Release of Virtualizing MSFT Business Critical Apps book!

After months of late nights and hard work, I’m very happy to announce that the book Virtualizing Microsoft Business Critical Applications on VMware vSphere, co-authored with Alex Fontana of VMware, has been released!  The official release date from VMware Press was August 7th, and it will be officially in stock at Amazon on August 16th.  It can be ordered from…

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Changes in support for virtual machine snapshots for SQL Server

First off, I have to say that writing a book and working on a challenging project for a customer at the same time does not translate well into having a lot of time to blog.  Shame on me – I need to do better. Back to business.  Last year I wrote an article about using virtual machine snapshots with business…

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New Book Coming Soon: Virtualizing Microsoft Business Critical Applications on VMware vSphere

I’m very pleased and excited to announce that the book I’m co-authoring, Virtualizing Microsoft Business Critical Applications on VMware vSphere, is available for both pre-order on Amazon as well as in Rough Cuts format from VMware Press.  Though the release dates online currently list a September release date we’re working with VMware Press to try to get it released before…

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Cloning Windows Server 2012 Domain Controllers on vSphere 5

Microsoft introduced a lot of virtualization awareness in Windows Server 2012, particularly for domain controllers.  They are, for the most part, considered virtualization “safeguards” in that they prevent against some of the classic problems of virtualizing domain controllers.  Historically things like virtual machine snapshots, restoring from virtual machine image backups, or cloning domain controllers was either difficult or impossible.  With…

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Windows 2012 Failover Clusters and vSphere 5.1

How many of you actually read through the release notes of a new vSphere release?  Ok, I know that Maish does.  If you read Maish’s post or read the vSphere 5.1 Release Notes you would see the following: Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering is not supported If you try to create a cluster for Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012,…

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Licensing SQL 2012 in a VM with Hyper-threading

When I talk to customers about running SQL in a virtual machine I often refer to the SQL 2012 Licensing Guide to make sure I have the latest information.  This document has changed quite a few times over the last year and I often find something new that I didn’t notice in the prior version (or simply wasn’t there). Last…

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New SQL 2012 Licensing and Its Impact On Virtualization

Last week Microsoft released their updated licensing scheme for SQL Server 2012, which is due to be released next year.  Though there are a number of changes to the product and to how it is licensed, in my mind the biggest change is that Microsoft has moved to a per core licensing model for SQL.  The Server + CAL model…

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