I’ve got two webcasts this month that I’m doing with Quest:Pain of the Week: Mission Critical SQL: High Availability – From Amateur to Aficionado in Less Than an Hour October 148 AM Pacific/11 AM Eastern/4 PM UK/5 PM Central EuropeClick here for more information and to register and a followupPain of the Week: Mission Critical SQL: High Availability Part 2October 218 AM Pacific/11 AM Eastern/4 PM UK/5 PM Central EuropeClick… Read More

I really like my new laptop, the Panasonic CF-S9 from Japan (i5-540, 8GB of memory, 12.1″ widescreen, 8 – 12 hour battery life, under 3lbs – yes, under 3lbs). I don’t always say that as I fall out of love with laptops pretty quickly. Is it perfect? No. I’ve definitely got some gripes with it. Disk speed is not one of them. Stock, it came with the new Toshiba 256GB… Read More

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… Read More

It’s 3:11 AM here and I just got my first Vmware demo environment with vSphere 4 (i.e. ESX 4.0) configured to show vMotion. Having set up both Live Migration and now the aforementioned vMotion, I can tell you that I much prefer the setup under Hyper-V. Just getting vSphere installed (pretty simple using its GUI Setup) and configured (not straightforward … maybe it’s my unfamiliarity with the server-based Vmware products, but… Read More

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… Read 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!  

The answer: 4. 1. Failover Cluster Manager 2. Move-ClusterVirtualMachineRole PowerShell cmdlet (part of the failover clustering cmdlets) 3. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 4. Move-VM PowerShell cmdlet (part of the SCVMM 2008 R2 cmdlets) At the end of the day, how you perform a Live Migration is going to depend on how you like to work – GUI or command line, and then it's down to preference under… Read More

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… Read More

With the SQL Server consolidation whitepaper a bit delayed, I wanted to touch on a hotbed topic I’ve talked about in other areas and ways. Since it’s my blog, I can address this topic in a different way than a formal whitepaper. Brent Ozar also blogged about some of this recently, and it looks like we’re on the same page! Anyway … SQL Server Consolidation – The Quick Skinny Consolidation… Read More

Clustering Virtual Machines in Production Yesterday (5/19/09), the KB article which details the support policy for SQL Server failover clusters was officially updated to include support for clustering guests/Virtual Machines … including in production. So anyone who talked to me at TechEd last week, I was right until yesterday Now a couple of points which the KB does not say currently (and I hope it will): 1. Don’t put both… Read More