Planet vSphere-land

Too often I read upgrade plans or visit sites with plans to upgrade VMware products or buy new hosts and notice that the VMware Compatibility Guides have never been checked when making plans. First thing I always do when changing big parts in a virtual infrastructure is to dive into the compatibility guides to check if there are any issues that might occur. Too often there are small things to th...

More and more Microsoft SQL Servers are being deployed virtually in a VMware environment, but how can you license them correctly? Microsoft changed their licensing again on April 1st, 2012. With the general availability of SQL Server 2012, the changes around SQL licensing are live.  Some highlights are: There are three main editions now: Standard [...] by Edwin Weijdema

Thursday 12th there was a press release by StarWind stating “StarWind completely eliminates the need for shared storage when implementing Windows Server 2012 Scale-out file servers”. At first, while reading the title, I was a bit confused. Starwind itself offers shared storage solutions with it’s software. But after reading the article, it´s clear that the [...] by Sander Mart...

During a recent SAN installation I ran into a Microsoft SQL cluster that needed to be migrated from an old SAN to a new SAN. After doing a bunch of reading and testing I developed the plan listed below. As it turned out the cluster that needed to be migrated was using shared VMDK files [...]

In my vSphere lab environment I like to try and run things as closely as possible to how it would be run in the “real world”.  Of course this isn’t always possible due to hardware and budget limitations although there are a few things I can do such as running a dedicated database (DB) server VM(s) from which to run the different vSphere related DB instances, such as vCenter, Update Man...

Past two months I’ve received three calls from customers who’s vCenter suddenly stopped working because their SQL database had stopped because the logs had filled up. Turns out few people regularly check the status of their SQL database. VMware has written some very good KB articles on what to do when your SQL DB fills up and stops. So this blog post is only a wake-up call for you to...

In this video we’re going to cover the installation, configuration and usage of the VMware vCenter 5.0 Server Appliance (vCSA). The vCSA is a brand new production ready Virtual Appliance that allows you to stand up vCenter Server in literally a few minutes. Once you watch the video you’re going to be like, “Hey Rick, that was more than 5 minutes!”.  For that I do apolog...

This post explains functionality of Veeam Backup and Replication (BaR) that you are not going to see in the User Guide. I was browsing the Veeam Forums and came across this thread – Backing up Veeam / vCentre Physical Machine which inspired me to write this post. The thread is actually about having an with an issue using with the scheduled backup of a physical vCenter server, which also ...

EMC Webcasts are in full effect! Over 20,000 viewers have registered for these webcasts, why haven’t you!? Every Thursday we cover the hottest topics hitting the virtualization scene, and this month isn’t going to be any different! We have five hot topics for you this month, everything from Virtualizing Oracle to Delivering IT as a Service! And for a special treat we have Chad’...

SQL server in virtual environments. There was a new study released concerning virtulaizing SQL Server. Since vCenter server together with vSphere update manager can use SQL databases, so those databases can be created or moved to real SQL server (not MSDE). And it’s good to know that the performances of virtualized SQL server are close to native performance. The author of the d...

There are a lot of products and product features available for creating a (more or less) high available environment. If you look at Microsoft SQL Server you have the option to create a Microsoft Cluster, you can use Marathon everRun,  VMware Fault Tolerance if you have a 1 vCPU SQL server, etc. When I was researching the [...]

A colleague of mine dropped by my desk on Friday to talk about storage best practices for virtualized databases (SQL Server in this case).  He observed a VMware deployment where the data and log files for a SQL Server virtual machine were consolidated on a single VMFS volume backed by a RAID 5 LUN.  ”Is this a VMware best practice?” he asked.  ”Should you not put the redo lo...