Operating systems

Windows 10 – I tried and came back

By Franck Pachot . I've tried Windows 10 one month ago, and I had to roll back because VirtualBox failed to create host-only interfaces. Today, it forced me to upgrade again, so I tried a little further... and finally rolled(…)

Using Windows 2012 R2 & dynamic witness feature with minimal configurations

F I wrote a blog post some time ago about using a file share witness with a minimal windows failover cluster configuration that consists of two cluster nodes. In this blog post, I told I was reluctant to use(…)

RAC Attack! was another great success at C15LV

By Franck Pachot . The RAC Attack  – install a RAC in your own laptop – is a great success at Las Vegas. The idea is to help people follow the RAC Attack cookbook which is available at:(…)

Windows Cluster vNext and cloud witness

The next version of Windows will provide some interesting features about WFSC architectures. One of them is the new quorum type: “Node majority and cloud witness” which will solve many cases where a third datacenter is mandatory and missing to(…)

IOUG Collaborate #C15LV

By Franck Pachot . The IOUG – Independant Oracle User Group – has a great event each year: the COLLABORATE. This year it’s in April 12-16, 2015 at The Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. I’ll be(…)

SQL Server 2014: FCIs, availability groups, and TCP port conflict issues

After giving my session about SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups at the last French event “Les journées SQL Server 2014”, I had several questions concerning the port conflict issues, particularly the differences that exist(…)

Don’t forget to configure Power Management settings on Hyper-V

Recently I had the opportunity to audit a SQL Server database hosted on a Hyper-V 2012 cluster. I noticed that the guest operating system had the Power Plan configured to High performance. This is great thing but when I talked to(…)

FIO (Flexible I/O) – a benchmark tool for any operating system

I have just attended an interesting session held by Martin Nash (@mpnsh) at UKOUG 14 – Liverpool: “The least an Oracle DBA Should Know about Linux Administration” . During this session I(…)

Windows Server 2012 R2: solving .NET Framework 3.5 installation problems

I faced a problem at a customer site last week when I tried to install the .NET Framework 3.5 – a prerequisite for installing SQL Server 2012 on a Windows Server 2012 R2. I opened the Server Manager and then(…)

SQL Server failover cluster, VSphere, & SCSI-3 reservation nightmares

When I have to install a virtualized SQL Server FCI at a customer place as an SQL Server consultant, the virtualized environment usally is ready. I guess this is the same for most part of the database consulting people.