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Virtualization software these days has an amazing feature list that sounds too good to be true. Unfortunately, some of it actually is: it’s still just smoke and mirrors. In this podcast, Brent explains some features that aren’t quite ready for prime time.

In the podcasts, we talk about good blog sources for virtualization news.  Here’s our recommended virtualization blogs:

• Blog.ScottLowe.org
• Microsoft Windows Virtualization Team Blog
• VCritical – a VMware-focused blog that tends to be highly critical of Microsoft.  Read it with a grain of salt.
• VirtualGeek
• Yellow Bricks by Duncan Epping

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If you haven’t seen virtualization software lately, you’re in for a great surprise: there’s some killer features to make SQL Server administration easier. In this video, Brent covers some of those features that might sound like smoke and mirrors, but they’re really real.

The scripts and related links for this podcast are:

• SQL Server Virtualization – the wiki article about virtualization of SQL Server.
• Microsoft Hyper-V Server – free download of Microsoft’s virtualization server.
• VMware Server – free download of VMware’s virtualization server.

If you have an MP3 player or a portable video player and you want to download our videos automatically, you can subscribe to our podcast feeds here:

• MP4 (Apple) Video Feed
• WMV (Microsoft) Video Feed
• MP3 Audio-Only Feed
• Zune One-Click Subscribe for Video
• Zune One-Click Subscribe for MP3

You can also download this video to watch it later:

• MP4 (Apple) Video Download
• WMV (Microsoft) Video Download
• MP3 Audio-Only Download

What’s going on in the virtualization market? Brent starts comparing Microsoft’s Hyper-V with VMware ESX, and gives the answer in a nutshell.

The scripts and related links for this podcast are:

• SQL Server Virtualization – the wiki article about virtualization of SQL Server.
• Microsoft Hyper-V Server – free download of Microsoft’s virtualization server.
• VMware Server – free download of VMware’s virtualization server.

If you have an MP3 player or a portable video player and you want to download our videos automatically, you can subscribe to our podcast feeds here:

• MP4 (Apple) Video Feed
• WMV (Microsoft) Video Feed
• MP3 Audio-Only Feed
• Zune One-Click Subscribe for Video
• Zune One-Click Subscribe for MP3

You can also download this video to watch it later:

• MP4 (Apple) Video Download
• WMV (Microsoft) Video Download
• MP3 Audio-Only Download

The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), Dell, MaximumASP and Microsoft have partnered to offer a free trial of the upcoming multi-server management features of the next version of SQL Server.  You get full system admin rights plus all of the SQL Server services – SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS too.

You can sign up for a free hosted SQL Server trial at SQLPass.org.

From the horse’s mouth at at the Windows Server Division WebLog:

“First and foremost, 32-bit is done. History. Archives. Windows Server 2008 R2 is the first Windows OS platform to go 64-bit only, and frankly it was high time. Customers have been unable to purchase a 32-bit server CPU for over two years now, and the advancements in CPU architectures really dictated that we squeeze as much performance out of customers’ hardware purchases as possible. The move to 64-bit is a first step.”

SQL Server database administrators everywhere are probably clapping with delight, but that clapping may slow down a little if you use virtual machines on your desktop computer for testing or development.  If you’d like to run Windows 2008 R2 as a virtual server guest, that means you need to be running a 64-bit host – which means your laptop or desktop will need to be running a 64-bit version of Windows.

Update: fellow Questie David Gugick points out that you can still run 64-bit guests on 32-bit host OS’s as long as your underlying hardware is 64-bit compliant.

Hi all, here’s a vblog entry that covers a bit more the topic of clock drift in virtualized environments.  This vblog entry corresponds to my blog post earlier this week. 

Enjoy and I look forward to your feedback – Kevin

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYoL7UPSNvs]

Last week, I was listening to John Rives, CEO of Amniox, speak about virtualization and clustered VMS (see pictures at http://drsql.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!80677FB08B3162E4!2292.entry.  Thanks Louis!) at the local SQL Server User Group meeting in Nashville.

John gave a really interesting talk about implementing virtualization and many of the benefits and pitfalls that you might encounter.  Most of the content was review for me, but the one concept that was new was a biggee – clock drift.

Clock drift is a situation in which the actual time shown on the physical machine’s (PM) clock, for example 3:53 pm today, is no longer in sync with one or more of the clocks of virtual machines’ (VM) running on the PM, showing 12:12 pm today and 9:30 pm yesterday.  This can happen because the VMs 1) only receive a slice of the PM’s total processing power and cycles, thus getting confused on the time, and 2) the application(s) running on the VM do not manually synchronize the VM clock with the PM’s clock or an external time source.  Naturally, if you’re running SQL Server, this can be a huge data integrity problem for you – especially for any transactions that record the date and time.

This is a fairly old-school problem, it turns out, and there are lots of hits when you google for “clock drift virtualization”.  However, the state of the industry seems to be somewhat immature in that the best hits tended to be blogs and discussion forums rather than vendor documentation or best practices papers.  If you’re developing applications for SQL Server that might be implemented on a VM, do yourself a favor and make sure you include clock syncronization processes as part of the application.  Otherwise, you might have to deal with a nasty clock drift problem.

Regards,

-Kev

Hello, this is Kevin Kline – join me tomorrow, along with Quest Domain Expert Brent Ozar and SQL Server MVP Ron Talmage, for a roundtable discussion on SQL Server consolidation and virtualization.  We’ll discuss a variety of issues that seem to come up constantly in the discussion forums – How are your consolidated / virtualized SQL Servers going to be used?  Are they running production environments with strict SLAs and heavy workloads?  Do SQL Server licensing costs make a big difference for your organization?  What about SQL Server management costs?  Will performance troubleshooting be an issue?  

The webcast is tomorrow, Thursday July 30th, at 8:00 AM PST / 11:00 AM EST.  Register for the webcast here.

I hope to see you there tomorrow!