This is the third installment of a series on our deployment of System Center at my workplace, emphasis on SQL Server MP. At this point we’ve got Operations Manager installed, and up and running, and we’ve been able to categorize all the monitored servers into production, preproduction, test and DR using groups that have dynamic membership rules. ...

I was fortunate to be able to attend the Vancouver BC SQLSaturday this past weekend, and it was excellent! Great sessions, good facility, well attended. Nice work, and a huge thank you to the volunteers that made that happen. One side perk: I got a copy of this terrific performance counters poster from Quest, which you can download as a PDF ...

At my office we’re about 90 days into our implementation of System Center Operations Manager for Windows Server and SQL Server monitoring. All in all it’s been a good experience, and I’m really excited to have access to this tool. I’ve logged a fair number of years as a DBA on products like Idera’s SQL Diagnostic Manager and Quest Spotlight on SQL ...

Lately I'm faced with a fairly ambitious data center move, and at the same time with an initiative to consolidate sprawling SQL Servers onto centralized clusters. It's a chunk of work, but these two notions have fit together pretty well: as long as we're moving SQL services and touching everything, it seems to be easier to make the consolidation ...