Hot off the press are a collection of Nutanix professional services for database modernization. Nutanix now has Xpert professional services portfolio to meet the needs of enterprises of all sizes in their database modernization and automation journey. The series of database modernization services will bring your Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle,...
Hot off the press is Nutanix Era v1.3. What is Era? Era is a database as a service (DBaaS) that automates and simplifies database administration, brings one-click simplicity and invisible operations to database provisioning and life-cycle management. Era enables database administrators to provision, clone, and refresh the database clones at...
​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...
A few years ago I wrote a blog post detailing an unattended SQL 2012 installation process. That article needs a bit of updating, so I'm creating a fresh post. I will also follow up on this post with SQL 2014 and SQL 2016. This time around I'm using Windows Server...
Session: BRK3557: Baselining and Benchmarking AlwaysOn Availability Groups In this session the speaker went through what SQL AlwaysOn availability groups is, and why the customer wanted to use it. Then he went through how he setup his testing, RAID levels, and listed the SQL perform stats that he monitored during...