Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Category: Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Optimizing protocol selection when using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP for Microsoft SQL Server

In this blog post, we will review advantages and disadvantages of the two storage access protocols, iSCSI and SMB, offered by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP). For comparison purposes, we will use Microsoft SQL Server on Windows. We will provide recommendations for selecting the optimal storage access protocol for your specific scenario. […]

Scaling SQL Server performance beyond 1M transactions per minute with Amazon FSx

In this blog post, we introduce a strategy for scaling Microsoft SQL Server deployments on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that uses Amazon FSx, a service that provides fully managed, high-performance file systems in the cloud. This strategy increases SQL Server performance on AWS, providing 2 to 3 times as many Transactions per Minute (TPM) as […]

Using AWS Launch Wizard to deploy SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

In this blog post, we will walk you through the steps required to deploy a SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster (FCI) using AWS Launch Wizard, with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP providing you with a shared storage solution. Introduction In our previous blog post, we described how to set up SQL Server FCI with […]

Using SMB CSI Driver on Amazon EKS Windows nodes

Back in 2020, we first published a blog post on how Windows pods on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS) could access Amazon FSx for Windows File Server as persistent storage. This was accomplished by using AWS Systems Manager to automate the domain join. In the background, a feature from SMB protocol called “SMB Global […]

SQL Server High Availability Deployments Using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

UPDATE: On 26th May 2022, AWS Launch Wizard added support to SQL Server deployments using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. AWS Launch Wizard uses a simple console wizard to simplify the deployment of SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. To learn more about using AWS Launch Wizard, visit the […]