With the growing adoption of Kubernetes, organizations want to take advantage of containerized Microsoft SQL Server 2019 to optimize transactional performance and accelerate time-to-insights from their business-critical data. However, as enterprises embrace hybrid cloud strategy, they need to consider several aspects based on the performance, cost and data protection requirements for running enterprise-grade SQL Server databases. In this webinar, we will compare and contrast various cloud-native platforms for SQL Server that would help CIOs, DevOps engineers, database administrators and applications architects to determine the most suitable platform that fits their business needs. Join us as we explore some exciting results from a recent performance benchmark study conducted by McKnight Consulting Group, an independent consulting firm, to compare the performance of Microsoft SQL Server 2019 on the best possible configurations of the following Kubernetes platforms: Diamanti Enterprise Kubernetes Platform Amazon Web Services Elastic Kubernetes Service (AWS EKS) Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Topics will include: Platform considerations and requirements for running Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Performance comparison and analysis of running SQL Server on various platform Best practices for running containerized SQL Server databases in Kubernetes environment

1. SQL Server 2019
Benchmark Comparison
on Various Kubernetes platforms
Diamanti Enterprise Kubernetes Platform
AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service
Azure Kubernetes Service

2. Containerized
SQL Server Performance Testing
Dr. Jake Dolezal
Practice Lead
McKnight Consulting Group
Arvind Gupta
Principal Solutions Architect, Lead
Diamanti

3. Platforms Tested
Cloud Only
Diamanti Enterprise
Kubernetes Platform
Amazon Web Services Elastic
Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Azure Kubernetes
Service (AKS)
Hybrid Cloud

4. • Two deployment options:
• Managed deployment on Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
• Serverless PaaS on AWS Fargate
• Nitro-enabled EC2 Instances
• r5d.8xlarge with 32 2nd generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8000
series processors
• Elastic Band Storage (EBS) performance options:
• General Purpose (gp2)
• 3 16K IOPS per 1GB
• Provisioned IOPS (io1/io2)
• Up to 64,000 16K IOPS
EKS
Control Plane
EC2
Compute
EBS
Storage
Elastic Kubernetes Service

5. Azure Kubernetes Service
• Two deployment options:
• Managed deployment on Azure Virtual Machines
• Serverless PaaS
• Azure Virtual Machine
• E32as_v4 with 32 AMD EPYC 7452 processors
• Azure Managed Disk performance options:
• Premium Disk
• Fixed IOPS per disk size
• Ultra Disk
• Up to 80,000 16K IOPS
• 2,000 MB/s Throughput
AKS
Control Plane
Azure
VM
Managed
Disk

6. • Deployment options:
• On-prem – Offload (ultima offload) cards and HCI Kubernetes platform
• Cloud – Kubernetes data plane (Ultima) for major clouds (Azure, AWS, Google)
• Hybrid cloud - Global management across on-prem and public cloud for any Kubernetes
platform with Diamanti spectra and hybrid cloud data services with Diamanti Ultima
• HCI Kubernetes Platform for high performance
• D20- Small (40 cores, 512G memory)
• Storage and Network offload
• Up to 1Million 4K IOPS
• IOPS not limited by volume size
• PCIe SRIOV virtualization with built-in CSI and CNI
• QOS guarantee for both networking and storage
Diamanti Spektra
(Control Plane)
Bare Metal X86
(HW acceleration)
Diamanti Storage
Diamanti Enterprise Kubernetes Platform
Diamanti
HCI
Diamanti Ultima
(Data Plane)

7. SQL Server on Kubernetes
• Ubiquitous database, around since 1989
• Good for multi-purpose OLTP and OLAP workloads
• Public Docker images on Microsoft-certified repository
+

8. Pod Configuration
Operating System
Image
RHEL 7.6
2019-CU5-rhel-7.6
Database
Repository
SQL Server 2019 Enterprise
mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/rhel/server
CPU 32
Memory 32 GB
Constrained memory to drive more I/O to disk!

9. TPC-H Benchmark
• Transaction Performance Council (TPC-H)
• http://www.tpc.org/tpch/
• Industry-accepted, widely-used testing workload
• Suite of business-oriented ad-hoc queries for broad
industry-wide relevance
• HammerDB v.3.3
• Free and open source

10. Build Phase Run Phase
Node
Pod
Node
Pod
Node
Pod
Scale Factor
100
GB
300
GB
Node
Pod
Virtual Users
8
16
Load Data 22 Queries
1
32
TPC-H Benchmark

11. Nitro
Nitro Nitro
Test
Results

12. Test
Results
Nitro
Nitro Nitro

13. Price-Performance Metric
• TPC-H Power@Size =
• TPC-H Throughput@Size = (Streams * 22 * 3600) / ExecTime * SF
• TPC-H QphH@Size =
TPC-H
How much query processing do you get for your money?

14. System Under Test Pricing
• Used System Under Test (SUT) pricing guidance from TPC
• 3-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) = Compute + Storage + Networking + Support
• Single EC2 Instance
• Used cheapest possible public
pricing
• 3-year Reserved pricing
• Paid all up-front
• Single Azure VM
• Used cheapest possible public
pricing
• 3-year Reserved pricing compute
• 1-year Reserved Premium Disk
• Paid all up-front
• Single D20 bare metal node
• Used Subscription-based
pricing
• Sticker price
• Contact Diamanti Sales for
further details

15. Price-Performance
Nitro
Nitro Nitro

16. Price-Performance
Nitro Nitro

17. Performance
Scaling
Diamanti
AWS Nitro gp2
AWS Nitro io1/io2

18. Azure premium
Diamanti
Azure ultra
Performance
Scaling

19. Storage
performance
(IOPS)

20. Storage
performance
(IO
Wait
Time)

21. Storage
performance
(Disk
Latency)

22. Quality of Service (QoS)
high
medium
best-effort
D20

23. Diamanti
Under the Hood

24. Diamanti: A Complete Kubernetes Solution
Hybrid Cloud Management Plane
Diamanti SPEKTRA

25. Diamanti: A True Hyper Converged Infrastructure
HYPERVISOR
NETWORKING
VM VM VM VM
….
STORAGE
Medium
(Outpost +Nitro)
HYPERVISOR
STORAGE
NETWORKING
VM VM VM VM
….
Hyperconverged 1.0 Hyperconverged 1.5 Hyperconverged 2.0
Hardware
Software
Highest
HostOverhead
+Latency
+Noisyneighbors
+TCO
Container Engine
c c c c c c c
HYPERVISOR
STORAGE
NETWORKING
VM VM VM VM
….
High
Hyperconverged 3.0+
NETWORKING STORAGE
Container Engine
C C
C C C
C C
C C C
C C C
C C C
C C
C C
KVM
C C
C C C
C
C
KVM
C
KVM
Lowest
Container Engine
c c c c c c c
Container Engine
c c c c c c c

26. Diamanti - Eliminating IO bottlenecks
• Acceleration with HW offload for Networking, storage, security and management
• Patented distributed file system for high performance
• Zero garbage collection, low metadata overhead (patented)
• Significant improvement of NVMe drive endurance (patented)
• Enterprise-grade data services: mirroring, replication, instant allocate on write volume snapshots/restores,
Pipeline architecture, lockless implementation, H/W queues for inter process communication
• Low Uniform latency for sequential, random
reads/writes, or mixed workloads
• Guaranteed QoS facilitate elimination of over-
provisioning & noisy neighbor

27. Database
Management
High Availability
andFailover
Backup
andRestore
Snapshot
andCloning
User andPolicy
Management
Monitoring
& Logging
HW Mirroring HW Offload
Quality
OfService
MSSQL2019
Storage Network
HW Offload
Encryption
LoadBalancing
andTraffic Isolation
Data, Control andStorage
Traffic Isolation
Scaling and
Distributedtables
Quality
OfService
MSSQL2019 & BDC
x86
K8s OS
Data planeSW
Compute

28. More Info
Download full report at
https://diamanti.com/resources/benchmark-report-containerized-sql-server-performance-testing/
https://www.mcknightcg.com/
https://diamanti.com/

29. Questions?
jdolezal@mcknightcg.com
agupta@diamanti.com