Lenovo SR650 V4 Optimizing Microsoft SQL Server

Specifications

• Product: Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V4
• Database Solution: Microsoft SQL Server 2022
• Processor: 2x Intel Xeon 6787P 86 core 3.8 GHz processors
• Memory: 2TB
• Storage: Micron 3.8TB NVMe drives

Product Usage Instructions

Data growth challenge and a solution

• In today’s data-rich environment, organisations of all sizes are addressing a surge of fast-moving information, making the right data collection and management tools crucial.
• Businesses of all sizes are being inundated by information at increasing velocity. It’s important to choose a database solution that matches the requirements of the company, resulting in the most efficient outcome.
• Lenovo Solutions for Microsoft SQL Server on ThinkSystem SR650 V4 are optimised for both Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Analytics / Data Warehouse (DW). This technical brief features Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Enterprise running on a high-performance Lenovo dual-socket 2u rack mount enterprise server.
• The server is configured with 6th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, DDR5 6400MHz memory and high performance NVMe drives among a variety of storage options, including support for the PCIe 5.0 standard devices for I/O.
• These new processors from Intel also offer support for MRDIMMs and CXL 2.0 memory The SR650 V4 server is a storage-dense offering, with up to 40 2.5″ drive bays in the front, mid-bays and rear of the server.
• Supports NVMe drives or SAS drives using a variety of 12 Gb RAID controllers and SAS HBAS. Supports 36x NVMe drives without oversubscription of PCIe lanes. The use of NVMe drives maximises drive I/O performance in terms of throughput and latency.
• The server also supports M.2 drives for convenient operating system boot functions or data storage. They can be internally mounted or can be mounted at the front or rear of the server as hot-swap drives.

Business database solutions with faster time-to-value
Lenovo SR650 V4 systems are rigorously tested and tuned to save you months of configuration, setup, testing, and tuning. With these new servers, you get the following advantage.s

• The new Intel Xeon 6 arrives with architectural improvements that improve performance and lower operational costs.
• By using high priority cores and low priority cores a better a better optimisation of the power consumption is being made during peak and off-peak hours.
• To support high-performance SQL server instances, the Lenovo SR650 V4 systems support DDR5 memory operating at speeds up to 6400 MHz
• Improve density and support more and larger databases per host

Microsoft SQL Server 2022

SQL Server 2022 includes updates to existing features like Intelligent Query Processing in addition to management, platform or language. Starting with SQL 2022, runtimes for R, Python, and Java are no longer installed with SQL Setup. Instead, install any desired custom runtime(s) and packages. Here are some performance enhancements in SQL Server 2022:

• Improvements have been made to all columnstore indexes that benefit from enhanced segment elimination by data type.
• Concurrent updates to the global allocation map pages reduce page latch contention.
• Improvements in buffer pool scan operations on large-memory systems by using multiple CPU cores for parallel scans
• Improvements to Clustered ColumnStore Indices to sort existing data in memory before the index builder compresses the data
• Support for Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) backup compression with software or hardware acceleration (only software compression is available in SQL Standard)
• Tempdb performance enhancements for scalability
• Shrink database uses low-priority processing to minimise impact on performance.
• In-memory OLTP enhancements

Here are some management improvements

• Additional Azure integration
• Link to Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR)
• Always On Availability Group enhancements

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V4 offerings are ideal for modernising your legacy SQL Server applications because of their low cost and high-performance capabilities. They are industry-standard x86 servers providing cost-effective computing and fast, high-density local storage.  Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V4 servers offer the necessary performance for bare metal or virtualised SQL Servers. High performance can be achieved using Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct technology, which are built into Windows Server. Several technologies like NVMe storage and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking are natively supported in Windows Server to enable the highest levels of performance.

This configuration features the following main components.s

• Server: Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V4
• Processor: 2x 6th Gen Intel Xeon, 6787P up to 3.8Ghz (2.00 Ghz base) 86 core
• Memory: 2TB of DDR5 6400 MHz memory
• Storage: 8x Micron 3.8TB NVMe
• OS Storage: 2x 960GB M.2 NVMe (RAID 1)
• Software:
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2025
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2022 Enterprise Edition

Host configuration on ThinkSystem SR650 V4
In our testing, we deployed several Hyper-V virtual machines in addition to bare metal testing. Each virtual machine runs Windows Server 2022 and SQL Server 2022 Enterprise Edition.
For a high-performance SQL Server solution, implement the following best practices on the host:

• Configure UEFI (BIOS) settings to sthe et Operating mode to Maximum performance.
• Enable Hyper-threading in the BIOS
• Configure the power profile in Windows OS to ‘High performance’.

Figure 1. Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V4

Performance Testing Details and Results

HammerDB Configuration

Hammerdb is an open-source load testing/benchmarking tool for databases available at:

• http:///www.hammerdb.com.
• It offers tools for testing performance on OLTP and Analytics workloads. The OLTP workload is based on the TPC-C benchmark from http://www.tpc.org, and the Analytics workload is based on the C-H benchmark from tpc.org.
• Hammerdb 4.3 was run on a separate load server. Below are details of the testing and results.

Bill of Materials

Why Lenovo
Lenovo is a US$70 billion revenue Fortune Global 500 company serving customers in 180 markets around the world. Focused on a bold vision to deliver smarter technology for all, we are developing world-changing technologies that power (through devices and infrastructure) and empower (through solutions, services and software) millions of customers every day.

For More Information
To learn more about this Lenovo solution, contact your Lenovo Business Partner or visit:
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/servers-storage/solutions/database/

References
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V4: SR650 V4 Detailed Information
Microsoft SQL Server 2022: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2022? view=sql-server-ver16

Related product families
Product families related to this document are the following:

• Microsoft Alliance
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Lenovo Servers and Storage

© Copyright Lenovo 2025. All rights reserved.

Trademarks

• Lenovo and the Lenovo logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo in the United States, other countries, or both.
• A current list of Lenovo trademarks is available on the Web at https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/legal/copytrade/.
• The following terms are trademarks of Lenovo in the United States, other countries, or both:
  • Lenovo®
  • AnyBay®
  • ThinkSystem®
  • XClarity®
• The following terms are trademarks of other companies:
• Intel®, Intel Optane™, and Xeon® are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.
• Azure®, Hyper-V®, Microsoft®, SQL Server®, Windows Server®, and Windows® are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
• TPC, TPC-C, and TPC-H are trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

FAQs

Q: What are the key features of SQL Server 2022 on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V4?
A: SQL Server 2022 on ThinkSystem SR650 V4 offers performance enhancements, management improvements, and support for custom runtimes in R, Python, and Java.

Q: What are the hardware specifications of the ThinkSystem SR650 V4?
A: The ThinkSystem SR650 V4 is equipped with 2x Intel Xeon 6787p processors, 2TB of memory, and Micron 3.8TB NVMe drives.

Q: How can I optimise my SQL Server solution on the ThinkSystem SR650 V4?
A: Implement best practices on the host configuration, utilise Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct technology, and leverage NVMe storage for high performance.

Documents / Resources

Lenovo SR650 V4 Optimizing Microsoft SQL Server [pdf] Instructions SR650 V3, SR650 V4, SR650 V4 Optimizing Microsoft SQL Server, SR650 V4, Optimizing Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server

References

• User Manual