​This blog post is a bit of a departure from my normal enterprise tech topics. Recently I've been on a 'refresh' cycle for many of my day-to-day gadgets and Apple mobile apps. So I thought I'd share my findings, as I put a lot of time into finding what I...
​Now that we have the Windows failover cluster service installed and configured with a management point, we need to configure a witness. A witness is a 'third party' that enables monitoring of the cluster node status and assist with failing over SQL services. The witness can live either in the...
Now that SQL 2017 is installed on both nodes, we need to configure the Windows Cluster service. Although SQL AAGs don't use the 'traditional' clustering technology of shared SCSI disks and a quorum disk, the clustering service is required to manage the state and failover the AAG instances.For this procedure...
​This is the fifth installment of the SQL 2017 AAG series, where we do an unattended install of SQL on node B. We will use a modified configuration INI file that was generated from the node A installation. This reduces human error and makes your installs repeatable. With the use...
​This is Part 4 of the SQL 2017 Always-On Availability Group installation series. In this post we will manually install SQL 2017 on the first node of the cluster. We will then capture an answer file for SQL, which will be used ​for an unattended SQL installation on Node B...
This is Part 3 of the SQL 2017 Always-On Availability group series where we setup two service accounts and a security group. One account is for the database engine and the other is for the SQL agent. In order for Kerberos to work properly the database engine account must be...
First up in this series is deploying your two Windows Server 2016 VMs, which will be the SQL 2017 Always-on availability group nodes. Each VM should be configured with the same VM hardware properties. Selecting the right virtual hardware configuration is important, regardless of which hypervisor you are using. Memory,...
​In this series of posts I will show you how to configure SQL 2017 on Windows Server 2016 with Always-on Availability Groups. I will also be pointing out Nutanix AHV and VMware vSphere configuration best practices along the way. As you will see, 98% of the configuration is hypervisor independent.​SQL...
This post is part 2 of 2, of my NPX Architecture Guide how-to series. In this post we will cover sections 9 through 14, from the outline below. You can check out the first part of this series here. At the end I will also give you some more tips...
A couple of months ago I successfully defended my Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX) certification and became number 14 in the world to obtain the certification. You can read all about that journey here. As part of the NPX certification process you submit a documentation package which should cover all of...
​NPX Resources​Nutanix NPX Architecture Guide How-To (Part 1)Nutanix NPX Architecture Guide How-To (Part 2)​The JourneyAlmost four years ago to the month my career took a major turn. I just successfully passed the VMware VCDX datacenter virtualization certification, to become #125 in the world. You can read about my VCP5 to...
The other day I was at a customer for a fresh installation of Nutanix using vSphere 6.5. And for whatever reason, when they were resetting the ESXi root password to their default, it was fat fingered. When they went to add the hosts to vCenter, they couldn't add them since...