Pythian Group

Good morning and welcome to a new Blogrotate. We missed last week’s edition because last week was insanely busy. We take customer service very seriously here at Pythian, so when there is a conflict between client issue and a blog, the client always wins out. ‘Nuff said.

It’s been another busy week here and shows no sign of slowing, but here’s a few of the things we found interesting this week.

Operating Systems

The H Online is reporting that Linus Torvalds named one of the 100 most influential inventors by “The Britannica Guide to the World’s Most Influential People”. More info can be found there, as well as a link to some free sample pages from the book. Of course, Bill Gates was also on the list.

Could it be that Microsoft ranks third in Linux sales? Read the rest of this entry . . .

Happy Friday and welcome once again for news from the whacky world of IT. Big Thanks to Tim for pushing out last week’s edition. I was busy banging my head against a particularly nasty wall. If you think my head looks bad, you should see the wall.

I was at the Ottawa VMWare Mini Conference yesterday. It was quite interesting. There were some good keynotes by some good speakers. I especially enjoyed the breakout speaker from Cisco about their direction in the years to come, and I think I drooled a little when he was talking about the Nexus 5000 switch (578 ports ought to be enough for anyone). Also news to me was the Nexus 1000v virtual switch which is a plugin replacement for the standard vSphere 4.0 virtual switch and includes a full Cisco IOS for management. I also really enjoyed the breakout with the Ottawa Senators IT team describing their progression from physical to virtual servers, their challenges, business needs, and lessons learned. There was a lot more, including an enjoyable one by the EMC rep. I’m trying to get my slides and notes together and will likely post more on the mini-con at a later time. I won a door prize! Go me!
Read the rest of this entry . . .

This topic has been raised again and again and quite a few people have asked me how to configure RAC on VMware Fusions on Mac. This warrants a blog post, especially, that Mac is definitely the way to go for an Oracle DBA — a Unix desktop OS that just works. What can be better? Sorry, I digress without even starting!

Before I go any further, I should say that this is not a complete guide on the Oracle RAC install with VMware Fusion but just the hints on setting up shared storage for Oracle RAC using Mac as host for VMWare Fusion virtual machines (VM’s). The reader is assumed to understand how to setup Oracle RAC and has general understanding of VMware itself. There are plenty of guides on the Internet on how to setup Oracle RAC including VMware but they usually refer to VMware Server on Linux or Windows. Please note that I’m writing it largely by memory so if you hit any issue — please leave a comment.

Disclaimers are over — moving on!

The root of the problem is that VMware Fusion doesn’t support shared disks unlike VMware Server on Windows and Linux. If you try to update the .vmx file manually to enable shared disk, you get the error message “Clustering is not supported for VMware Fusion – this setting will be ignored”. Fear not — you are running the best desktop OS anyway! ;-)
Read the rest of this entry . . .

This happens to be my very first blog post with Pythian, and to kick this thing off, I would like to talk about building a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

As DBAs, we cannot separate ourselves from the grueling task of having to deal with the underlying operating system, especially as new versions come out. Running SQL Server also means understanding the operating system on which it runs. And since Windows Server 2008 has been released for almost a year now, a lot of customers are upgrading from Windows Server 2003 to this new version.

Installing SQL Server on a stand-alone server or member server in the domain is pretty straightforward. Dealing with clustering is a totally different story. The goal of this series of posts is to be able to help DBAs who may be charged with installing SQL Server on a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

The best approach is to always have an environment on which to run these tests. In my case, I run VMware Workstation 6.5 on my Windows XP laptop. Here are the steps that you need to take.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

This message is for our readers mostly located in UK and Europe but keep reading even if you are far away geographically – nothing is impossible in our digital age and you might actually consider traveling there in case of desperate interest. Your feedback would be useful, either way.

What I want to draw your attention to is that Jonathan Lewis has posted a call for attendees for a special event dedicated to virtualization technologies with Oracle. This event is considered by UKOUG and whether it happens or not depends on you.

I had a brief discussion with Jonathan at the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham last week and shared significant interest about virtualization that I can see from our customers as well as a fear cloud around it. From my point of view, an event dedicated to virtualization technologies would be very timely now to satisfy quickly growing interest and provide real world experience in addition to publicly available marketing-like information from different vendors. Knowing high quality of UKOUG events, I’m sure that this would be a great forum to share ideas and learn what others do with virtualization.

Have a quick look here if haven’t done so already especially if you are closer to managerial role or wear architect’s hat rather than DBA’s one. It’s not only about host virtualization but also network, storage and other resources.