SQL, best practice for volumes, luns, etc.

[HendersonD]

I  have had a SQL 2005 server for some time and am just about to bring  online a SQL 2008 R2 server. Eventually I will be migrating all of my  databases from the old to the  new and getting rid of the 2005 server.

We have a Netapp FAS3020 that is housing the luns for my SQL  2005 server. Within the next week I will be using Snapdrive to carve out  LUNs for use on the new  SQL server. This brings up a few questions:

1.   - The  new server will be running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL  2008 R2 installed on it. In the past I carved out 100GB volumes with  snap reserve set at 0%. The  resulting LUN ends up being 50GB or half the size of the volume. Has  best practice here changed at all?

2.   - Right  now the GA release of Snapdrive is 6.1.1 with two First Customer  Shipments, 6.2 and 6.3. Given the operating system and version of SQL,  which version of Snapdrive should  I install?

3.  - Likewise there is a GA release of Snapmanager for SQL (5.0R1) and a First Customer Shipment of 5.1. Which one should I install?

Our  FAS3020 is running OnTap 7.3.2. The current GD release is 7.3.3 and GA  release is 7.3.4. I do not know if it is necessary to update OnTap for  this endeavor.

[dnewtontmw]

The release notes (or tech support) is probably the best place to look for this info.

For what it's worth... we're running SnapDrive 6.2 and SnapMgr SQL 5.0, on a Win 2008 R2 x64 server with SQL Server 2008 SP1.

I can't say we've been thrilled about the stability of this setup.  We get random issues (typically timeouts attempting to mount up a cloned db) once every 6-8 weeks.