>The first most opvious one is to use a fast disk system (e.g. a fast SDD) to speed up writes.

Web site requests travel presently to SQL Server on a NAS device for the virtual environment.

The NAS hardware being used is from NetApp company. They use a V-Series controller. They use disk rack called Disk Shelves. The data protocol is FC at the physical layer. This is like a special TCP. On top of FC, the protocol used is CIFS. This is what Windows uses.

A Cisco switch connects the physical servers, where resides the VMWare machine, to the V-Series controller.

The SQL Server VM uses a Fiber attached SAN.

>Second, check the clustered index. For best performance an 4byte autoincremental integer key is best. Since indexes will have a pointer to the clustered key it will keep the indexes as small as possible. The autoincrement will also prevent rows being moved from one page to another when the indexvalue of the clustered index changes.

This is configured as an Active/Passive Microsoft Failover Cluster. SQL Server 2012 is installed on the cluster, which manages the failover process from one node to the other in the event of an issue with the active node. The two servers are configured identically so that one system can handle the load as well as the other upon failure of a node.

I am using Integer presently. Where is 4byte type defined in the field type?

>Also look at whether you really need all indexes, esspecially the compound ones. If an index is not used, it is only taking up space and hurting performance in inserts and updates. Consider removing Indexes on low selective columns (typically boolean columns) as they general do no speed up queries much, but only cost diskspace and performance on inserts and updates

Yes, all of them are needed.