I'm a big proponent of using the Windows firewall on all computers, be they clients or servers. It may not be perfect, but it's better than nothing. Layered defenses are key in the enterprise, so protecting each host may save your bacon some day. Many programs automatically add Windows firewall...
Yes, we are finally at Part 7 of the SQL 2012 failover cluster install. Now that your first node is healthy, we can join the second node to the cluster. The installer process is fairly different, since it will detect your existing cluster and ask you far fewer questions. It...
This is Part 6 of the SQL failover cluster installation, where we finally get to install the SQL Server database engine and related tools. It's been a tedious road, and you likely ran into some cluster creation issues. This is not for the faint of heart, and should not be...
This is Part 5 of the SQL 2012 failover clustering series where we setup two service accounts. One is for the database engine and the other is for the SQL agent. In order for Kerberos to work properly, and for the cluster to work at all, they must be Active Directory...
This is part four of the SQL 2012 failover cluster installation series. In this installment we will create the Microsoft cluster and add the storage resources. If you are using two VM NICs then we will also tweak their configuration. While this process is fairly straight forward, it can be...
This is Part 3 of the SQL 2012 failover clustering series we will configure the required LUNs and iSCSI components, so that Windows Server 2012 can mount the shared LUNs. As I mentioned before, I'm choosing to do in-guest iSCSI for the shared LUNs vice RDMs. RDMs are acceptable as well, and...
After teasing us last week with a vSphere 5.5 pull-down under My VMware Downloads, but no content, today we have content! You can now download the GA bits for vSphere 5.5. Seems a little odd to go GA on a Sunday, but hey, I'm not one to complain! My 20Mbps...
First up in this series is deploying your two Windows Server 2012 VMs, which will be the SQL 2012 failover cluster nodes. I have a standard VM template that is built in a nearly fully automated manner with Microsoft MDT 2012 Update 1. If you are still making your VM...
This series of posts will show you how to configure SQL 2012 on VMware using a Microsoft failover cluster. Now that VMware vSphere 5.5 is out, I'm excited that VMware finally got on board with officially supporting clustering the vCenter database. However, their only official clustering option they support is what...
So it seems to be fashionable to blog about one's VCAP exam experiences, so I'll jump on that bandwagon too. If you follow me on twitter, you might know I took the VCAP5-DCA exam today. While it's still fresh in my mind (no, not disclosing any NDA information), I wanted...
 Hot off the press is VMware Workstation 10. Even if you are a full blow VMware ESXi lab like I do, I still like running Workstation on my primary PC for various purposes. It's also great for web surfing in a stateless VM, if you are worried about malware. I'm...
For a few years I've been occasionally posting home ESXi "server " builds. The last one I did was for SandyBridge. I have two such hosts, and they've been working really well. But after attending VMworld this year in San Francisco and hearing about all the VSAN goodness, I'm going...