I had gone through few days of hands on training for Citrix Xendesktop. The experience of the training is good and it went through technical deep dive. 1 of the key thing we discussed during the training was about the databases requirements to support the Xendesktop and Xenapp infrastructure. Microsoft SQL will be 1 of the key component, and you will require to plan for the high availability architecture to support the production environment.
The best approach may just consider to build an independent Active/Passive or Active/Active SQL cluster to support the infrastructure. A backup for the SQL is always recommended to create recovery point in the event of data corruption. Most data on the SQL databases is the configuration changes, log and etc. Similar to VMWare vCenter Database.
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Went through a marathon troubleshooting with my client for the past 1 week to figure out the reason why a cluster failed in place and it could not easily rebuild back after 1 of the node evicted. We had gone through the process to re image both nodes and rebuild from scratch. Follow exactly the best practices and run through the cluster validation without any error. While we try to form the cluster, the system keep provide an unknown error which do not share much information from log. It just keep telling you that the node is not reachable or unauthorized due to security setting.
After few nights of troubleshooting, I was running out of clue. Came to the sudden, I accidentally search the computer name in AD under the category of Users object group, and I found an user account been created in AD with the same name as we define on the cluster name. I was wondering whether this could caused the confuse to the system. Therefore, I was suggesting to remove the user name temporally as it was not use at the moment and tried to reform the cluster. Guess what, the cluster form up as it needed to be in less than 1 minutes. We were so happy to end the marathon troubleshooting every night well and we were also very pissed off with the bugs we face here.
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To deploy Microsoft Cluster on VMware ESX 4.1 is not new thing, you may need to choose the right storage protocol in this case. According to VMware best practices, on Fiber Channel SAN will be supported with the current version. You will need to present the Share Storage via FC LUN to build the microsoft cluster in VMware environment. ISCSI & NFS both are not supported in this case.
You can view the Official VMware Documentation from here.
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Recently had found some weird issue while we tried to migrate virtual to virtual from Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to VMware vSphere 4. The import process done successful by the VMware converter, but we realized the network packets get delay while we performed the continues ping test to the virtual machine. the Ping respond had been delayed more than 1000ms in the LAN environment.
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I went through this article from Information Week and I absolutely agreed with the point been brought up by the author about the reason why Hyper-V is just not ready for Enterprise use. No question about Microsoft capabilities about the software they had developed. In fact, I had been with Microsoft platform for long year. But when come to virtual data center, I really believe CHEAP do not meant everything and they have a huge gap to close up the competition with VMware anyway.
You can read more from the original post here, have fun.
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