Shout Out: David Klee "Virtualizing Business-Critical SQL Servers – Part 2: Understanding the Physical Workload"

Another Shout Out coming full speed, course correcting to ram right into you. This time a post from David Klee, a Solutions Architect at House of Brick Technologies. In this Shout Out, bring on the bench marking, performance charting, workload tracking pie and give me the whole thing. David's posts is second part to a multipart blog post series on Virtualizing Business Critical SQL Servers. His post gives you a pretty detailed map on the areas to focus on so that you can know what you need to about your physical workload. Following his guidelines can help you effectively create baselines from scheduled periodic benchmarks and from there effectively tune your SQL Server to get the best performance. His blog post includes the following subjects:

• Benchmarks
• Disk Performance
• SQL Server and Windows Metrics
• Query Performance
• Baselines

This was a really great post and there were a lot of things I got out of it, here is a snippet of one of my favorite parts:

"Now, what good is a benchmark if you do not have a running average metric to compare it against?
A baseline is a rolling average of your repeatable benchmarks. You should routinely (and not just once a year either) benchmark your systems and compare against a rolling baseline to see how things are performing. Once completed, update your benchmarks accordingly with the updated data.
[...]
The bottom line with benchmarks is that not only do you have an objective measure of the average performance of your systems, but, in the event of a problem, you have an objective means of defending your system. It can even help point out performance problems in other systems. If a performance problem does show up in your system, you have the ability to quickly determine the area that requires more focus, and the means to prove when it is resolved."

Baselines are to often over looked because of a lack of bench marking. Too commonly as a consulting company we are asked to perform health checks on customer systems, how much more beneficial those health checks would be if we had baselines to use to contrast against the new numbers and figures....sigh....

There was one customer who had baselines back 5 years, done quarterly, in easy to read and understand documents with graphing and metadata...oh wait....no......I guess it was all a dream, right Biggie? I used to read Word Up magazine.

Heres the link:
http://www.houseofbrick.com/blog/virtualizing-business-critical-sql-servers-a-part-2-understanding-the-physical-workload.html?blogger=solutionsarchitects

Also checkout David's personal blog @:
http://www.davidklee.net/

Or follow him on Twitter:
@kleegeek