Microsoft Document Watch for Operational Excellence

KKline — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 19:59:00 GMT

Back when my day-to-day duties included database administration work and enterprise architecture, I became rather obsessed with the idea of operational excellence. I read everything I could on the topic. I made a list of favorites, which became somewhat shabby over time, as I dog-eared important pages and scribbled notes in the margins. (Perhaps that list of favorites might, in and of itself, make a good blog post). Fast-forward a decade and I'm still mightily interested in operational excellence for IT organizations. It's just that so much good material is available for free on the web. Here's a run-down of several useful documents and downloads to improve overall operation performance for those of you in a Microsoft-centric IT organization:

Microsoft Operations Framework

Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) version 4.0 guide is practical guidance for IT organizations. With the release of version 4.0, MOF now reflects a single, comprehensive IT service lifecycle—it helps IT professionals connect service management principles to everyday IT tasks and activities and ensures alignment between IT and the business.

Infrastructure Planning and Design

The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.2 (for IT Professionals)

The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer provides a streamlined method to identify missing security updates and common security misconfigurations. MBSA 2.2 is a minor upgrade correct minor issues and add optional catalog support.

Security Compliance Manager

The Microsoft Security Compliance Manager provides centralized security baseline management features, a baseline portfolio, customization capabilities, and security baseline export flexibility to accelerate your organization’s ability to efficiently manage the security and compliance process for the most widely used Microsoft technologies.

Pain of the Week/Expert's Perspective: Performance Tuning for Backups and Restores

KKline — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:39:00 GMT

First off - the Pain of the Week webcast series has been renamed. It's now known as The Expert's Perspective. Please join us for future webcasts and, if you're interested in speaking, drop me a note to see if we can get you on the roster!

The bigger your databases get, the longer backups take. That doesn't really seem like a huge problem — until disaster strikes and you need to restore your databases as fast as possible.

Join my buddy Brent Ozar (blog | twitter), a Microsoft Certified Master of SQL Server and good friend, as he reveals ways to make these critically important maintenance tasks run faster.

You'll discover:

Why Instant File Initialization is so important for restores
How to use DMVs to check restore progress
How to find the bottleneck while you're backing up or restoring data

Watch the recorded presentation at http://www.quest.com/events/ListDetails.aspx?ContentID=13358!

Enjoy!

-Kev

Follow me on Twitter at kekline

Microsoft SQL Server High-Availability Videos and Q&A Log

KKline — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 22:11:00 GMT

You Want Videos? We Got Videos!

I always enjoy getting the chance to catch up with author, consultant, and Microsoft Clustering MVP Allan Hirt. Allan and I recently presented two sessions covering an overview of high availability in Microsoft SQL Server and, the following week, a demo of how to implement several different kinds of high availability techniques including database mirroring, transactional replication, and Windows clustering services.

You can see videos of these presentations at the Quest Software Pain of the Week webcast site.

Archives of other videos are here.

We're joined by my new cohort in crime, Iain Kick, also renowned for his role as the editor-in-chief at SQLServerPedia.

Allan is the author of these and other books: ...and...

During the Q&A, we always get a lot of questions. Here are the collected Q's and A's.

~~~

Meeting Questions and Answers: Subject: Pain of the Week We -

October 14, 2010 Start Time: 14 October 2010 16:00:00 GMT+1:0

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Paul T Asked: General comment..... copying files is where I love the SAN replication. Don't trust it at all for real database stuff though!

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Sherbaz M C P Changes Question To: Please suggest the best back/restore techique for huge databases. Should we go for SAN level backup technologies or snapshots that uses SQL Writer? Storage admins claims that they can restore a 28 TB database in 30 minutes. They are saying that they can even take transaction log backups and restores.

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Ameena L Asked: When we talk to our management about SLA, Recovery object and uptime etc. They say just do your best. They expect no downtime but will not define any of this so how we determine what we are shooting for if target is not identified?

Kevin Kline Answered: That's why actually working through a recovery is so important. I strongly recommend that you perform a full recovery, perhaps to a dev or QA server, and then using that benchmark as the general rules for your SLA.

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Stuart A Asked: What do RTO & RPO stand for?

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Fadel Asked: at 2 part questions: part1- what is the advantage of having a sql clustering over Oracle RAC where in the first case, we have at least 1 node sitting there doing nothing waiting on the other node(s) to fail, comparing to the second case where Oracle RAC offers both, HA and scalability - part2: what is the new features on sql 2008 clustering compared to sql 2005 clustering - thanks!

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Mohammed Changes Question To: Shouldnt clustering considered as a local HA instead of DR since the other nodes are local?

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Alan Xu Changes Question To: Is cluster 2008 support sql 2005 instance and sql 2008 instance in the same cluster?

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sjohn Asked: What is the maximum recomended distance for a synced mirroring with a reasonable size of pipe

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Anita Asked: You mentioned about multi - instance cluster( active-active)? I will be interested in learning more about this. we have active-active in our environment. Is it scheduled for next week?

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robert l Asked: Will mirroring work with a large number of "Smaller" databases? 500 2gb databases vs 2 1tb database

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Alvinator Asked: When log shipping if you have a large tlog will it ship it in chunks or the entire log file?:

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James M Asked: What are the advantages of Database Mirroring over transaction replication? or vice versa

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Martin Asked: IDEA - Maybe Quest should provide a Database Invenotry/Request to gather all the information for a HA environment

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Martin Asked: I am very interested in finding a holistic view to HA and DR to handle SQL Server. Oracle and even DB2 - are you aware of such a product/s?

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Alan X Changes Question To: How to handle SSIS in multiple instance?

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Nadim Y Asked: I was coming from a consolidation angle - looking to install muliple instances on each node within the cluster. Is there an upper limit or just based on the resources available on the nodes

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Mohammed Asked: IS clusteting possible in std edition sql 2008?

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Anita Asked: You mentioned about multi - instance cluster( active-active)? I will be interested in learning more about this. we have active-active in our environment. Is it scheduled for next week?

Kevin Kline Answered: Next week is mostly demos of how to set up these techniques. However, there are some resource slides at the end that point you to more websites and whitepapers about each of these specific technologies.

________________________________________

robert l Asked: Will mirroring work with a large number of "Smaller" databases? 500 2gb databases vs 2 1tb database

Kevin Kline Answered: absolutely! however, there is some management overhead in that mirroring is configured on a per database level

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Alvinator Asked: When log shipping if you have a large tlog will it ship it in chunks or the entire log file?:

Kevin Kline Answered: It doesn't ship the transaction log, it shipps the backups/dumps of the t-logs. That's an especially good use for backup compression. We have a lot of features specifically for this in our LiteSpeed backup tool.

________________________________________

James M Asked: What are the advantages of Database Mirroring over transaction replication? or vice versa

Kevin Kline Answered: We're on those slides now. =^)

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Martin Asked: IDEA - Maybe Quest should provide a Database Invenotry/Request to gather all the information for a HA environment

Kevin Kline Answered: I like it, Martin. I'll put that in my notebook. Btw, have you seen our "Discovery Wizard for SQL Server"? It does inventorying for SQL Servers.

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@SQLRich Asked: I've heard that not all of the SQL components are cluster aware, is this true?

Kevin Kline Answered: Yes, afaik, SSIS is one of the biggest offenders in this area. But I think there are others.

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Desi Asked: Can you mirror a database to more than one locaton?

Kevin Kline Answered: I don't recall the exact steps to do this, but yes. Also available with replication and log shipping.

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Mohammed Asked: IS clusteting possible in std edition sql 2008?

Kevin Kline Answered: Discussed on slide 11, Mohammed. :-)

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sjohn Asked: What is the maximum recomended distance for a synced mirroring with a reasonable size of pipe

Kevin Kline Answered: That's on slide 10, :-)

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Nadim Y Asked: Is there a maximum number of instances you can have in a multinode cluster

Kevin Kline Answered: Not sure what you mean, Nadim. Usually, I don't see more than 2 actives to 1 passive.

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Mohammed Asked: One question before we leave please..i asked this before also. Clustering is more Local HA and mirrroing/ls is DR...is this correct?

Kevin Kline Answered: Clustering across fibre can be miles, sometimes many miles distant, though it's uncommon. Mirroring and log shipping can be long-distance. Latency varies per technology type and is also another issue as to whether the solution is considered HA or DR.

Search results matching tags 'Best Practices' and 'High Availability'

Microsoft Document Watch for Operational Excellence

Microsoft Operations Framework

Infrastructure Planning and Design

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer 2.2 (for IT Professionals)

Security Compliance Manager

Pain of the Week/Expert's Perspective: Performance Tuning for Backups and Restores

Microsoft SQL Server High-Availability Videos and Q&A Log

You Want Videos? We Got Videos!