April 29, 2008 at 5:24 am
Hello,
To cut a long story short, my place is cramped and so I am getting rid of my 3 old desktops and buying a laptop with 4gb RAM and 320gb Sata drive the processor is a Intel Core Duo.
Before I get rid of my desktops, does anybody think I will have trouble studying using VMWare with this hardware setup, I plan on running a 2 virtual 2003 servers within a team, each with SQL server 2005 on. Also, does anybody think I will have problems learning clustering or DB replication and mirroring using VMWare?
Any feedback is much appreciated.
Regards,
Paul.
April 30, 2008 at 4:34 am
Sounds like a nice-enough laptop, although I'm slightly surprised that it is not a Core 2 Duo?
Certainly VMware will be able to snapshot your current 3 desktops and create Virtual Machines out of them (barring any unusual hardware or unusual drivers you have installed). Your 4GB of RAM should be enough to run 2 VMs, although if the databases are large then it will struggle.
These VMs will enable you to play around with Replication and Mirroring.
I think you are out of luck with Clustering though. To my knowledge, you have to first create a Microsoft Cluster, and then add MSSQL to the Cluster. There are many, many requirements to creating a Microsoft Cluster, and I'm sure running Nodes in a VM is not one of them!
April 30, 2008 at 6:01 am
Hello,
Thanks for your reply. It is indeed a Core 2 duo. Bit of a bugger I wont be able to do the clustering, but there you go. I wont be taking any snapshots of the old machines, I have chosen to just start again and build to new Virtual Servers on it, the databases are just the Adventureworks and Northwind Db's for training, though Im sure I will create a few of my own, so it nothing to strenuous.
Regards,
D.
April 30, 2008 at 6:28 am
If you want the experience of installing MSSQL Server, then a reinstall is worth doing. But otherwise, try doing a snapshot in VM - it is surprisingly easy and quick.
April 30, 2008 at 7:13 am
Hello,
Well the main reason I am redoing the lot is because I plan on going through all the SQL MS Press books again right from the start, 431 then 443 and finally 444, I really want to cement some stuff in and then do the 444 exam at the end, thats the only exam I have left to go.
Regards,
D.
April 30, 2008 at 7:23 am
Good Morning,
Duran if VMWare won't allow you to setup a cluster you can checkout Virtual Server 2005 (free). Below is a link on how to setup a cluster.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/virtualserver/deploy/cvs2005.mspx
Luke C
MCSE: Data Platform, MCP, MCTS, MCITP - Database Administrator & Database Developer
April 30, 2008 at 8:30 am
Thanks Luke, very interesting white paper.
I am genuinely surprised that this works. All my previous encounters with Microsoft Cluster setup have been severely restricted by the requirements demanded by Microsoft, for example documented at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309395
I quote from the main setup and configuration guide for MSCS:
"Clustering hardware must be on the cluster service Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)"
and, even scarier:
"All hardware should be identical, slot for slot, card for card, BIOS, firmware revisions, and so on, for all nodes."
Strange that MSCS can work quite happily on a Virtual Machine though...??
Looking at the setup described in the white paper, there is no reason why that same setup couldn't be created using VMware. Might be worth a try.
Andy
April 30, 2008 at 9:12 am
VMs work great for studying, but I'd recommend and external USB drive to share the load with your built in drive.
The VMs are alike, so clustering works great.
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April 30, 2008 at 9:48 am
Hello,
Thanks for all your feedback, looks I'm on for a bit clustering. Thanks for the white paper, I'll give it a read. Funny you should mention the external USB drive, because I was thinking about that, now I'll just get one.
Thank you all for your advice, I'll report back and let you know how I get on as it may help others, will be a while though, I have a lot to do before I get there.
Kind Regards,
P.
May 15, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Hello, I just finished setting up a Win2K3 cluster running SQL2K5 on my laptop here at work. I referenced quite a few sources, but this one was particularly helpful: http://www.blkmtn.org/files/VMware%20clustering%201.0.pdf
These are the steps I took, in a nutshell:
1) Setup a domain controller (this virtual machine won't be part of the cluster, but rather provides a domain for the nodes)
2) Create 1st node, with 1 ethernet controller pointing to the DC's network, and 1 more ethernet controller with a different subnet for the cluster heartbeat
3) Add shared disks to Node1, and make sure the following settings exist in Node1's config file:
scsi1.present = "TRUE"
scsi1.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi1.sharedbus = "virtual"
scsi1:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi1:0.mode = "independent-persistent"
scsi1:0.shared = "FALSE"
4) Create Node2, but instead of creating new shared disks, point to the ones previously created for Node1
5) Join both nodes to the domain, and use ClusterAdmin to create a new cluster
6) Ensure you create MSDTC on the cluster before installing SQL2K5 on the main node
Viewing 10 posts - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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