Configuration for SSIS server and database server

Question

My current environment is: 3 servers, one for source database, one for destination database and one for IS packages. Now I need to adjust the configurations, like CPU, Memory for each server .

I do believe that running IS packages will consume a lot of resources because of large data volume. However, I do not know which server needs to be configured with more power for IS packages. That is, which server's resource will be mostly used when IS is running?

Also, I need to setup SQL agent for daily ETL processing, then which DB server I should use, the source or destination one?

I'm new to IS deployment,thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

The data will be read from the source server and written to the destination server, so here you need nice fast IO subsystem. Ideally RAID 10. Also, providing your data is split across multiple discs on the source server, more cores will achieve more parallelism. This is not so important on the destination as inserts are normally single threaded.

The server running SSIS needs lots of memory as the data flow buffers will be on this server (providing you run Server Agent here) and you need a fast network connection between all three.

Server Agent should be on the ETL server, otherwise SSIS will consume resources on the box that Server Agent is on, and could therefore fight for threads with SQL Server whilst reading or writing.