DR SQL Server Memory Test

Colin Smith — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:32:06 +0000

My new company has a DR Test coming up and we came up with a great idea on how to make the SQL Servers test pretty simple. We use SAN Block level replication so we should be able to mount up our shared disk to any server that has the correct version of SQL Server installed. One question that we had though was that if SQL Server is configured to take say 1024 MB of memory minimum but the server only has 4 GB total would it start up. The answer is yes it will. I tested this using SQL Server 2008 running in Virtual Box. I had SQL Server set up to grab 1024 MB minimum at startup. I shut down the VM and configured the maching to only have 52MB and then I started it back up. SQL Server came up just fine. So this tells me that it will start up and then we can modify the settings to be what we would like.

Hope this helps.

Setting Min and Max Memory settings in SQL with Powershell

Colin Smith — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:14:45 +0000

So today I was thinking about some of the things that are currently not set up properly on some of my servers. I got to thinking that a lot of them were never set up properly for Min and Max Server memory. Most of them, that were installed before my time, are set up with the defaults and as you all know, that is not usually the best practice.

I thought it would be nice to have a way to progamatically set those values based on how much memory the server has total. I started tooling around in Powershell using SMO and I found the settings that I was looking for. It is really pretty simple to change theses values as I have tested it on my own local SQL Server. Here is what you need to do.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO’) | out-null
$s = New-Object (‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server’) “ServerName”

$s.Configuration.MinServerMemory.ConfigValue = 1024
$s.Configuration.MaxServerMemory.ConfigValue = 1024
$s.Configuration.Alter()

The above code will set both the Min and Max Server memory settings to 1024 MB. This change will not be in affect until you restart sql server. But I now know that I can do this progamatically if I come up with a standard for these settings that is based on something that I can progamatically determine. My first thought is to do this based on the total Memory in the server and then figure out how to set both values. I will post more as I come up with it but I thought this was a nice little tidbit.

The Multifunctioning DBA » memory

DR SQL Server Memory Test

Setting Min and Max Memory settings in SQL with Powershell