Server – Almost a ninja

Recently the company I work for has upgraded all their VMware ESXi licenses to Enterprise Plus and with great licenses come great configurations. So, I’ve decided to install a fresh install of vCenter 6.5 in a lab with a couple of ESXi hosts attached so I can start configuring the awesomeness like distributed switches (which will be documented too). I’ve always wanted to play with this, but licensing was an issue.

This is for a new install of vCenter, using the UI. I included a very brief CLI deployment too. I will also include an upgrade vCenter post to show the upgrade procedure from 6.0 to 6.5 (and the issues faced with that).

Continue reading Installing vCenter with External Platform Services Controller →

This is going to be a multi-part post, based on a very recent deployment.

I had to urgently build an AlwaysOn Availability Group and Listener in Azure on SQL Server 2014. The only issue was, I have limited Azure and SQL knowledge. I can maintain and install, and create a few scripts here and there. But not enough to be called a DBA or Cloud Boff. However, I decided this would be an awesome thing to learn how to do. So, during the course of man flu, about 40 hours of crunch time, I can now install, configure and maintain a SQL AlwaysON AG with Listener on Azure.

So, lets get cracking.

Prerequisites:

1x Domain Controller
1x Service account for the SQL Server Service and for the SQL Server Agent Service
1x Delegated permissions on AD for the cluster to create computer objects.
1x Load balancer (on Azure)
2x Windows Servers installed with a minimum of SQL 2012 installed
Shared location on each node (this will be used for adding DBs to the using a “Full” model)

Some of these pre-requisites are listed in this post – so don’t worry if you don’t know how to do certain things.

Continue reading Install and configure SQL AlwaysON AG with Listener on Azure →