Saturday, August 29, 2009

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2: Bare Metal to Live Migration (In about an hour!)

In this one-off video, Matt McSpirit, Partner Technology Specialist at Microsoft UK, walks through a bare-metal installation of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (RC) on 2 physical nodes, hooks them up to an iSCSI SAN, configures the SAN storage, and then, from a Windows 7 (RC) laptop, validates, and builds a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (RC) Cluster. The end result? A Highly Available, Live Migratable, Virtual Machine!

All in about an hour!!

Monday, August 3, 2009

Getting Real - the smarter, faster, easier way to build a succesful web application

Getting Real is the business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies of 37signals — a developer of web-based software used by over 1 million people and businesses in 70 countries.

37signals used the unconventional Getting Real process to launch five successful web-based applications (Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard, Ta-da List), and Ruby on Rails, an open-source web application framework, in just two years with no funding, no debt, and only 7 people.

Anyone working on a web app — including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, or marketers — will find value, fresh perspectives, and inspiration in this practical book.

Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2008

It’s not uncommon to experience the occasional slowdown of a database running the Microsoft SQL Server database software. The reasons can range from a poorly designed database to a system that is improperly configured for the workload. As an administrator, you want to proactively prevent or minimize problems; if they occur, you want to diagnose the cause and take corrective actions to fix the problem whenever possible. This white paper provides step-by-step guidelines for diagnosing and troubleshooting common performance problems by using publicly available tools such as:

  • SQL Server Profiler
  • System Monitor (in the Windows Server 2003 operating system) or Performance Monitor (in the Windows Vista operating system and Windows Server 2008), also known as Perfmon
  • Dynamic management views (sometimes referred to as DMVs)
  • SQL Server Extended Events (Extended Events) and the data collector, which are new in SQL Server 2008.

We have limited the scope of this white paper to the problems commonly seen by Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS), because an exhaustive analysis of all possible problems is not feasible.

Because this paper is very long (102 pages), reading it in an online format such as the Library becomes impractical, so we offer it as a downloadable Microsoft Word document.