We've been seeing a lot of interest in optimizing SQL Server for virtualization private cloud deployment lately. Below is an attempt to put useful links to recent SQL Server virtualizaiton, consolidation and private cloud resources in one place, divided into a range of topics such as benefits, comparisons, products and tools, planning ...

Awwlright, both of you, my dear readers. I should not be writing this post, but I have to get it off my chest. This is part I of two Scandalous posts. Unfollow me now, before it’s too late. I have been around so many people lately who are loving, fawning over, peddling, drooling over and otherwise talking up virtualization, that I have to remind ...

On my blog post Virtualizing SQL on VMware Reference List, Oscar Zamora (Blog | Twitter) asked the following question in a comment: As a virtualized instance has the benefit of "failing over" to another physical box, would you consider clustering a virtualized instance? The answer to this question more than I want to write up in a ...

I’ve been managing SQL Server virtualized in production environments for nearly five years now, and in that time, I’ve had to do a significant amount of reading/learning about VMware as a hypervisor so that I could properly track down performance problems and in a lot of cases, prove to vendors that the problem wasn’t virtualization.  It ...

Last Thursday, March 25, 2010, the topic of Virtualization of SQL Server came up in the SSWUG Newsletter, with Steven Wynkoop asking if peoples perceptions and experiences have changed since the last time he covered virtualizing SQL Server.  I unfortunately missed the last coverage of this topic, but it appears from the newsletter that there ...

Traditionally, the time between Christmas and New Years is a bit slow.  Many people take time off from work and, for those of us still working, it's a good time to catch up on all of those low priority projects that have been on the back burner for the last several months. If you find yourself with a few extra hours, why not engage in ...

I have scripts that re-create my databases for testing and development purposes. But sometimes I want to take the data from a set of tables and move it as well – I could use SSIS, or a SELECT INTO statement, but what if I want to “re-set” the data to a point in time? In other words, load it with some “base data”? I thought this might be a good ...

I just posted a new entry on my SQLMag Tool Time blog that you might enjoy. Thanks to my friend and fellow MVP John Paul Cook for bringing Disk2Vhd to my attention on his blog. The free tool is enables migration of a physical machine (PM) to a virtual machine (VM), while the PM is running.  You can download it from Microsoft here.  ...

Microsoft sent me an updated ASUS bios (1902) to solve my problem of hardware virtualization not being enabled after resuming from sleep mode. This was an unexpected pleasant surprise after receiving this email from ASUS yesterday: Dear Valued Customer, Due to the win7 is not supported by the motherboard, so we suggest you to use the win vista or ...

If you regularly test software, or do development, then you probably use Virtual PC or one of the other virtualization technologies out there.  I like Virtual PC because it is free, easy to use, and gets the job done.  I used it for testing SQL Server 2008 from CTP to RTM, and I am using it again to test SQL Server 2008 R2.  ...