In Just Days: See YOU at the Virtual Conference
20 different speakers are pulling together their excellent content, approaches and ideas and presenting it to you! SQL Server tips, best practices, tools, tuning and much more. Business Intelligence tips, approaches and specific how-to information, SharePoint information on setting up and administering SharePoint systems – all of this and a ton of different, entirely new and fresh sessions. Where else can you attend a conference online – a REAL conference – with 75+ sessions, and a lot of interaction, live chat, session replays, session transcripts and downloads…
Mark your calendars now for April 7, 8 and 9th – and get more information or register here. (Yes, group discounts are available too! Here’s the form.)
Featured Article(s)
Troubleshooting a SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov-CTP installation on Windows 7
This article is for an installation of SQL Server 2008 R2 NOV-CTP (x32) on a notebook computer after a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate(x32). The "Reporting Services’ fails to install. Troubleshooting follows leading to the cause and resulting in a fix.
Virtualization – Guidelines from a reader
I’ve had a few people write in about the fact that they’ve had experiences different from what I’ve posted thus far, both good and bad. I can’t publish all the feedback on this topic, but rest assured, it hasn’t all hit the newsletter yet. 🙂 I will be sharing feedback for several days on this one – from guidelines to experiences to pros and cons, there is a lot of information being shared and I want to make sure you get it. Keep those emails coming! Email me here.
From Zach: "In response to your questions maybe I will just lay out what our VMWare infrastructure is and how we have our architecture for a 4500+ user SharePoint Production, Test and Dev farms.
Currently we sit on VMWare 4.0 with over 250 VM’s in our VM Farm with 18 VM hosts
Our SharePoint environment and let’s just talk production:
2 WFE’s Running Web applications and Query Services Hardware load balanced
1 Index Server
1 CA Server
1 SSRS Integrated SharePoint Server
1 Enterprise Project Server
1 Database Server
Let’s talk resource’s for this Farm
All the WFE, CA, EPM, SSRS are Dual Core 4gb ram with XIV san storage
Index 4 cores 8gb ram XIV san storage
DB Server is 4 core 10gb Ram.
We are at the point in our architecture that we need more resources for our DB Server. We want 16gb of ram. But our system guys don’t want to dedicate ¼ of a VM hosts ram to one box because of several factors but an important one is VMotion to another box that is already pretty well taxed and boom now more users are getting impacted by pour performance, not just the SharePoint users.
In addition if you look at the performance metrics of this server it is at a very constant 80% load memory and cpu. In VM world you like spikes, this server does not provide a lot of spikes and valleys. Again why even our VM Admin who has guzzled the VM Kool-Aid is saying it’s time to get this SQL box off of VM. Another reason we also want to cluster and mirror our DB backend.
Your questions ultimately were leaning towards any guidelines. Really it is coming down to just the physical load on a VM host and the performance metrics which would show lots of transactions(it is a SharePoint DB Server!, EPM, and SSRS).
All in all we are moving our DB server for this application off of VMWare and going physical."