Chapter 3. Physical server design

Chapter 2 addressed the important issue of determining I/O requirements and building a storage system to match. The selection of server components is directly related and will be the focus of this chapter.

In this chapter we look at various server components, including the CPU, memory, disk, and network. We explore the important properties of these components and their impact on SQL Server from both performance and fault tolerance perspectives. This chapter concludes by focusing on the ever-increasing march toward server consolidation and virtualization.