VM-Aware

The Desktop Virtualization blog have posted a handy article on how to change the root password if you have forgotten/lost/mislaid it.

Check it out here.

I’ve found a multitude of blogs that point out that significant performance enhancements can be attained by disabling the File Last Access Time Check registry key in Windows Server 200x& XP.

I tried it and it does indeed make a difference, but don’t just take my word for it as Microsoft have disabled it by default in Vista & 2008.

Check out these blogs for various discussions about it:

• How To Geek
• Microsoft CAB Site
• PCTools
• VMwareInfo

Give it a go, unless of course you run an application that depends on this parameter being updated.

3Par have announced some back-end storage enhancements that can greatly improve the usability, scalability and performance of VMware VDI. Thin Copy Desktop has some of the following enhancements:

Automated Disktop Image Creation & Management - Storage level snapshots that are VMware VDI aware. This will apparently make desktops available in seconds instead of minutes/tens of minutes

Fast & Granular Recovery of Desktop Images - Recovery of desktop images in seconds via the use of scheduled snapshots

Greater Performance - Using Virtual Copy snapshots, which can share the same cache pages for common data within a snapshot tree. In the case of booting, most of the data is common among the virtual desktop boot images, requiring only a single copy in cache to potentially support hundreds of booting clients

You can read all about it here.

I have almost completed an installation of DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualisation product and wanted to find out about how the wider SQL Server (in my case) community feel about storage virtualisation.

It just so happened that one of the articles I ended up reading was written by the always excellent Brent Ozar. It discusses the topic using real life use cases and quite a lot of detail.

For the customer I have implemented DataCore, they don’t quite need to worry about some of the issues that Brent points out, but some of the points are certainly worth considering.