On May 13 and May 20, Ben DeBow and I will be giving two days worth (six sessions) of webinars dedicated to the topic of consolidation with SQL Server. There is no requirement to attend both days, and you can do just one, or both. These webinars are not free, but are great value for the money and your boss does not need to send you anywhere - you can view them right on your computer screen! The cost for a single day is $99, or $178 for both (a savings of $20).

The six sessions we'll be doing are:
May 13 - Part I
11:00 am ET: SQL Server Consolidation Basics
1:00 pm ET: Gathering Information to Make Consolidation Decisions
3:00 pm ET: Applications and SQL Server Consolidation

May 20 - Part II
11:00 am ET: Considerations for SQL Server Consolidation
1:00 pm ET: Approaches for a Consolidated SQL Server Architecture
3:00 pm ET: Administering and Maintaining a Consolidated SQL Server Environment 

Each session will be about 75 minues with a live Q&A with both of us. For more details on each session and to register:

Part I Only http://elearning.left-brain.com/event/sql-server-consolidation-part-1-elearning-series.aspx?code=EP2905A1
Part II Only http://elearning.left-brain.com/event/sql-server-consolidation-part-2-elearning-series.aspx?code=EP2905A2
Both Days (with the $20 Savings) http://elearning.left-brain.com/event/sql-server-consolidation-parts-i-and-ii.aspx?code=EP2905AC

As if that wasn't enough to keep me busy, I've got more going on. Besides working on a few whitepapers which I hope will be released in the next two months as well as customer engagements, I'll be on the road quite a bit. Here's where you can catch me at public or semi-public events besides the webinar:

TechEd North America 2010
I'll be spending time in the SQL Server booth (and probably the Windows Clustering one as well), but the main reason will be my session DAT407 "Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Failover Clustering Implementations". It will be on Thursday, June 10th from 5 - 6:15 PM in Room 276 (subject to change, I'm sure; check the site and guide when you get there). I know it's late in the day and most likely before the attendee party (update: it is; actually this is arguably one of the last sessions of the conference), but I hope to see you there and your brains are ready for 75 more minutes of content!

Microsoft Certified Master - SQL Server
I was recently honored with being asked to give one day of sessions at the upcoming May rotation for the Microsoft Certified Master - SQL Server certification. That day is May 14th, so if you're in the rotation, I'll see you there.

I'll actually be on the West Coast quite a bit (mainly in the Pacific Northwest and California) in May and June (outside of TechEd, of course), so if you've got a user group that needs a speaker and I'm in town, let's see if we can't coordinate. Click the Contact link above to get in touch.

Puget Sound SQL Server Users Group
Since I will be in the area, I do plan on trying to attend the Puget Sound SQL Server Users Group meeting if my schedule permits on May 12th. I am not going to be speaking if I go; I'm rarely around to just attend user group meetings anywhere. So feel free to say hello if you spot me!

Well, it's official - the website just went up. Can't hide it anymore ... I'm delivering a 3-day masterclass on consolidation and virtualization at World of Windows Server in Singapore as well as delivering two sessions (although the current website shows two different, it is going to be a two parter on clustering). I'm very exicted and honored to have been asked to do this.

If you don't live in Singapore or can't get there (hey, what's a few thousand US dollars to take a little excursion to Singapore at the last minute - just ask ask your boss!), I do plan on delivering the masterclass and possibly expanding it to four or five days. Or not. I've spent a lot of time over this past month in content development (official v1 of my Windows Server 2008/SQL Server failover clustering class and this upcoming delivery in Singapore), and am going to assess it after I'm done to see if any tweaks are needed. I can promise you that whether you come to Singapore or see it in a town near you, it'l be a lot of fun, technical content, and information.

Contact me if you want to know more!

I've been talking about it for awhile, but it's finally here - my update of the old SQL Server 2000 consolidation whitepaper. It just went live less than an hour ago.

The basic info including the link to the download of the Word document can be found here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692366.aspx

or you can just download the Word doc from http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/B/D/DBDE7972-1EB9-470A-BA18-58849DB3EB3B/SQLServer2008Consolidation.docx.

I hope you find it useful!

It's been a busy month between client work, travel, playing bi-weekly with a big band, and the holidays ... as well as getting ready to go into the studio to start my first new album in 10 years in a week! First, the updates:

• Thanks to the folks at SQL Saturday in Redmond - I had a lot of fun and the audience was great. Even though I was the last session of the day, people still stuck around.
• The consolidation paper is finally in edit, and we're on track to have it out for PASS assuming no road bumps.
• It looks like I'll be speaking in Singapore in December ... more info as it gets solidified.
• Hard to believe PASS is less than a month away! Hope to see some of you in my session.
• I'll get back to the promised post on DTC very soon.

• Ben DeBow and I will be doing a 6 part series on consolidation for Penton media early next year (similar to the six I did earlier this year for SQL DBAs). Again, stay tuned for more details. It will be a lot of fun to work with Ben on this, as he also has some really great experience with some large customers who have done consolidation. Maybe if we're crazy enough we'll attempt to write a book, but don't hold your breath :)

Now for some technical content ...

Hyper-V, Virtualization, and Live Migration
I've been playing around a lot lately with Hyper-V, and I have to say I'm impressed. I'm well documented as a VMware Workstation guy, but I've had some issues with it and Windows Server 2008 R2. On a lark, I decided to dual boot my laptop with Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 (I'm still at RC; haven't had time to upgrade to RTM and with all of my speaking coming up, I'm leaving my configuration alone!). Interestingly enough, I find that W2K8 R2 consumes a bit less in the way of resources than Windows 7. But I digress.

I set up what I usually do in VMware - a demo cluster - and it was a breeze. The Hyper-V Manager tool is very straightforward. I like the editing of VMs a bit better in VMware's tools, and the only real negative I have with Hyper-V at the moment is that you can't (or maybe I'm missing something) drag and drop from your hard drive into the VM. One nice improvement over VMware is that I can cleanly shut down a Windows guest from the management tool. So I'd say both at this point are equally as good for my purposes, and for production, I would say MS has really caught up in the virtualization race. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years with the various hypervisors and where they take things.

One of the best features of W2K8 R2 and Hyper-V is Live Migration. Live Migration is the ability to take a virtual machine (which is running on a Windows failover cluster) and move it with no downtime to another node in a way that minimally impacts performance. SQL Server fully supports Live Migration. Unfortunately, what I can't do on my laptop is demo Live Migration, and it's a killer feature (and for SQL Server). The reason? You can't enable virtualization in a VM (either Hyper-V or VMware). It just isn't practical to schlep extra hardware and disks around everywhere, and I can't count on having an Internet connection everywhere (nor can I necessarily rely on being able to get to my home machines if I have it configured). As someone who talks about clustering a lot, it puts me in a difficult spot. So right now I'm doing some work in a location where someone has graciously allowed me to configure this setup using a real SAN, and I'm documenting the heck out of it (including caveats) for Live Migration and SQL Server. Whether that winds up being a whitepaper for MS, or something I do on my own, it'll get out there. It'll be a nice companion to the paper MS already has on SQL Server and Hyper-V.

iSCSI
iSCSI is becoming more prevalent both in my use of it for demos and at client sites. However, realize that there are a few "gotchas" that you really do need to take into account. I will still maintain that using more traditional disk architectures for a production SQL Server implementation that is mission critical is arguably better in many cases, but that really isn't my decision in the end. Just be aware of what iSCSI means for SQL Server. I've seen iSCSI work really well for SQL Server deployments, too, but it all boils down to planning.

1. Remember that with iSCSI, chances are you're probably using a NIC, not a dedicated iSCSI HBA (which would be better). On a cluster, you must use a dedicated NIC in addition to the Public and Private NICs; iSCSI traffic can't share either.

2. You are now dependent on your network for your I/O. Remember that SQL Server needs guaranteed writes. What happens if your network dies? Make sure your network infrastructure is robust and architected properly. This means things like dedicated networks for iSCSI so the traffic isn't going out with the rest of the network traffic, redundant switches and such, etc.

3. Using NICs means some processor overhead. Account for that in your server sizing.

4. Test, test, and test some more. Make sure you not only run tests to see what the I/O capacity is from a hardware perspective is, and then run your workload. Know where the system will be stressed out. You may even want to try some more basic tests (like a file copy - I've seen that choke some iSCSI systems) before you attempt to test your workloads. This rule also applies to standard SANs, but is even more important with iSCSI.

I do a bit of work in the consolidation space, and speak about it a lot. The update to my old SQL Server 2000 consolidation planning whitepaper is almost done and I should be doing a webcast next month. But I wanted to address one thing here in the interim: the biggest sticking point is not moving databases or maintenance plans; it's applications. There are lots of aspects to this which I am not addressing in this blog post. I am specifically going to address application compatibility with later versions of SQL Server such as 2005 or 2008. A common complaint I hear from many customers is that the applications they use do not support SQL Server <insert version here>.

There are a few issues with this really large, and to some degree, crippling problem:
1. Part of the problem is not the vendor, but the customer.
a. Many vendors do have later versions of their application; customers just haven't implemented it. I'm oversimplifying here; it's a deeper problem than that which is explored in the next few sub-letters.
b. Change is hard. Later versions introduce new, or changed, functionality that may not even be used. If something is changed, it may not be to a customer's liking. As far as unused functionality, there comes a point for a lot of people where what is there is "good enough" and there may be no reason in terms of features to seemingly want to upgrade.
c. If the application is highly customizable (such as Siebel), it's not a slam dunk just to implement it. There's downtime as well as retraining of end users.
d. This one is really a side effect of a, b, and c: even if it means not being supported, it sometimes may feel like it is just easier to go with what you know.
e. ... and then there is cost. Upgrades generally are not free.

You can work through downtime and any technical issues associated with an upgrade; the more intangible (perceived value) and tangible (do we have money to do this?) are a bigger problem.

2. In the cases where there is no later version of the software, it's unfortunate, but Microsoft cannot play the heavy and force vendors to make an application support a later version of SQL Server. Believe me, I wish they could, but I can only imagine the potential legalities of that. It's really up to the customers to make their voice heard to get a version of an application that supports what they need. If they can't, realistically, it may be time to move to another software package that supports the platforms you deploy. You could possibly consider virtualizing the server and its SQL Server instance, but you're still supporting the old version of SQL and you need to be sure the vendor supports you in a virtualized environment - but you do get rid of the physical box.

3. All of this is a Catch-22. Your application pain now forces you to deploy or still keep older versions of SQL Server in play, affecting your long term supportability not only from Microsoft but in terms of your DBAs. Do you want your DBAs to be a long way behind in their knowlegde of the platform? Heck no!

By the way, this  problem extends to service pack levels. In my experience, some software won't allow you to upgrade/patch your SQL Server instances to a later service pack unless they support it. That doesn't bode well for consolidating that application where you have a shared instance with N number of databases, all of which will be upgraded at the same time.

Trust me, I wish I had a magic wand to make these issues go away. They are very real and must be dealt with appropriately in a consolidation effort. What is right for one customer may not be for another. I do enjoy helping customers work through these issues, but I can assure you that it is never easy and hard decisions need to be made.