Ok, I’d like to give an update on this now that we’re running on the new system.
Incidentally, I did buy your book Jörg, and appreciate the help both it and this forum have given in helping me grow and understand this system better.
As far as the disks, I ended up with the following configuration.
10 Disks - R10 - Data
4 Disks - R10 - Logs
4 Disks - R10 - TempDB / Master
Compared to our previous setup which was an 8 disk RAID10, which the Logs, Data, and TempDB were all sharing.
The only difference between the drives is that the previous drives were 15K 3.5 SAS, while the new drives are 10K 2.5 SAS. (43X0805 / 49Y1840)
After the change, the client did not perceive the performance to be increased on the new system, and we went about tuning the system as best as possible. Some heavy queries were tuned to lessen their impact. Un-used indexes were removed from heavily queried tables, some large tables were cleaned up, scheduled maintenance jobs were added, Read Committed Snapshot Isolation level was enabled, Fill Factor % set to 90, Max Degree of Parallelism set to 1, Optimize for Ad Hoc Workflows set to 1.
These suggestions for the system came from a compilation of information from your book, local experts, and this post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nav/archive/2010/09/28/microsoft-dynamics-nav-sql-server-configuration-recommendations.aspx
As far as the hardware, the Queue Depth on the Host Bus Adapters has also been set to 64.
I have been monitoring performance both using the PAL tool. http://pal.codeplex.com/ and also a software called Ignite by Confio. Unfortunately, I did not have either of these tools before I started, and my previous performance statistics were only gathered using performance monitor.
Now, despite the tuning of the system, the customer still perceives the system to not be as fast as they would like, and the areas of Navision that they are focusing on to judge performance are Invoice Posting, Invoice Booking, and various job queues.
I’m attaching an image of some graphs that they’re compiling that they’re using to gauge system performance on their side.
I’m also attaching a PAL report that gives a good example of the system performance. Scroll to page 30 and past.
C - OS
D - Primary Database
E - Logs
F - Lesser used databases
I - TempDB
P - Pagefile
Any advice on where I need to be looking to get this system working better? Much appreciated.