The current release in this channel is Windows Server, version 1709, which became available on October 17, 2017. This release will fall out of Mainstream support on April 18, 2019, and there is no Extended support period. In this new model, Windows Server releases are identified by the year and month of release: for example, in 2017, a release in the 9th month (September) would be identified as version 1709.

Microsoft describes the Semi-Annual Channel below:

“The Semi-Annual Channel provides opportunity for customers who are innovating quickly to take advantage of new operating system capabilities at a faster pace, both in applications – particularly those built on containers and microservices – and in the software-defined hybrid datacenter.”

You also have the option of staying on the Windows Server 2016 Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) with the traditional five years of Mainstream support, five years of Extended support, and the option to purchase Premium Assurance, for six more years of support. The current release in this channel is Windows Server 2016, version 2016 which became available on October 12, 2016. This release will fall out of Mainstream support on January 11, 2022, and it will fall out of Extended support on January 11, 2027. The LTSC is scheduled to have new releases every two to three years.

The Semi-Annual Channel will be available to volume-licensed customers with Software Assurance, as well as via the Azure Marketplace or other cloud/hosting service providers and loyalty programs such as Visual Studio Subscriptions.

The Semi-Annual Channel can be installed as a Nano Server or Server Core, but is not available as Server with Desktop Experience. The Long-Term Servicing Channel can be installed as a Server with Desktop Experience or Server Core, but is not available as Nano Server.

Implications for SQL Server Usage

If you want to use the Semi-Annual Channel, you will have to be comfortable running SQL Server on Server Core (with no integrated GUI). You can either start using Powershell or you can use tools like Project Honolulu, which is a locally deployed, browser-based, management tool set that enables on-premises administration of Windows Servers with no Azure or cloud dependency.

The two most interesting new features for SQL Server in Windows Server, version 1709 are Storage-Class memory support for Hyper-V VMs and Virtualized Persistent Memory (vPMEM) for Hyper-V VMs.

Storage-class memory support for VMs enables NTFS-formatted direct access volumes to be created on non-volatile DIMMs and exposed to Hyper-V VMs. This enables Hyper-V VMs to leverage the low-latency performance benefits of storage-class memory devices. Virtualized Persistent Memory (vPMEM) is enabled by creating a VHD file (.vhdpmem) on a direct access volume on a host, adding a vPMEM Controller to a VM, and adding the created device (.vhdpmem) to a VM. Using vhdpmem files on direct access volumes on a host to back vPMEM enables allocation flexibility and leverages a familiar management model for adding disks to VMs.+

Virtualized Persistent Memory (vPMEM) is enabled by creating a VHD file (.vhdpmem) on a direct access volume on a host, adding a vPMEM Controller to a VM, and adding the created device (.vhdpmem) to a VM. Using vhdpmem files on direct access volumes on a host to back vPMEM enables allocation flexibility and leverages a familiar management model for adding disks to VMs.

Using Storage-class memory in a VM will let you use the Persisted Log Buffer feature (aka “tail of the log caching”) that was introduced in SQL Server 2016 SP1, as described here.

The post Windows Server Servicing Model Changes appeared first on Glenn Berry.

One potential issue with Windows Server 2016 is the fact that Microsoft is now using a core-based licensing system for that product. Microsoft requires a minimum of eight core licenses per processor and sixteen core licenses per server. This could potentially be a point of confusion and extra SQL Server licensing costs for some organizations.

Here is the scenario. Imagine that you have done your sizing analysis and calculations for SQL Server 2017 usage, and you have decided that a new two-socket server with two, quad-core Intel Xeon Gold 5122 processors will best suit your performance needs and budget requirements. That particular processor costs $1221.00 each.

Shon Smith, your well-meaning server administrator is aware of the new Windows Server 2016 licensing model, and he wants this new database server to actually have the sixteen physical cores that he was forced to buy Windows Server 2016 core licenses for. He also wants to minimize the hardware cost of this new server. Because of this, he decides to buy a two-socket server with two, eight-core Intel Xeon Bronze 3106 processors (which only cost $306.00 each). Shon has maximized his investment in those sixteen required Windows Server 2016 core licenses, and he has saved $1,730.00 on the hardware. But what has he done to you, the DBA?

First, this new database server now will require sixteen SQL Server 2017 core licenses instead of only eight. For SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition, this means a $14,872.00 increase in your SQL Server license costs, while SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition would cost $57,024.00 extra due to this hardware change. But you have twice as many physical cores, so that must be better, right?

Actually, not at all in this case. The Intel Xeon Bronze 3106 has a base clock speed of only 1.7GHz, with no Turbo Boost, no Hyper-Threading and an 11MB L3 cache. The Intel Xeon Gold 5122 that you specified has a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, a Turbo Boost speed of 3.7GHz, along with Hyper-Threading and an 16.5MB L3 cache.

The system you originally specified would have more than double the single-threaded CPU performance compared to Shon’s modified system. Your original system would also have more total CPU capacity than Shon’s modified system. The Intel Xeon Bronze 3106 is a terrible choice for SQL Server usage!

Keep in mind that most SQL Server instances only require Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition (rather than Datacenter Edition). Those sixteen required core licenses for Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition only cost $882.00 total, not each. This means that you should not let that required minimum Windows Server 2016 core license count sway your processor choice for SQL Server.

This exercise assumes that SQL Server 2017 licenses have the same pricing model as SQL Server 2016 licenses. It also uses a particularly bad processor choice by Shon, to illustrate the point. Using two eight-core Intel Xeon Gold 6144 processors would have given you much better performance and scalability (at a higher hardware cost) for that extra SQL Server license cost.

Additional Resources

My new Pluralsight course, SQL Server: Upgrading and Migrating to SQL Server 2016 has just been published. This is my eleventh course for Pluralsight, but the complete list of my courses is here.

Building on this online course is a new three day class, IEUpgrade: Immersion Event on Upgrading SQL Server, taught by myself and Tim Radney. The first round of this course will be taught in Chicago from October 11-13, 2017.

Finally, I will be presenting a half-day session called Migrating to SQL Server 2017 at the PASS Summit 2017 in Seattle, WA from October 31- November 3, 2017.

Here is a link to the complete series about upgrading SQL Server.

The post Upgrading SQL Server– Windows Server 2016 Licensing Issues appeared first on Glenn Berry.

There are currently six major versions of SQL Server that I commonly see being used in Production, along with five major versions of Windows Server. Only certain combinations of SQL Server and Windows Server are officially supported by Microsoft, but tracking down this information is a little tedious.

Table 1 shows these possible combinations and whether they are officially supported by Microsoft. One possibly surprising combination is the fact that SQL Server 2012 is not officially supported on Windows Server 2016. Perhaps this is less surprising if you keep in mind that SQL Server 2012 will fall out of mainstream support on July 11, 2017, which is not that far away.

Table 1: OS Support for Recent Versions of SQL Server

The available links that document this are listed below:

Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server 2008 R2

Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server 2012

Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server 2014

Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server (for 2016 and later)

If you are getting ready to deploy a new instance of SQL Server 2014 or SQL Server 2016, then you should prefer Windows Server 2016, even though they are also supported on older operating systems. If you are getting ready to deploy a new instance of SQL Server 2008 through SQL Server 2012, then you should prefer Windows Server 2012 R2, even though they are supported on older operating systems.

Finally, if you are getting ready to deploy a new instance of SQL Server 2005, then I feel a little sorry for you! SQL Server 2005 is out of extended support, and it is missing so many useful features that were added in newer versions of SQL Server.

Actually, I recently helped a client deploy some new instances of SQL Server 2005 for some pretty valid business reasons. We ended up deploying to a VM (on new, very fast host hardware) that was running Windows Server 2008 R2, which worked perfectly fine.

The post Operating System Support for SQL Server Versions appeared first on Glenn Berry.

By early-mid 2017, Windows Server 2016 will have been GA long enough to convince most skeptics that it is safe and stable. Windows Server 2016 has many tangible advantages over previous versions of Windows Server, which I will be discussing in future blog posts.

SQL Server 2016 already has its first Service Pack available, with many very valuable enhancements (especially for Standard Edition). Some people who are on older versions of SQL Server Enterprise Edition may be able to migrate to SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition SP1.

Finally, Intel is due to release the next generation two-socket server processor (which will require new model servers from the server vendors). One specific new improvement you will get with a new server/processor and Windows Server 2016 is called Intel Speed Shift.

Intel Speed Shift (which is different than the older Intel SpeedStep technology) was added in the Intel Skylake microarchitecture. It requires operating system support in order to work, and the first OS to enable Speed Shift was Windows 10, after an update in November 2015. This feature lets the OS give control of processor P-states back to the hardware, with P-state requests coming from the operating system. This lets the processor increase the clock speed of individual cores much more quickly in response to an OS request for more performance.

The upcoming Intel Xeon E5-2600 v5 processors (Skylake-EP) for two-socket servers are due to ship in mid-2017 (although rumor has it that they are already shipping to some cloud data center providers). I don’t know for sure whether Intel Skylake-EP will have Speed Shift like the mobile and desktop Skylake processors do, but it probably will. Supposedly, the flagship Xeon E5-2699 v5 will have 32 physical cores, even though you will likely want a lower core count model with a higher base clock speed in most cases, to minimize your SQL Server licensing costs.

Why this matters for SQL Server is that many short-duration OLTP queries might run a little faster with Speed Shift enabled. Legacy power management techniques on older processors can take up to 120ms to fully throttle up to full Turbo Boost clock speed, while Speed Shift does it in 35ms, with most of the frequency increase happening in 3-4ms.

Figure 1 shows an example of the difference in how quickly the processor can increase the clock speed with Speed Shift Technology.

Figure 1: Intel Speed Shift Technology Performance Example

If your operating system supports Intel Speed Shift (Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016) and if you have an Intel processor with Speed Shift Technology (Skylake or newer), then you will be able to get the performance benefits of Intel Speed Shift with virtually no effort beyond perhaps changing a BIOS/UEFI setting on your server. Figures 2 and 3 have some more information about how Intel Speed Shift works.

Figure 2: Intel Speed Shift Technology Introduction

Figure 3: Intel Speed Shift Technology Details

Over the past year, there has been a decent amount of information regarding Intel Speed Shift support in Windows 10, but nothing regarding Windows Server 2016. Part of the problem here is that we already have Skylake processors available in the mobile and desktop space, and in the single-socket server space, but not on the higher socket count server platforms.

Just as a quick experiment, I installed Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition on a brand new HP Spectre X360 laptop that has an Intel Core i7-7500U Kaby Lake-U processor, to see if Intel Speed Shift would be enabled or not. As you can see in Figure 4, the green SST lettering in the Features box on the left side of the System Summary screen in HWiNFO64 shows that Intel Speed Shift is enabled in Windows Server 2016, at least for this processor (which is the next release after Skylake).

Figure 4: Intel Speed Shift Enabled on Windows Server 2016 Standard Edition

Now, this is not definitive proof that Intel Speed Shift will be enabled with two-socket Skylake-EP processors, but I would say the chances are pretty good (especially given some conversations I have had with some people who actually know the answer)…

The outstanding question is how much will this actually help SQL Server performance? At this point, we simply don’t know, without actually doing some testing. Based on some reading I have been doing about Windows 10, I believe there is a way to temporarily disable Intel Speed Shift in Windows 10. Once I figure that out, it should not be that difficult to do some initial testing with short duration queries (150 ms or less) to see if they have lower average durations when Intel Speed Shift is enabled or not.

There are many other variables to consider regarding your workload and configuration that will likely affect the results in real production usage, but I expect there will be some positive benefit from this feature. As I like to say in presentations, nobody has ever told me that their database server is “too fast”, so I will take any performance improvement that I can find!

The post Intel Speed Shift Support in Windows Server 2016 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

Intel describes AES-NI this way:

Intel AES New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) are a set of instructions that enable fast and secure data encryption and decryption. AES-NI are valuable for a wide range of cryptographic applications, for example: applications that perform bulk encryption/decryption, authentication, random number generation, and authenticated encryption.

Intel provides more complete documentation of AES here:

Intel Advanced Encryption Standard (Intel AES) Instructions Set

Now that we have a better idea of what AES-NI is, we need to know which server processors have AES-NI support. AES-NI was introduced with the 32nm Westmere microarchitecture. In the server space, this means the Intel Xeon 5600 product family (Westmere-EP) for two-socket servers and the Intel Xeon E7-4800/8800 product family (Westmere-EX) for four and eight-socket servers. Any newer Intel product family will also have AES-NI support.

These product families were released in Q1 2010 and Q2 2011 respectively, so they are both pretty old by modern standards. If you are planning to upgrade to SQL Server 2016, I would hope that you would use a new server with newer processors (ideally the latest 14nm Broadwell-EP or Broadwell-EX).

You can also use CPU-Z to confirm whether a particular processor has AES-NI support. Just to confuse things, CPU-Z displays AES-NI support as “AES”, which is the name of the broader standard. Figure 1 shows AES as one of the supported instructions for an Intel Xeon X5660 processor.

Figure 1: CPU-Z CPU Details for Intel Xeon X5650

The post AES-NI Encryption Support in SQL Server 2016 appeared first on Glenn Berry.

There are a lot of interesting new features and enhancements in Windows Server 2016, especially in Hyper-V and Storage. I think it makes sense to start paying some attention to Windows Server 2016 as it is getting closer to final release. Below, I have some links so you can read more about Windows Server 2016, and how it will be the best OS for SQL Server 2016.

Discover new storage technologies and new features for existing technologies in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview

What’s New in File and Storage Services in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview

 

Discover what’s new in clustering in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview

What’s New in Failover Clustering in Windows Server Technical Preview

 

Storage Spaces Direct is a new feature in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview that enables building highly available (HA) storage systems with local storage which is either disk devices that are internal to each storage node, or disk devices in JBODs where each JBOD is only connected to a single storage node.

Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview

I talked about Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) in this article.

 

Storage Replica is a new feature in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview that enables storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between clusters or servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability.

Storage Replica in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview

 

Storage Quality of Service (Storage QoS) is a new feature in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview that provides a way to centrally monitor and manage storage performance for virtual machines using Hyper-V and the Scale-Out File Server roles. The feature automatically improves storage resource fairness between multiple virtual machines using the same file server cluster and allows specific minimum and maximum performance goals to be configured in units of normalized IOPs.

Storage Quality of Service

 

Cluster Operating System Rolling Upgrade is a new feature in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview that enables an administrator to upgrade the operating system of the cluster nodes from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview without stopping the Hyper-V or the Scale-Out File Server workloads. Using this feature, the downtime penalties against Service Level Agreements (SLA) can be avoided.

Cluster Operating System Rolling Upgrade

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