CapBBeard's questions

With the new Xeon CPUs supporting Hyper-threading, what is the current wisdom with regard to using it (or not) on a Hyper-V host machine?

I was originally under the impression that turning it on in a virtual host environment could be detrimental as the 'extra' CPUs were not true cores. However I've also read (unconfirmed) comments along the lines of MS doing some hard work to get Hyper-V running well in a Hyper-threading environment.

Does anyone have any solid information or experience in this regard? Cheers!

I'm a bit of a newbie to configuring SQL server, and have just had to set up a new Server 2008 x64 machine with SQL 2005 x64. Everything seems to be running well, however I have a question regarding the 'Maximum server memory' option.

Should this option be configured right out of the box? The server in question has 16GB of RAM at this stage. I have opted to turn on the lock memory pages option, however there appears to be plenty of conflicting advice online about whether or not to do this.

In my mind, if memory pages are being locked, then it seems important to set the maximum server memory option in order to prevent SQL from taking too much for it's own good. However in saying that, it appears that SQL will also release memory when needed; but this mechanism allows it to decide what to release rather than the OS paging out what it thinks best.

So at this stage I am thinking I should set the maximum server memory to approximately 12GB. It should be noted that the server is not at all memory bound at this point in time.

What are the best practices here? Thanks!

Recently I was performing an OS upgrade on one of our DB servers, moving from Server 2003 to Server 2008. The DBMS is SQL Server 2005. While reinstalling SQL on the new Windows installation, I went to another of our DB servers to verify a couple of settings.

Now, I always thought this second server was Server 2003 x64 + SQL 2005 x64 (from what I'd been told), but I now have my doubts about this. I now suspect that it is in fact only 32 bit SQL, however I'd like to verify this.

Here's some details:

The OS is definitely 64 bit.

xp_msver shows Platform as NT INTEL X86

SELECT @@VERSION shows Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - 9.00.4035.00 (Intel X86)...

However sqlservr.exe is not shown with '* 32' in taskmgr, does anyone know why this is the case, if it is in fact 32 bit as claimed? Despite this, it does seem to be running out of the x86 program files folder.

If I do the same checks on a confirmed 64 bit installation, it does give back the expected 64 bit readings, which can only prove that this server in question is only running in 32 bit.

Now, that being the case, the question arises about how much memory this '32 bit' install can use. Task manager reports about 3.5GB memory usage for sqlservr.exe (The server has 16GB physical). I suspect that AWE has not been configured at all, and therefore the server will be significantly under-utilised (remembering that the OS is 64 bit) if SQL is simply using a 32bit address space.

Is this assumption correct?

I feel the server should have SQL reinstalled as 64 bit in order to fully utilise the hardware platform, however it is currently heavily in production; this will be no easy task. I suspect we may just have to configure AWE correctly and let it be for the time being (Unless this is a bad idea?).

I apologise that this question is a little vague/lost; I'm no SQL expert, just trying to get a handle on what's going on here.

Possible Duplicate:
Can you help me with my software licensing question?

I've heard that with Enterprise Edition Server 2008, if you run a pure Hyper-V machine, you are also allowed to run four additional installations as guest VMs. The same goes for Standard edition except you only get the single guest install.

Can someone please clarify the terms of the guest VMs? For an enterprise edition Hyper-V installation, the four guest machines would also need to be enterprise edition to fall under this licensing arrangement, is this correct?

The reason I ask is because we currently run a bunch of standard edition VMs, but are looking to roll out clustering and thought it'd be a good opportunity to go for the enterprise licensing deal. However, I'm unsure if moving our current standard edition machines onto the enterprise host will count as 'one of the four', or whether these machines will need to be reinstalled as enterprise edition.

Does anyone know how this works? Cheers!