VM-Aware » Microsoft

SQL Server Install Checklists

Paul Shannon — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:44:32 +0000

Brent Ozar has been writing excellent articles for a long, long time, so I’m not sure how I managed to take so long to find these two little beauties:

Pre-Install Checklist

Post-Install Checklist

These puppies are firmly in the indispensable section of my bookmarks.

Thanks Brent

SysInternals Suite Updated

Paul Shannon — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:56:52 +0000

Just a quickie to let you know that the incredibly useful SysInternals Suite has been updated recently and can be downloaded here.

The following packages are included:

AccessChk
AccessEnum
AdExplorer
AdRestore
Autologon
Autoruns
BgInfo
CacheSet
ClockRes
Contig
Coreinfo
Ctrl2Cap
DebugView
Desktops
DiskExt
DiskMon
DiskView
Disk Usage (DU)
EFSDump
FileMon
Handle
Hex2dec
Junction
LDMDump
ListDLLs
LiveKd
LoadOrder
LogonSessions
NewSid
NTFSInfo
PageDefrag
PendMoves
PortMon
ProcessExplorer
Process Monitor
ProcFeatures
PsExec
PsFile
PsGetSid
PsInfo
PsKill
PsList
PsLoggedOn
PsLogList
PsPasswd
PsService
PsShutdown
PsSuspend
RegDelNull
RegJump
RegMon
RootkitRevealer
SDelete
ShareEnum
ShellRunas
SigCheck
Streams
Strings
Sync
TCPView
VolumeID
WhoIs
WinObj
ZoomIt

Microsoft Exchange 2007 Sizing Chart

Paul Shannon — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:52:39 +0000

A very nice article regarding Exchange 2007 server sizing can be found here at msexchange.org.

It talks about how to size depending on the amount of mailboxes, mailstores and users.

Virtualising Office 2007 In 30 Steps

Paul Shannon — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:39:51 +0000

Brian Madden has created an article that walks you through using Microsoft’s SoftGrid product to sequence or virtualise Microsoft Office 2007 in 30 easy to follow steps.

It is worth a read even if you don’t own SoftGrid as the concepts can be applied to other Application Virtualisation products. I used the section about tweaking the virtual registry (step 24in ThinApp and it worked a treat.

Read it here. Thanks Brian!!

Speed Up Windows (VMs & Physical)

Paul Shannon — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:59:50 +0000

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:

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

VMware Is Best… According To VMware & Me!

Paul Shannon — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:36:48 +0000

VMware recently published an article on the Virtual Reality blog that raises some interesting points as to why VMware is better than Xen & Hyper-V.

Some of the areas that get particular analysis are:

Uptime
Direct driver model
Memory management

More interesting still are some of the comments to post, have clearly been made by Citrix & Microsoft employees or people with a vested interest.

I find some of the points amusing, but my 2 penneth worth is thus:

No VMotion or equivalent = not production ready

I think that this in itself is a good enough reason to use VMware over anything else.

Microsoft Product Licensing Clarified

Paul Shannon — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:42:14 +0000

I stumbled across this great pdf, call it Microsoft Licensing for Dummies or whatever you want, but it has a great breakdown of how licensing should be undertaken to be fully legit.

Server & CAL Licensing
Enterprise CAL Suite
Core CAL Suite
Server Licensing
Licensing Exchange Server

It even has a stab at Sharepoint, but I think that this is better handled by reading one of my earlier posts. Thanks to vinf.net for the original spot.

SQL Server Bottlenecks

Paul Shannon — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:23:56 +0000

The guys over at PSS SQL Blog have written a short but really sweet article about how to really detect whether you have a bottleneck with SQL Server implementations.

It gives a few pointers of what to look for if you really start digging including:

PAGE I/O Waits (select * from sys.dm_os_wait_stats where wait_type like ‘%PAGEIO%’)
Virtual File Stats (select * from sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(-1, -1))
Stalled I/O Warnings
Additional disk based performance counters and available hardware utilities

I found this useful recently when SQL Server was virtualised and all other methods of monitoring looked fine (perfmon, vCharter), but couldn’t find the problem.

Bash Vs Powershell

Paul Shannon — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:56:04 +0000

Here’s an interesting little piece comparing Microsoft’s PowerShell to good old Bash.

It is as non-biased as I have seen these comparisons be and it does a good job of pointing out the major difference, PowerShell is object-oriented and Bash isn’t. I don’t think that this in itself is reason enough to consider one better than the other, but it does mean that PowerShell can have a very steep learning curve whilst overall being more powerful.

It is an interesting PDF so have a look if you get chance.

Moving WSUS To New Location

Paul Shannon — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:21:05 +0000

A customer recently asked me how to increase the boot disk size of a Windows VM to increase the space available to WSUS.

I recommended using the WSUSutil command to move the data to a different drive rather than extend a boot drive.

Extending drives in ESX is very straightforward and it will work on a boot drive, however, Windows will not let you extend the boot drive into the new space using diskpart, whereas it will allow it on a non-boot drive.