saying I know very little about RAID and this is my first encounter with the hardware sizing guide!

We're trying to size a new SQL 2005 server for an existing customer: 150'ish users and an 80gb'ish database size.

The hardware sizing guide is recommending 6 x 36GB RAID01 for data and 8 x 72GB HDD RAID1 for the log file.

I can see that I'm going to have a hard time justifying this to the customer which is something that the guide doesn't really help with, and I don't quite see how the 'logical units' piece ties up with the number of disks - am I suffering from some kind of delusion that RAID1 = 2 disks per LU?

TIA

Waldo

Hm. Hard one. Let me try to help you out.

CPU:
The number of CPU's helps you with the concurrent users. With 150 users, I recommend you for using at least 4 CPU's.

RAM:
The RAM is something that has te be increased when your db size is growing. You have already 80Gb, which is quite a lot. I recommend you to use 6 to 8 GB RAM.

HD:
This is a very important aspect. Because your RAM will be much smaller then your dbsize, the speed that NAV is using the HD's, will be very important for the overall performance.
SQL Server consists of multiple files you have to place on different RAID sets, on seperate RAID controllers.
RAID controller 1:
Your data files: RAID 10. 6x36GB is only just enough. Try to get bigger HDs
RAID controller 2:
Your transaction log file: RAID 10. 4x72Gb should be sufficient.
Tempdb: RAID 10: 4x35Gb. This is more important then most people admit. Putting the tempdb on seperate (fast) disks can increase performance a lot...
RAID controller 3:
Your OS and Program files: RAID1: 2x36Gb should be sufficient.

am I suffering from some kind of delusion that RAID1 = 2 disks per LU

What do you mean with this?

NickAl

Thanks for replying - excuse me switching to new user ID (Mibuso doesn't seem to like me changing my email address).

>> am I suffering from some kind of delusion that RAID1 = 2 disks per LU
> What do you mean with this?

I always thought that RAID1 was just 2 disks (paired) making a single logical unit, yet the hardware sizing guide was recommending RAID1 8 x 72GB drives which sounded to me like four logical units and four log files - which didn't sound right?

Waldo

NickAl wrote:

I always thought that RAID1 was just 2 disks (paired) making a single logical unit, yet the hardware sizing guide was recommending RAID1 8 x 72GB drives which sounded to me like four logical units and four log files - which didn't sound right?

Hm ... didn't read the sizing guide, but RAID1 with 8 disk, seems dat you'll have 4 logical discs... :-k . Else, it would be RAID10.