What has been literally years in the making, Microsoft has just now enabled Microsoft 365 users to send email as a proxy (alias) address. Why is this news? Well Gmail Suite and other business email services have had this feature forever, and some businesses have a hard requirement for such...
One of the most popular posts of all time on my blog has been Create Trusted Remote Desktop Services (RDP) SSL Certificates for Windows 2008R2/2012/Win7. That article is a few years old, so I thought I would update it for Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10. The fundamentals have not...
​In this installment we will perform several tasks needed to successfully configure a SQL 2017 Always-On Availability Group (AAG). Tasks include Windows firewall rules (if you use the Windows firewall), configuring a replication folder, creating a small sample database, and finally configuring the SQL AAG.​We will need to create two...
​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...