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Windows Server 2016 configuration
16 65TB Data Warehouse Fast Track Reference Architecture for Microsoft SQL Server 2017 using Dell EMC
PowerEdge R640 and Dell EMC PowerVault ME4024 | 3918-RA-SQL
6 Windows Server 2016 configuration
6.1 Power plan
To maximize performance, the server was configured to use the High performance power plan as shown in
Figure 5.
Windows power plan
6.2 Lock pages in memory
To prevent Windows from paging SQL Server memory to disk, the Lock pages in memory option was
enabled for the SQL Server service account.
For information on enabling this option, visit https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-IN/library/ms190730.aspx.
6.3 Windows volumes
A single Windows volume was created on each ME4 Series volume. All volumes were formatted with the
NTFS file system. The mount point host volume used the default allocation unit. All other volumes used an
allocation unit of 64KB.
For DWFT reference architectures, Dell EMC recommends using mount points for the volumes instead of
drive letters. It is highly recommended to assign appropriate volume and mount-point names to simplify
troubleshooting and performance analysis. Ideally, the mount-point names should be assigned in a way that
makes it easy to identify the ME4 Series volume for a given Windows volume.