Posts made by Shuey

@MattSpeller @DustinB3403 Thanks guys. It sounds like FOG is gonna be the next route to look into. I'm already getting a VM setup for the "server" and am gonna keep digging into their wiki.

@DustinB3403 Right, PXE booting essentially works the same way as how we're currently doing it. But it's a whole 'nother ball of wax. If I go the route of PXE booting, I'd have to make sure that all of our hardware supports it, and I'd have to still learn how to deploy using PXE boot (what would I use to build the image? what "server" would I use to host and deploy the image? etc)

@DustinB3403 I'm not sure if all of our desktops support PXE booting or not (some of our workstations are old, so I don't know for sure).

As far as using the VM as the image, I don't follow what you mean :-S...

I could use WADT, but since I've never used it before, it seems like that might be a lot of extra work to get it up and running (especially since I'd have to build a server for it, even if it was a virtual server). I like the simplicity of our PC techs being able to boot from a PE disc, map a drive to the network, and restore the pre-built image.

@scottalanmiller Yep

@scottalanmiller LOL

I've successfully built a "base Windows 7 image" in VMware and have been able to verify that it's working great when deployed to various physical desktops (using Macrium PE). My current dilemma though is that I don't have a solid solution yet for creating the image and deploying it.

I've currently been using a Macrium PE disc (free version) to build an image and restore it to a physical box, but there's currently a couple of problems with this method so far:

1. Even though I've successfully added all possible NIC drivers to the boot disc, and can see them all being loaded when Macrium PE boots, once I'm in the PE environment, it doesn't see a NIC adapter at all.
2. We're currently testing with the free version, but we're not sure this is something we'd want to use, even if we could get this working with the paid version of Macrium.

I tried building the image using PING, but based on my experience with that software so far, it's not working (I can't even build an image, let alone deploy one with it).

If I go with a different software brand, the ultimate goal is to be able to have a bootable PE-like disc that will recognize ANY NIC in a physical box that we boot from. I'm also looking for a solution that's simple to setup and deploy. I know some people might love FOG for instance, but that is NOT an easy/quick solution to deploy/setup.

Any recommendations?

@JaredBusch said in SQL Administration Woes:

@Shuey Your workload being as tiny as it is means that the other guy told you wrong. there is near zero need for the level of detail that @PSX_Defector and I were talking about.

I'm glad my initial hunch was right then. Thanks for confirming. I tend to overwhelm myself anytime I'm in a situation where I'm ignorant and/or inexperienced, and this was one of those times. I just always wanna "get it right" (and ideally "the first time" if possible, lol).

Thanks for all the feedback guys!

@JaredBusch said in SQL Administration Woes:

@Shuey just create a sql job to make a bak file nightly and be done from the SQL side. You backup software will get them when it snaps the VM.

If your backup solution does not understand things inside the VM, you current do not have a valid backup unless you get lucky.

Cool, sounds good - Thanks Jared! : )

@scottalanmiller said in SQL Administration Woes:

Hard to imagine many cases where four users will need many resources. It can happen, but generally, it's hard. How much database work can an accounting system need to do?

Right! That's why I'm still considering just leaving everything as is, and just do my usual two full backups per day (one at noon and one at 7pm - the staff work from 8am to 6pm). And I could also incorporate actual SQL backups each day as well. It's still new territory for me, so I'm definitely gonna need a little time to get my bearings.

@Tim_G said in SQL Administration Woes:

How many users use the software and connect to the database? What's the load going to be like?

We're licensed for five total, but only four people will be connected to it every day (until/unless they end up hiring a 5th member to join the accounting department). I'm not sure what kind of a load the server will have, but I can say that the previous server (also a guest VM in our ESXi environment) only had 4 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM dedicated to it, and a 130GB vmdk.

@scottalanmiller said in SQL Administration Woes:

VMDKs are "volumes" in the modern sense. That's an LVM layer. A partition, volume, LUN, array... they are all "disks" but we don't call them that as it is confusing like we mean separate physical devices. Making a separate VMDK for each is identical to making an LVM volume for each... just managed at the VMware layer instead of inside of the OS.

Ah ha! moment Thanks Scott! That's at least the third time you've taught me something cool that should've been more obvious but I totally missed it until you shed new light on it for me! : )

@scottalanmiller said in SQL Administration Woes:

The confusion, I think, comes from calling partitions disks. It's not four disks, four partitions. Which mostly makes sense. But four totally separate disks would be crazy.

I don't have it setup as four partitions - I created four separate vmdks for this server (besides the fifth disk which is disk 0; the OS vmdk).

@PSX_Defector Thanks for the link and info!

@Tim_G said in SQL Administration Woes:

It's still a best practice to set up those extra drives, especially if you have it virtualized.

For example, on your hypervisor, you might have an SSD RAID and an HDD RAID. You would put the "Database" and "Logs" virtual disks on the SSD RAID, and the "Backups" and "Temp" virtual disks on the HDD RAID.

There's no reason to put backups on the more expensive storage tier, or temp files. What matters is the database and logging. Generally, you should follow vendor best practices no matter what you see on forums... If Microsoft and your Sage software vendors say to set it up a certain way so they will properly support you, than that's what you do. (generally)

Unfortunately, the "support" person who setup SQL for us was just following a script. When I told her about the drives that I had provisioned, she said "I don't know anything about that" and refused to install to one of them. She also ran into an issue when installing and said she was going to uninstall the software and re-install it! During the re-install, she came across an error and had no idea what to do. I ended up Googling the error and found a solution and implemented it myself while she watched O_o... So as far as best-practice goes, our vendor seems to have no clue what that is.

As far as the types of storage we have, I work for a company who still lives in the dark ages in many regards. So on that note, our "storage" in our ESXi hosts is just some old 10K rpm SAS drives, and our storage arrays where we keep our backups are all running SATA drives! (all our storage arrays are old MSA 60s).

From what I can tell so far, it looks like all of the accounting data (which at this point I can only assume contains the database(s) as well) is only occupying 3.5GB (and that's nearly 10 years worth (and possibly more) of data).

As far as licensing Altaro's "database backup client", they don't have one as far as I know :-S... Some of that functionality may be included with their existing version, but last I talked to the guys from Altaro, they said they don't have a full-fledged SQL backup feature in their software.

I spoke with our previous SQL admin (Bill), as well as Sam and Jean from Altaro, and here was how the conversation went:

Me: One of our contracted IT Pros told us that we should consider going with Veeam. The major reason he said this is because he said that their software allows “instant recovery” for SQL server backups (whereas Altaro does not).

Altaro: Veeam does allow granular restores of single items from an SQL database, while we don’t currently have the functionality for that as of yet. It might be something that we’ll introduce later on, but no ETA on that John.

Me: Bill's reply: “I would not follow the recommendation of your backup vendor as it will allow you only limited recovery of the SQL database (ie point of time based recovery). I would really recommend a backup software that uses an SQL agent along with VSS to back up the server.”

Altaro: This isn’t really an issue in my opinion here John. As in, you’re going to have the restore points available for whenever you took backups. Regarding running an SQL agent along with VSS – this isn’t required as VSS would be taking care of truncating the logs and ensuring that the DB is in a fully application consistent state.

Me: Bill's reply: “That still does not answer the question if they recommend simple recovery model or not. I would confirm with them the recommend model, if they say simple recovery, then you need to look at something else.”

Altaro: Simple recovery model is definitely the way to go if you’re not backing up SQL using another software inside the VM itself for example. In order to truncate the logs, it must be configured to use a simple recovery model. The logs are there in order for you to be able to rollback in case anything happens. Whenever Altaro runs a backup it triggers a VSS job and thereby using a simple recovery model, that means that you will have a restorable backup via Altaro and the logs can be safely truncated in order to clear space being taken up by the transaction logs.

Altaro: Since you just took a backup, there’s no need for the logs in such cases. Again…this is assuming you’re not using some other product, or SQL backup itself in order to backup SQL from within the VM. In which case you can utilise a Full Backup Recovery Model.

Maybe I'm worry about nothing on both fronts (the disk provisioning AND the backups)??...

@JaredBusch said in SQL Administration Woes:

Your vendor is shit, but what you are probably stuck with.

OK, so after that long-winded preface, here's what I'm wondering:

1. At this point, should I even bother with all those other disks that my previous SQL Admin told me to build? Even if I do keep them, at this point I don't know how to properly utilize them (at least according to the original intended purpose).

Yes, you absolutely want them and you want SQL fixed to use them. Pay the price. You can easily get away without it for years and never have a fail. But when it fails, you will be screwed hard.

2. We don't have any SQL backup software at the moment, so I'm wondering how I should go about doing the backups... And a word of warning on this particular subject: My company would be more inclined to buy a dedicated application for backing up SQL (especially since we already own Altaro for all of our VM backups). They would also be thrilled if I could find an app that's "free" to accomplish the SQL backups.

You do not specifically need something to do SQL backups. SQL Server can do it all natively if you know what you are doing. See previous answer about paying someone. With the partitioned drive layout, the SQL server would be making whatever schedule backup to the backup drive. these are the SQL .bak files that you can restore to get your shit.

You VM backup process would then have these backed up.

I've heard legendary tales of SysAdmins who have done SQL backups all for free, but I'm still way out of my league on this topic, so I'd like some advice if possible...

ANy good SQL DBA can setup maintenance plans to handle indexing, cleanup, backups, etc. all from within SQL server.

Any good SQL DBA CAN do all that, but I'm not a SQL DBA, lol. So I either gotta pay somebody to take care of it, or I gotta hope I can learn and implement it while I'm in the interim (and hope it doesn't all go south during that time) :-S.

So in the near 5 years I've been at my current company, they've had a dedicated server for their accounting department and the software they use (Sage AccPac). They've been in need of an upgrade for years and they finally pulled the trigger on it a couple weeks ago, and the upgrade was completed today.

Prior to the upgrade, I built a new Server 2012 R2 server (as a VMware guest in our ESXi environment). One of the guys who built our network (prior to me coming on-board) told me to build it with four extra drives, configured as follows:
"Backups" (Disk 1 / 500GB)
"Logs" (Disk 2 / 100GB)
"Database" (Disk 3 / 100GB)
"Temp" (Disk 4 / 50GB)

Building that was all fine and dandy, but as far as installing and configuring SQL Server, and then migrating the data from the old server to the new server, I was/am completely out of my league.

Our vendor (ADSS Global) ended up doing the upgrade for us today (which included the SQL installation and configuration), but the lady who did all the work was not a SQL Admin; she is just someone who's been trained to do the basics that specifically relate to their software. She even said at one point during the upgrade "I'm not a SQL administrator, so when I run into problems, I call our SQL engineer". Needless to say, when I told her about the drives I had setup in advance for the SQL data, she said "I don't know anything about that. I'm just going to install it like we're trained to do (everything on the drive), and you'll have to pay $165/hour to talk to one of our SQL engineers if you need more info".

OK, so after that long-winded preface, here's what I'm wondering:

1. At this point, should I even bother with all those other disks that my previous SQL Admin told me to build? Even if I do keep them, at this point I don't know how to properly utilize them (at least according to the original intended purpose).
2. We don't have any SQL backup software at the moment, so I'm wondering how I should go about doing the backups... And a word of warning on this particular subject: My company would be more inclined to buy a dedicated application for backing up SQL (especially since we already own Altaro for all of our VM backups). They would also be thrilled if I could find an app that's "free" to accomplish the SQL backups.

I've heard legendary tales of SysAdmins who have done SQL backups all for free, but I'm still way out of my league on this topic, so I'd like some advice if possible...

Here's the one I've been using (before I found out about ShareX today - I'm gonna check that one out as soon as I have time)
https://lightscreen.com.ar/

@Dashrender said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

MSA60 is a DAS (external SAS attached disk array) not a server.

OH.. thanks didn't know that.
Then... what's the problem? Does the MSA60 have a flaw causing issues?

One weekend when Hurricane Matthew was headed our way, we shut down all equipment for 2 days. When I came back in to power everything up, one of the MSAs that we have hooked up to one of our VM hosts was no longer recognized as having a logical drive. Scott was saying that we should get rid of them because they're old and no longer under support contract. They really shouldn't be part of this thread because we won't be connecting them to the new equipment (which we likely won't be getting now because I told HP that it's not a good fit for our environment). They're going to call me about a possible consolation prize and pick a new winner for the main package that we've all been conversing about.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?

ESXi 6

Then NFS storage will work very well.

What's wrong with DAS?

Can you use DAS with a blade server? Most often you cannot. But I don't know this model for sure.

Sorry, I got side-tracked. I meant for our existing ESXi hosts. You told me that our existing DAS (MSA60 on each host) should be thrown out, but the hosts themselves don't have enough drive bays for internal storage. When I asked you for info about "new" storage earlier, I was talking in terms of our existing VMware infrastructure (because remember we had that near disaster when one of the MSA's suddenly wasn't visible at boot?)

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?

ESXi 6

Then NFS storage will work very well.

What's wrong with DAS?