SQL Server 2016 Archives - Page 2 of 3

September 23, 2016

New SQL Server Benchmark – New Windows Server Feature

It hasn’t been widely publicized yet in SQL Server circles, but Intel just published a brand new benchmark with physical SQL Server 2016 instances and Windows Server 2016. There are a lot of good numbers in there, but the one that should raise an eyebrow (in a good way) is 28,223 transactions per second.

How did they do this? They used new feature of Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition called Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). S2D is a new way to deploy a WSFC using “shared storage”, and it can be used either with Hyper-V VMs or SQL Server FCIs directly running on physical hardware. While in some ways it can be compared to VMware’s VSAN or something like Nutanix, the reality is that S2D is a different beast and can be accessed by more than just virtual machines (hence bare metal SQL Server 2016). I’ve demoed S2D in the past with older builds of the Windows Server 2016 Technical Previews, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the RTM bits soon.

S2D allows you to configure very fast local storage such as NVMe-based flash/SSD in each of the WSFC nodes and have those nodes then utilize it (no really … local storage for things like FCIs, and not just TempDB). Note in the picture underneath the specs the hardware is using RDMA NICs. In the immortal words of Jeffrey Snover “don’t waste your money buying servers that don’t have RDMA NICs”. This is true in the Windows Server world on physical hardware. VMware does not support RDMA or Infiniband as of now, but they recently added support for 25 or 50 Gb networks in ESXi 6.0 Update 2. It’d be great if VMware supported RDMA since it would really help with vMotion traffic. Time will tell!

UPDATE: It does look like VMware is edging towards RDMA see here and here for public evidence.

So what is RDMA? RDMA stands for Remote Direct Memory Access, which is a very (VERY) fast way to do networking. You can bingoogle to find more information, such as there are different flavors (RoCE and iWARP), and some say Infiniband and RDMA are one in the same. RDMA connectivity can revolutionize your storage connectivity and is great for things like Live Migration (and in the future, hopefully vMotion) networks. Its massive bandwidth enables things like converged/hyperconverged solutions because there is an insane amount of bandwidth and speed. Hyperconverged is the latest marketing buzzword bingo that every company uses a bit differently, so you’ll want to understand how each one is using it. Here’s the bottom line, though: fast networking is going to be the key to most things going forward including storage access. If you’re still on 1Gb or even just doing 10Gb, you should really consider looking at faster things.

I’ve been talking about RDMA and Scale Out File Server (SOFS) with SQL Server for years. SOFS, when implemented right, uses RDMA. SQL Server natively supports RDMA and SOFS – there’s nothing that needs to be done other than using SMB 3.0 (well, SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct) to store your databases and use something like SOFS to serve it up. In fact, a few years back, I designed and helped to implement a hybrid Hyper-V/physical FCI solution for a customer using RDMA and SOFS. I remember the meeting where I proposed the RDMA aspect of the architecture – people looked at me like I had two heads because it is a left field concept in the SQL Server world. Six months later when we got into a lab, none of us had seen such speed and most of the concerns and doubts faded away. Having seen and played with S2D for over a year now, I’ve seen the potential for how it can be used with SQL Server, and Intel’s new benchmark confirms it. If you care about pure performance with SQL Server, this is going to be an awesome architecture (SQL Server + S2D).

Ignite is just around the corner with the official Windows Server 2016 launch. S2D is here. If you want to take advantage of the speed and power of Windows Server (including 2016), RDMA, S2D, SOFS, Hyper-V, or vSphere (especially when RDMA is released) for SQL Server, contact us. It’s a brave new world, and SQLHA can guide you through it.

June 23, 2016

PASS Summit, VMworld, and More – Oh My!

I know it’s been awhile since I’ve done a blog post, but we’re in the midst of a few heads down customer engagements. We’re also busy in other ways and the second half of the year and the early parts of 2017 are already filling up. Besides the already scheduled Mission Critical SQL Server class in Chicago from August 8 – 11, I will be presenting at the Chicago SQL Server User Group on the 11th to wrap up my week in the Windy City.

In a few weeks, on July 12, I will be presenting for the PASS High Availability and Disaster Recovery virtual chapter doing an all new SQL Server 2016 topic which should be a lot of fun.

If all of this wasn’t enough, I’m very honored to have been selected to speak at PASS Summit once again, and for the first time, I will be speaking at VMworld, VMware’s annual conference, later this summer. At VMworld, I will be doing a high availability talk as well as a panel discussion with some other folks you know. At Summit, I will be doing a pre-con on Monday as well as a half day session, and I’m very proud to say that Max will also be speaking at PASS Summit with two lightning talk. Of course, we’ll be in our Consultant’s Corner booth, too.

There may be a handful of other things popping up on the calendar for the second half of 2016, too.

Looking ahead to 2017, the first confirmed dates are for my Mission Critical SQL Server class in London in March. There will be much more in 2017 – we’re just getting started.

As an aside, I will be doing a blog post specifically about the book in the upcoming weeks since so many have asked what is going on.

See you online or in person soon!

April 15, 2016

Ding, Dong – SQL Server’s Dependency on .NET Framework 3.5x is Dead

Hello everyone. I’ve been pretty heads down with a lot of customer work, teaching my Mission Critical SQL Server class (with Philly on the way in June), preparing for three upcoming conferences in Europe (including three pre- or post-conference sessions, one of which will have updated labs), and working on the book. Yes, I’ve really been working on it and you’ll see some things shortly. You may have noticed our site got hacked, and I’ll probably do a post about that at a later date, so that’s taken up some time as well. I did lose the post on Distributed Availability Groups which I will rewrite soon. Needless to say, blogging has not been my Number 1 priority. I would rather put that energy into my customers, the book ,and making sure my upcoming speaking appearances go off without a hitch.

Having said that, SQL Server 2016 RC3 was publicly released today and I felt this was important to put out there. There is a major change that actually came in with RC2 that no one seemed to notice. I already talked about how from a server perspective, SQL Server 2016 is 64-bit only and I had a lot to do with that. That was a massive change to SQL Server. This next one is also just as big. Many of us (not just me) have been asking to remove the reliance on the older version of .NET Framework (3.5x), and it’s finally happened. Starting with SQL Server 2016, it is no longer a requirement.

Let me give you a little bit of backstory. For every version of SQL Server from 2008 through 2014, SQL Server required that .NET Framework 3.5x was installed (or enabled as the case may be depending on your version of Windows Server). How to enable .NET Framework 3.5x on Window Server 2012 or later is not apparent to everyone. I even wrote two blog posts (one and two) on how to get this task done. There is also a lot of confusion on why the older .NET Framework version is needed if the later version in the 4.x tree is installed. The short answer is that 3.x (which is the same branch as 2.x and 1.x) is different than the 4.x branch. Parts of the engine still relied on the old .NET Framework so the SQL Server development team could not just rip it out easily.

Some of us knew this was coming, and when I pinged someone around the time of RC1, I was told it would definitely be in RTM. We got it a little bit earlier. This was some hard work on the dev team’s part. If you think this is a hoax, it is not. Figure 1 shows all of the SQL Server features selected but look at the highlighted section – the only dependency is .NET Framework 4.6.

Figure 1. All SQL Server features selected, no dependency

In Figure 2, the Command Prompt window is showing sqlcmd running a SELECT @@VERSION command with its output (RC3), and imposed on it, the output of showing that the older .NET Framework is not installed, yet SQL Server 2016 is running. Huzzah!

Figure 2. SQL Server RC3, no .NET Framework 3.5x

Couple that with the other changes to Setup introduced in the RCs by splitting out the tools install, installing a SQL Server instance is a more streamlined process … and much, much quicker. Getting an instance up and running is almost a pleasant experience. I have my issues with the new tools install, but I’ll take that as a first world problem.

December 10, 2015

Are You Keeping Up With .NET Framework Versions? You Should Be

You may have seen one of the 1,000,001 Tweets, blog posts, and other warnings around SQL Server 2005 end of life, and prior to that, Windows Server 2003 end of life. But there is something else intrinsic to SQL Server that you also need to worry about making sure you are up to date which affects later versions of SQL Server you may be running: the .NET Framework.

If you’re using SQL Server 2012 or later, one of the required components is some version of .NET Framework 4.x. Windows Server 2008 R2 did not ship with .NET Framework 4.x, so you would need to install it on your own or have SQL Server do it. This is known as out of band. Windows Server 2012 shipped with .NET Framework 4.0 and Windows Server 2012 R2 shipped with 4.5. This is known as in band. The good news is that for installations of SQL Server 2012 or later, you would not have to install or enable .NET Framework 4.x; it’s just there.

Like any other component, the .NET Framework needs to be managed, maintained, and updated. Depending on how .NET Framework was installed/configured, either it will be managed as part of updating Windows (in band versions), or you will need to manually update if it was installed separately (out of band, such as .NET Framework 4.x on Windows Server 2008 R2 or if you installed .NET Framework 4.5 on Windows Server 2012).

Microsoft recently published an official .NET team blog post reiterating that .NET Framework versions 4, 4.5, and 4.5.1 will no longer receive security updates, support, or hotfixes as of January 12, 2016. This was first announced back in August of 2014, so it’s not like this is new news, but I can say from experience virtually no one is talking about it. MS’ new post talks more about the upgrade path. To sum it up, you need to install .NET Framework 4.5.2, 4.6, or 4.6.1 to be considered supported when it comes to your .NET Framework version. Security is a real issue for many, and those responsible may not know that your version of .NET Framework could be a possible attack vector. Is your security team aware of this impending problem? How will this affect your version matrices (you do have those, right?)?

The bigger question is this – have you even planned for this event in your environments for both servers and any clients or application servers that run or connect to SQL Server? Have you been keeping up with .NET Framework versions or did you just install SQL Server and forget about it? I would say that most people I encounter fall into the latter. Staying supported is a key component of being mission critical.

If you haven’t thought about updating/patching your .NET Framework version, now is the time to start planning the upgrade to your preferred, supported, and tested version of .NET Framework in your environments. If you do not test against your applications, you could possibly encounter problems. In other words, without testing you are rolling the dice. That is anti-mission critical and can lead to downtime.

Another question you have to get the answer to is this: who owns this upgrade? Is it the app owner? The DBAs? The sysadmins? The .NET Framework can be a bit of a grey area depending on the server and how it was installed.

Here’s a tip: if you’re considering 4.6, just go to 4.6.1 – you’ll not only have a longer shelf life of supportability, but they enhanced the behavior of MultiSubnetFailover (see this blog post for more information) which could benefit some Availability Groups implementations (I am trying to verify if it applies to FCIs; it should as well …). To help you get to green faster, here are some handy links:

This is the KB article to get information on how to download .NET Framework 4.5.2 as an offline installer (including desktop OSes and all Windows Server OSes).
This is the link article to get information on how to download .NET Framework 4.6 as an offline installer (including desktop OSes and all Windows Server OSes
The blog post linked above for 4.6.1 has links for its download.

If you need help planning or implementing your upgrade strategies, let us know.

October 5, 2015

32-Bit Server-based SQL Server Is Finally Dead

Some of you may have noticed that Microsoft recently released SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.4. There is one major change that I am very happy about – x86, or the 32-bit version, is no longer included. SQL Server 2016 is now 64-bit only. This is what you see in Windows Explorer:

SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.4 file – no x86 directory

This is one of those changes that has been a long time coming. I first blogged in 2009 about the beta release of Windows Server 2008 R2, and how it was 64-bit only. I’ve talked publicly how SQL Server was really the only major Microsoft server product left shipping a 32-bit version and how the SQL Server dev team needed to stop shipping an x86 version – especially since the last 32-bit Windows Server release was Windows Server 2008. I even entered a formal bug for SQL Server 2014. Now that SQL Server 2016 is officially not supported on that OS, it’s time to kill it – and it has finally happened.

Its removal is actually the result of an offline conversation I had with someone on the SQL Server development team earlier this year (that conversation covered other stuff which has not and probably will never be fixed … grumble). I’ve been lobbying for this to happen for quite some time (since Windows Server 2008 R2, actually). I pleaded my case yet again during that chat, and they said they would see what they could do – no promises. I did not hear anything for about half a year until an e-mail in June saying that 32-bit would officially be dropped, and was told a few weeks ago it would finally be in CTP 2.4. Lo and behold, no x86! I know it was hard work for the dev team to do, and I for one, thank them from the bottom of my heart. It’s been hard sitting on this one for all this time, but I’m glad I can finally talk about it. As the old saying goes, people really do win on MTV.

Another major reason to kill 32-bit would be so that the SQL Server development team could have more test coverage elsewhere, Think about it – for everything they test, it had to be done twice (x86, x64). Now it’s just once.

Does this mean there will be no 32-bit version of SQL Server 2016? They may make some desktop version; I don’t know nor have I been following. But as a Server product? RIP, and good riddance.

So you can thank (or damn) me for this one. Me, I’m going to celebrate. Where’s my bottle of Coca Cola with real sugar?

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