One unfortunately common scenario is a situation where someone made a very poor processor choice sometime in the past for a database server that runs a mission critical workload. When I do health checks for SQLskills, I encounter both good processor choices and some pretty bad processor choices.<\/p>\n
One recent example was a 22nm, quad-core Intel Xeon E5-2407 v2 processor<\/a> (Ivy Bridge-EN) being used in a Dell PowerEdge R320<\/a> one-socket server. The Intel Xeon E5-2407 v2 was launched in Q1 of 2014, and it was a part of the Ivy Bridge-EN family<\/a>. The EN suffix means lower base clock speeds, smaller L3 caches, and lower QPI speeds compared to the EP suffix processors, which is not a good thing for SQL Server usage. If you want to know how to decode Intel Xeon processor numbers, Intel explains it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n This particular processor has a base clock speed of 2.4GHz, no Turbo Boost<\/a>, no Hyper-Threading<\/a>, a relatively small 10MB L3 cache, and a slow 6.4 GT\/s QPI<\/a> speed. This processor was an extremely bad choice for SQL Server usage, and it would have been a prime candidate for my laptop comparison method that I discussed here<\/a>. It did have the virtue of only costing $250.00 for the processor though!<\/p>\n Since this processor has four physical cores, it would cost $1,858.00\/per core<\/a> for SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition (for a total of $7,432.00) and it would cost $7,128.00\/core for SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition (for a total of $28,512.00). This means you could be paying anywhere from 30X to 114X your processor cost for the SQL Server 2016 licenses, depending on which edition of SQL Server 2016 you purchased.<\/p>\n A couple of things in defense of the person who made this choice. First, the single-socket Dell PowerEdge R320 only supported Intel Xeon E5-2400 v2 family processors, and the 2.4GHz Intel Xeon E5-2407 v2 was at least a better choice than the even slower 1.8GHz Intel Xeon E5-2403 v2<\/a> they could have picked! The primary motivation here was probably to pick a low cost server, with a low core count processor to minimize their hardware and SQL Server licensing costs. <\/p>\n Given that sort of goal, a much better<\/a> choice at the time would have been a two-socket Dell PowerEdge R620<\/a> server with just one quad-core Intel Xeon E5-2637 v2<\/a> processor. The E5-2637 v2 has a base clock speed of 3.5GHz, a 3.8GHz Turbo Boost speed, Hyper-Threading, a larger 15MB L3 cache, and a faster 8.0 GT\/s QPI speed. It did cost a little more for the processor, at a price of $996.00. A base two-socket PowerEdge R620 would also cost a little more than a base one-socket PowerEdge R320, but the overall difference in hardware cost would be pretty negligible compared to the SQL Server licensing costs. <\/p>\n Using an analysis based on TPC-E scores, I estimate one Intel Xeon E5-2407 v2 would have a system CPU capacity of 192.16 with a score\/core of 48.04. A single Xeon E5-2637 v2 would have a system capacity of 559.77, with a score per core of 139.94. That is quite a difference!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Additional Resources<\/font><\/u><\/strong> <\/p>\n My new Pluralsight<\/a> course, SQL Server: Upgrading and Migrating to SQL Server 2016<\/a> has just been published. This is my eleventh course for Pluralsight, but the complete list of my courses is here<\/a>. <\/p>\n Building on this online course is a new three day class, IEUpgrade: Immersion Event on Upgrading SQL Server<\/a>, taught by myself<\/a> and Tim Radney<\/a>. The first round of this course will be taught in Chicago from October 11-13, 2017. <\/p>\n Finally, I will be presenting a half-day session called Migrating to SQL Server 2017<\/a> at the PASS Summit 2017<\/a> in Seattle, WA from October 31- November 3, 2017. <\/p>\n