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How To Put Tempdb On Your Azure VM Temp Disk

The document provides instructions for configuring SQL Server's tempdb database to use the temporary SSD disk that comes with most Azure virtual machine instances. It describes the benefits of using the temporary disk for tempdb and steps to create a scheduled task that will make the directory and start SQL Server. The steps include setting the SQL service to manual startup, creating a PowerShell script to run on startup, scheduling the script as a Windows task, configuring SQL Server to use the new tempdb directory, and ensuring permissions and deleting old files. Alternatives discussed include using a PowerShell script from GitHub or the SQL IaaS agent extension to automate the process.

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Darko Milovanović
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171 views8 pages

How To Put Tempdb On Your Azure VM Temp Disk

The document provides instructions for configuring SQL Server's tempdb database to use the temporary SSD disk that comes with most Azure virtual machine instances. It describes the benefits of using the temporary disk for tempdb and steps to create a scheduled task that will make the directory and start SQL Server. The steps include setting the SQL service to manual startup, creating a PowerShell script to run on startup, scheduling the script as a Windows task, configuring SQL Server to use the new tempdb directory, and ensuring permissions and deleting old files. Alternatives discussed include using a PowerShell script from GitHub or the SQL IaaS agent extension to automate the process.

Uploaded by

Darko Milovanović
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How to put tempdb on your Azure VM temp disk | sql... https://sqlsunday.com/2023/04/10/set-up-tempdb-on-v...

How to put tempdb on


your Azure VM temp disk
2023-04-102023-04-13 / DANIEL HUTMACHER
Almost all Azure virtual machine sizes come with a temporary
disk. The temporary disk is a locally attached SSD drive that
comes with a couple of desirable features if you’re installing a
SQL Server on your VM:

◦ Because it is locally attached, it has lower latency than regular


disks.
◦ IO and storage are not billed like regular storage.

As the name implies, the temporary disk is not persistent,


meaning that it will be wiped if you shut down your VM or if the
VM moves to another VM host (as part of maintenance or
troubleshooting). For that reason, we never want to put anything
on the temporary disk that we need to keep.

tempdb could be a good fit

Since tempdb is wiped and recreated every time we start a SQL


Server instance, it could be a great candidate to have on the
temporary drive, provided a few prerequisites are met:

◦ Make sure you have enough space on the temporary drive.


Azure VM instances come with differently-sized temporary
drives and you can’t scale them infinitely.
◦ Do you have other workloads on the same VM that use the
temporary drive? By default, Windows likes to place its
pagefile.sys in the root directory of the temporary drive. This
could not only affect storage space on the drive, but could also
compete with the IOPS on the drive.
◦ Is your monitoring solution going to go nuts if we change the
way SQL Server starts up?

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Step by step

We’re going to set up a scheduled task that runs on server


startup. This task will create the directory on the temporary drive
and then start the SQL Server instance.

Tip: Disable the page file

Move the operating system page file somewhere else, or disable


it entirely. For my money’s worth, if your SQL Server needs a
page file, you’re doing it wrong. Brent seems to agree
(https://youtu.be/ZhFG3LllLug?t=638).

Set the SQL Server instance to “manual”


startup.

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This allows us to create the proper directory before SQL Server


tries to create the tempdb files.

Create a PowerShell script

We’ll schedule this script to run on startup, in order to first create


the directory on the temporary drive, and then start the SQL
Server instance. Put this script somewhere on your system drive.

1 # Configuration
2
3 $SQLService="SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER)"
4 $SQLAgentService="SQL Server Agent (MSSQLSERVER)"
5 $tempdbFolder="D:\tempdb"
6
7 # Make tempdb directory on the SSD
8
9 if (!(Test-Path -Path $tempdbFolder)) {
10 New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $tempdbFolder
11 }
12
13 # Start the services
14
15 Start-Service $SQLService
16 Start-Service $SQLAgentService

Create a job in the Windows scheduler

Run the task at startup, so it starts whenever you start or reboot


the server.

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Set the task to run as “SYSTEM”, so it does not depend on a user


account

The “-file” parameter to powershell.exe points to the PowerShell


script file we just created.

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Configure SQL Server to use the new


directory

We’ll use ALTER DATABASE to move tempdb’s files to the new


directory. Note that these changes will take effect the next time
SQL Server restarts.

1 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='tempdev', FILENAME=


2 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='temp2', FILENAME=
3 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='temp3', FILENAME=
4 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='temp4', FILENAME=
5 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='temp5', FILENAME=
6 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='temp6', FILENAME=
7 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='temp7', FILENAME=
8 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='temp8', FILENAME=
9  
10 ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME='templog', FILENAME=

Make sure you spell the directory correctly and that SQL Server
has permissions to create files in that directory. Otherwise, the
instance won’t start at all.

In my experience, SQL Server does not delete the old tempdb


files, so make sure to do that, too.

Other solutions

Joey D’Antoni has published a PowerShell script


(https://github.com/DC-AC/TempDBDSC/blob/master
/ScheduleTaskAgentJob.ps1) to set up the scheduled task in an
automated fashion.

AZURE VM ,
TEMPDB ,
TEMPORARY DISK

9 thoughts on “How to put tempdb on


your Azure VM temp disk”

1. Jeff Moden
2023-04-10 AT 15:48
I’m not a Azure user.. not sure that I ever will be… but it it ever

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How to put tempdb on your Azure VM temp disk | sql... https://sqlsunday.com/2023/04/10/set-up-tempdb-on-v...

comes to that, this is most definitely an article I’ll be coming


back to.

Thanks for what you do, Daniel.

REPLY
◦ Daniel Hutmacher
2023-04-10 AT 16:18
Thanks, Jeff! I appreciate your kind words. :)

REPLY
2. Peter Åkerlund
2023-04-10 AT 19:50
Have been using a Joeys script for some time but intefesting
point about the page file. Something to look into.

REPLY
3. Pingback: Putting tempdb on an Azure VM Temp Disk –
Curated SQL

4. David Wiseman
2023-04-17 AT 12:52
Another option is to use the IaaS agent extension.
https://www.sqltact.com/2020/05/azure-vm-tempdb-on-d.html

REPLY
◦ Steve Welburn
2023-04-18 AT 10:30
Yup, that makes life much easier. Sounds like MS need to
advertise the benefits of the extension a bit more!

REPLY
5. Aaron Blosser
2023-04-17 AT 19:50
I had created a script that does exactly this, plus makes sure
the appropriate permissions are granted to the service
account. It works great. And then we tried out the SQL IaaS
extension which supposedly will do this same thing, and it
works sometimes. But when it doesn’t work (the extension
may have issues during machine startup), it results in SQL not
starting because your TempDB folder isn’t present where it
expects.

So although the extension sounds nice, I wouldn’t call it


reliable enough for production use since we’ve seen it fail on
several occasions. But if it did work correctly, that’d be great. I
think it may have failed, in at least one instance, because the
extension was auto updating at some point during a server
reboot, or after we’d stopped the VM and started it back up
after some maintenance. I guess that may have caused the
extension to miss the window where it would create the
TempDB folder and then SQL just failed to startup until I did it
manually.

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REPLY
6. Tim Gitchel
2023-04-18 AT 13:46
Here is a snippet of my script to setup the ephemeral drive for
TempDB on AWS EC2 instances. The script is called from
user data.

$NVMe = (Get-PhysicalDisk -CanPool $true)

if ($NVMe) {
New-StoragePool -FriendlyName NVMePool
-StorageSubsystemFriendlyName “Windows Storage*”
-PhysicalDisks $NVMe
}

$StoragePool = (Get-StoragePool -FriendlyName


“NVMePool”)

$driveLetters= (Get-Volume).DriveLetter

if ($StoragePool -and !($driveLetters -contains “t” -and


$driveLetters -contains “e”)) {
New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName NVMePool
-FriendlyName TempDBDisk -ResiliencySettingName simple
-ProvisioningType Fixed -Size ($StoragePool.Size * .65)
Get-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName TempDBDisk | Get-Disk |
Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle GPT -Passthru | New-Partition
-DriveLetter T -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume
-FileSystem ReFS -AllocationUnitSize 65536
-NewFileSystemLabel TempDBfiles -Confirm:$false
New-VirtualDisk -StoragePoolFriendlyName NVMePool
-FriendlyName BpeDisk -ResiliencySettingName simple
-ProvisioningType Fixed -Size ($StoragePool.Size * .32)
Get-VirtualDisk -FriendlyName BpeDisk | Get-Disk | Initialize-
Disk -PartitionStyle GPT -Passthru | New-Partition -DriveLetter
E -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume -FileSystem ReFS
-AllocationUnitSize 65536 -NewFileSystemLabel BPEfiles
-Confirm:$false
$item = Get-Item -literalpath “T:\”
$acl = $item.GetAccessControl()
$permission = $config.saDomainAccount,”FullControl”,”Allow”
$rule = New-Object
System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule
$permission
$acl.SetAccessRule($rule)
$item.SetAccessControl($acl)
$item = Get-Item -literalpath “E:\”
$acl = $item.GetAccessControl()
$permission = $config.saDomainAccount,”FullControl”,”Allow”
$rule = New-Object
System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule
$permission
$acl.SetAccessRule($rule)

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$item.SetAccessControl($acl)
New-Item -Path “T:\Data” -ItemType Directory
New-Item -Path “T:\Logs” -ItemType Directory
}

REPLY
◦ Tim Gitchel
2023-04-18 AT 16:34
This will set the T drive to roughly 2/3 of the ephemeral
disk space and the E drive to roughly the remaining 1/3.

REPLY

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