Authors
Published
20 Aug 2023Form Number
LP1740PDF size
10 pages, 121 KBChange History
Changes in the March 31, 2025 update:
- Added 5th Gen Turin processor
Data growth challenge and a solution
Information is a crucial asset. Having the right tools to collect and manage critical business data is of paramount importance in a world where businesses of all sizes are flooded with ever-expanding volumes of information at ever-increasing speeds. Businesses must therefore select the database solution that most efficiently matches their requirements. SQL Server Enterprise Edition includes advanced database and business intelligence tools for larger organizations that need a full featured, highly available database solution.
Lenovo Solutions for Microsoft SQL Server 2022 on ThinkSystem SR665 V3 servers are optimized for both Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Data Warehouse (DW). This technical brief features Microsoft® SQL Server 2022 running on a high-performance Lenovo dual socket 2U rack mount enterprise server. This server is configured with two 32-core AMD EPYC™ 9334 processors, TruDDR5 4800MT/s memory, and ThinkSystem 2.5" PM1653 drives (from among a variety of storage options), and includes support PCIe® Gen 5.0 I/O. 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors offer up to 128 “Zen 4” cores, high memory bandwidth, and excellent energy efficiency.
The Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 V3 now also supports the 5th Gen AMD EPYC 9005 processors, code named Turin. The 5th Gen processors support up to 192 cores, and 6400MHz 256GB TruDDR5 memory DIMMs.
The SR665 V3 server is a storage-dense offering that comes with up to 40 2.5" drives in a variety of front- accessible bays (up to 24), mid bays (8), and rear-accessible bays (8). This server supports up to 32x NVMe drives without oversubscribing of PCIe lanes (1:1 connectivity) or 20x SATA drives using the onboard SATA controller with no additional adapter needed.
Business database solutions with faster time-to-value
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 V3 servers are methodically tested and tuned with MS SQL Server 2022 to save you months of configuration, setup, testing, and tuning. These new servers powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors deliver the following benefits compared to servers powered by prior 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors:
- Increased maximum cores per processor
- Increased “Zen 4” per-core performance
- Support for advanced technologies, such as DDR5 memory, PCIe Gen 5.0, and CXL 1.1
- Improved MS SQL Server performance thanks to the higher core counts, improved per-core performance and advanced technologies, supporting improved host density and more/larger databases per host
- Fast time to value with pretested and sized ThinkSystem SR665 V3 hardware configurations
- Simple evaluation, fast and easy deployment, and workload optimized performance
- Database sized solution with optimal compute, memory, storage and networking components
- Optimal TCO through high performance, rapid deployment and advanced hardware
Microsoft SQL Server 2022
MS SQL Server 2022 includes updates to existing features like Intelligent Query Processing in addition to improved management, platform, and language features.
Note: MS SQL 2022 no longer installs R, Python, and Java runtimes. Manually install any desired custom runtime(s) and packages.
Some of the performance enhancements in SQL Server 2022 include:
- All ColumnStore indexes benefit from enhanced segment elimination by data type
- Concurrent updates to global allocation map pages reduce page latch contention
- Improved buffer pool scan operations on large-memory systems via multiple CPU cores for parallel scans
- Clustered ColumnStore Indices now sort existing data in memory before the index builder compresses the data
- Improved TempDB scaling performance
- Enhanced Shrink database low-priority processing minimizes in-memory OLTP performance impacts
Here are some management improvements:
- Additional Azure® integration
- Link to Azure SQL Managed Instance
- Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR)
- Always On Availability Group enhancements
SQL Server Enterprise Edition delivers comprehensive database capabilities with end-to-end business intelligence, enabling high service levels for mission-critical workloads. A detailed comparison of SQL editions can be found here.
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 V3
The low cost and high performance of Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 V3 offerings make them ideal for modernizing your legacy MS SQL Server applications. These industry standard servers provide cost effective computing and fast high-density local storage.
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 V3 servers offer the performance necessary for bare metal or virtualized MS SQL Servers. The Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct technologies built into Microsoft Windows® Server further boost performance. Windows Server also includes native support for technologies such as NVMe storage and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking to enable the high levels of performance.
The configurations feature the following main components:
Generation |
4th Gen Genoa |
5th Gen Turin |
Database Software |
SQL Server 2022 Enterprise |
SQL Server 2022 Enterprise |
Operating System |
Window Server 2024 |
Window Server 2025 |
Server |
SR650 V3 |
SR650 V3 |
Processor |
AMD EPYC 9334 32 core |
AMD EPYC 9355 32 core |
Memory |
1.5 TB 4800MHz TruDDR5 |
2.2 TB 5600MHz TruDDR5 |
DB Storage and TempDB |
6x 1.6TB SAS SSD |
8x 3.8 TB NVMe |
Log Storage |
2x 1.6TB SAS SSD |
4x 3.8 TB NVMe |
OS Storage |
2x M.2 480GB SSD |
2x M.2 960GB SSD |
Best practices for SQL Server on ThinkSystem SR665 V3
The following best practices wil help you implement a high-perfomance SQL Server Enterprise deployment:
- Set the BIOS UEFI operating mode to Maximum performance
- Set the Windows Server power profile to High performance
- Use a 64KB NTFS cluster size when formatting the SQL server database and log drives
- Place the MS SQL server database and log files on separate physical drives
- Format the OS and SQL server binary drives with the standard 4KB NTFS cluster size
- TempDB is shared by many processes and users as a temporary working area. The default configuration is suitable for most workloads, but the installation process can help guide your configuration, as described in the Microsoft TempDB Database documentation
- If the server is dedicated to the MS SQL Server workload, then use either the default dynamic memory management model or follow Microsoft SQL documentation guidelines to manually configure memory options if you need more granular control
Figure 1. Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 V3
Performance Testing Details and Results
HammerDB Configuration
HammerDB is an open-source database transactional and analytics load testing/benchmarking tool for databases. The OLTP workload is based on TPC® Benchmark C (TPC-C), and the Analytics workload is based on TPC Benchmark H (TPC-H). The HammerDB OLTP and Analytics workloads are open source workloads derived from the TPC-C Benchmark Standard and the TPC-H Benchmark Standard, respectively, and as such are not comparable to published TPC-C or TPC-H results, as the results do not comply with the TPC-C and TPC-H Benchmark Standards. The testing described below used HammerDB running on a separate server.
Table 1. TPC-C and TPC-H performance testing details and results
Database tested |
MS SQL Server 2022 Enterprise Edition |
MS SQL Server 2022 Enterprise Edition |
Processors |
2x 32-core AMD EPYC 9334 |
2x 32-core AMD EPYC 9355 Turin |
Hardware Configuration |
ThinkSystem SR665 V3, 2x AMD EPYC 9334, 1.5 TB memory, ThinkSystem PM1655 SSDs |
ThinkSystem SR665 V3, 2x AMD EPYC 9355, 2.2 TB memory, ThinkSystem 3.8 TB NVMe |
Benchmarks simulated |
TPC-C and TPC-H |
TPC-C and TPC-H |
Database size: TPC-C |
100GB 800 warehouses, distributed over 8 NVMe drives (6x DB, 2x Log) |
100GB 800 warehouses, distributed over 12 NVMe drives (8x DB, 4x Log) |
Database size: TPC-H |
1000GB scale, distributed over 8 NVMe drives (6x DB and tempDB, 2x Log) |
1000GB scale, distributed over 12 NVMe drives (8x DB and tempDB, 4x Log) |
OLTP run time parameters: TPC-C |
|
|
Virtual users |
150 |
150 |
User delay |
1 ms |
1ms |
Analytics run time parameters: TPC-H |
|
|
Virtual users |
7 |
7 |
Scale |
1000GB |
1000GB |
Virtualized OLTP results |
|
|
Transactions Per Minute (TPM) |
16 million (8 VMs) |
14.6 million (8 VMs) Additional testing in progress |
Analytics results |
|
|
Queries per Hour (QpH) |
3805 |
Results coming soon |
Bill of Materials
Why Lenovo?
Why Lenovo
Lenovo is a US$70 billion revenue Fortune Global 500 company serving customers in 180 markets around the world. Focused on a bold vision to deliver smarter technology for all, we are developing world-changing technologies that power (through devices and infrastructure) and empower (through solutions, services and software) millions of customers every day.
For More Information
To learn more about this Lenovo solution contact your Lenovo Business Partner or visit: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/servers-storage/solutions/database/
References:
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR665 V3: https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1608-thinksystem-sr665-v3-server
Microsoft SQL Server 2022: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2022?view=sql-server-ver16
Trademarks
Lenovo and the Lenovo logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo in the United States, other countries, or both. A current list of Lenovo trademarks is available on the Web at https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/legal/copytrade/.
The following terms are trademarks of Lenovo in the United States, other countries, or both:
Lenovo®
ThinkSystem®
The following terms are trademarks of other companies:
AMD and AMD EPYC™ are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Microsoft®, Azure®, Hyper-V®, SQL Server®, Windows Server®, and Windows® are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
TPC®, TPC Benchmark®, and TPC-C® are trademarks of Transaction Processing Performance Council.
Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
Configure and Buy
Full Change History
Course Detail
Employees Only Content
The content in this document with a is only visible to employees who are logged in. Logon using your Lenovo ITcode and password via Lenovo single-signon (SSO).
The author of the document has determined that this content is classified as Lenovo Internal and should not be normally be made available to people who are not employees or contractors. This includes partners, customers, and competitors. The reasons may vary and you should reach out to the authors of the document for clarification, if needed. Be cautious about sharing this content with others as it may contain sensitive information.
Any visitor to the Lenovo Press web site who is not logged on will not be able to see this employee-only content. This content is excluded from search engine indexes and will not appear in any search results.
For all users, including logged-in employees, this employee-only content does not appear in the PDF version of this document.
This functionality is cookie based. The web site will normally remember your login state between browser sessions, however, if you clear cookies at the end of a session or work in an Incognito/Private browser window, then you will need to log in each time.
If you have any questions about this feature of the Lenovo Press web, please email David Watts at dwatts@lenovo.com.