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SQL Server on a SAN: Dedicated or Shared Drives?

August 19, 2008

A reader wrote in and asked: We’re running SQL Server with blades and a NetApp SAN. We have a few hundred databases from 100mb to 200gb. All data, logs, tempdb, etc. are located in the same 30-disk pool. Apparently this was setup using NetApp’s guidelines. NetApp recommendations are to put everything in one aggregate, or…

Storage virtualization for SQL Server: friend or foe?

July 17, 2008

Brent Ozar

Storage

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Storage virtualization is a really slick SAN technology that does for SANs what VMware did for servers: it abstracts away the underlying hardware to make management easier. Multiple SANs can be swapped around back and forth behind the scenes without affecting any servers that store data on those SANs. It’s nowhere near common yet –…

Benchmarking VM Fusion storage

May 18, 2008

Brent Ozar

Hardware

I use a Macbook Pro with VMware Fusion, which lets me run a bunch of virtual Windows machines for testing. I upgraded my internal drive to a quick 320gb one a few weeks ago, intending to run all my VMs off that internal drive, making it easier to do testing on airplanes or in coffee…

VMware ESXi 5 on an Apple Mac Mini 2010 – It Works!

May 14, 2008

Brent Ozar

Hardware

Great news – Pedro Costa has got a working solution! Apple Mac Mini 2010, 2011, and 2012 models all boot a patched version of VMware ESX 5.0: VMware ESXi 5 Running on an Apple Mac Mini I’d always wanted a small VMware vSphere 5 (ESXi) lab farm up and running, and I wanted to use…

Windows 2008 with Hyper-V on a Dell Latitude D830

May 4, 2008

Brent Ozar

Hardware, Virtualization

My new work laptop for Quest is a Dell Latitude D830 running Windows XP. I gave XP another shot, and after a day I’d switched back to my Macbook Pro. I needed to use some of the XP-only apps, so I virtualized the XP image, and set about turning the Dell into my mobile datacenter.…

Dell EMC AX150i review

January 7, 2008

Brent Ozar

Storage

Dell AX150i The iSCSI EMC AX150i is resold by Dell, and refurbished versions are available pretty inexpensively through the Dell Outlet. We just picked up our second AX150i with 12 500gb SATA drives for around $6,000 total, or about $1,000 per raw terabyte. It’s a great deal for lab or development storage, but there are…

Ugly month of outages

August 17, 2007

Brent Ozar

Hardware, Storage, Virtualization

The past month has been a real challenge, filled with 70-80 hour weeks and clawing back from one disaster after another. In late June, IBM recommended that we upgrade the firmware on our DS4800 SAN controllers to fix some problems. We obliged, and two days later, our Exchange cluster rebooted without warning. We’d been having…