October 2008 - Posts
Based on hypervisor technology, the Hyper-V™ virtualization feature in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system is a thin layer of software between the hardware and the operating system that allows multiple operating systems to run, unmodified, on a host computer at the same time. Hyper-V is a powerful virtualization technology that can be used by corporate IT to consolidate under-utilized servers, lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintaining or improving quality of service (QoS). Hyper-V opens more potential development and test environment types that otherwise might be constrained by hardware availability.
It is challenging enough in general to right-size the hardware to consolidate current workloads and provide headroom for growth. Adding virtualization to the mix increases the potential capacity planning challenges. The goal of this document is to help address these by focusing on two key areas of running Microsoft® SQL Server® in a Hyper-V environment:
This white paper describes a series of test configurations we ran, which represented a variety of possible scenarios involving SQL Server running in Hyper-V. The paper discusses our results and observations, and it also presents our recommendations. Our test results showed that SQL Server 2008 on Hyper-V provides stable performance and scalability. We believe Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is a solid platform for SQL Server 2008 for the appropriate workload. It is practical to run production workloads under a Hyper-V environment, as long as the workload is within the capacity of your Hyper-V guest virtual machine.
For more information, please refer to the whitepaper Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Environment - Best Practices and Performance Recommendations.
It's fairly simple to monitor a web page in OpsMgr 2007 by using the web application monitoring feature. In this post I'll show you how it's done and how to configure a recovery task to execute a command or a script when the monitor status becomes critical.
Create Web Application using the following procedure (taken from http://sharepointnotes.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/web-application-monitoring-with-system-center-operations-manager/, If credentials are needed read the original post) :
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Log on to the computer with an account that is a member of the Operations Manager Authors role for the Operations Manager 2007 Management Group
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In the Operations Console, click the Authoring button
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Expand Management Pack Templates and right-click Web Application. Select Add monitoring wizard
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Select Web Application and click Next
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Enter Name and Description and click Next
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Enter and test the URL and click Next
The test will fail in the web site requires credentials but they can be provided later
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Select the node that will act as the watcher node and enter time time interval at which the test will run. Click Next
The Watcher Node must be an agent managed computer and have access to the web site
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Click Create
After the Web Application Monitor is created do as follows in order to configure a recovery task:
1. Open Web Applications under the authoring pane, Open the monitors screen:
2. Right Click the monitor under Entity Health > Availability and choose properties:
3. Switch to the diagnostics and recovery pane and choose Add in the recovery section, click the recovery for critical state option:
4. Follow the wizard, it allows you to configure a command or a script that will be executed when the monitor state becomes critical.
If you need to restart a service, You can create a batch file that uses the "Sc Stop" and "Sc Start" commands to restart the service on the remote computer (Use sc /? to get more info). Don't forget to configure the monitor recovery task to use it :-)