I've only ever used Redgate, but have heard good things about ApexSQL.

General Info

ESXi1 – Dell R710 – VMWare ESXi5.0.0
2x Intel Xeon E5607 (4 core, no Hyperthreading)
64GB RAM
1TB Local

ESXi2 – R610 - VMWare ESXi5.0.0
2x Intel Xeon E5645 (6 core, 24 Threads)
64GB RAM
NO Local

ESXi4 – R620 - VMWare ESXi5.0.0
2x Intel Xeon E5-2640 (6 core, 24 Threads)
64GB RAM
NO Local

@eddiejennings said in Who needs an MSDN subscription?:

@bigbear said in Who needs an MSDN subscription?:

@tim_g said in Who needs an MSDN subscription?:

@eddiejennings said in Who needs an MSDN subscription?:

This thread is inspired by the never-ending thread about licensing and replication in I Can't Even.

I know that developers who use Visual Studio probably get their Visual Studio license through an MSDN subscription. One benefit of the subscription is that you're allowed to spin up Windows servers, SQL servers, etc., for development and testing.

For organizations who have full-on lab environments or IT staff who need to spin up a VM Windows Server VM here and there to try something out, how do they stay in compliance? Do they also buy a MSDN subscription (perhaps MSDN platforms) for the IT staff member? Do they have their IT staff continually use Windows server 180-day evaluation licenses? Do they turn a blind eye as they give their IT staff activation keys from a dev's MSDN subscription and hope their organization is never audited?

MSDN subscriptions are user-specific. To stay in compliance, every person who wants to take advantage of an MSDN benefit, will need to have their own MSDN subscription. They cannot be shared. Any VM spun up under the MSDN subscription cannot be used in any way by another person.

Ah, didnt read the full OP post and assumed it was for him.

However Bizspark MSDN does provide startup organizations with multiple user accounts all for internal use and testing. It is not for production or internal use.

Yeah. It's not for me. I was just musing about the test VMs and such we need to spin up as IT, and I was curious how larger businesses or businesses with test labs license those test Windows VMs. I figured MSDN platforms wasn't used because of [see the above responses], but perhaps truth was going to be stranger than fiction.

Larger is different. Once you are of any size you have enterprise agreements and your labs are just covered.

@scottalanmiller said in Appropriate Use of Hyper-V Checkpoints:

@eddiejennings said in Appropriate Use of Hyper-V Checkpoints:

@jaredbusch said in Appropriate Use of Hyper-V Checkpoints:

@eddiejennings said in Appropriate Use of Hyper-V Checkpoints:

With this upcoming project of virtualizing our production stuff, I've been thinking through the appropriate use of checkpoints. I'm sure there are other articles on this, but this seemed to be a good read.

My grand idea is that checkpoints would be used before installing Windows updates or some upgrade to an application. You take the checkpoint, apply the update, and if everything breaks, you apply the checkpoint. If nothing breaks, then you delete the checkpoint.

I'm curious how this would be handled with a SQL Server VM or Redis VM. You'd update your VM, transactions start happening, then things break causing you to have to apply the checkpoint. Any transactions that were done would be lost, which upon further thinking probably doesn't matter, since you probably couldn't trust any data put into the database while the stuff was in the process of breaking.

You have to make sure you don’t have transactions coming in. Simple as that. Anything is a headache waiting to happen.

Makes sense. When I do maintenance on these normally, I stop IIS once downtime’s been announced, then do my work. So I’d just take the checkpoints at that point. I imagine once stuffs back up and I confirm things aren’t broken, Hyper-V just handles merging the avhdx file in such a way that SQL Server, etc is none the wiser. Or is there significant risk of stuff breaking if it’s running while that merge process takes place?

No real risk. Just performance loss.

And never enought to matter to any SMB workload I have ever had to deal with.

@scottalanmiller said in SQL Server Backup Design:

@jaredbusch said in SQL Server Backup Design:

@tim_g said in SQL Server Backup Design:

I'm with Jared on this one...

Backing up through the application layer (SQL) as often as you can depending on change frequency. For example, every 15 minutes.

Hourly and daily through the SQL backup tools.

At least daily full VM backup at the hypervisor level.

I prefer backups that use a standard file format, so you don't have to rely on Veeam for example to restore it. Veeam has screwed up too many times for me to want to rely on it like that.

I have never had been fail

Except for statements like this.

For some reason Siri does not like Veeam yet. Even though correct it a lot

@oksana Still backups are needed 🙂

We have plans to add an in memory database to ML in the future when more performance is needed, as well.

@grey This might help get you started. There are 2 types of change tracking for MS SQL. Pick the one most appropriate for your scenario.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/track-changes/track-data-changes-sql-server

@JaredBusch Sweet!

at "200 character width" I started thinking about the COBOL class I took in college.

There seem to be 3 instances where links weren't put in correctly. 3/4 of the places you imply that there is a link actually have links.

@aaronstuder said in Changing SQL SPN:

You missed blacking out some hostnames 😉

😆 Damn VNC!

In this case, it was a matter of the settings during the restore.

Under GENERAL you had to select your source and destination as normal. Destination was changed so that it was the new History file. Under FILES you updated the DB and LOG files to reflect the new DB, otherwise you would over write the originals.

This is where they borked it. They didn't mention FILES only going to OPTIONS, and there is where they mentioned updating the file names. The main discovery was that you need to uncheck LEAVE Source database in the restoring state.

When I emailed them about removing the 'borked' databases I had created the called me back. I mentioned it to the fellow and we had a short discussion on the matter where he took notes and agreed that the directions were incorrect. When I got to the part about unchecking LEAVE Source database in the restoring state he mentioned that he uncheck Take tail-log backup before restore

Hope this helps.

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