Microsoft Private Cloud Launch

Today I attended a Microsoft event where they discussed their private cloud offering. The focus for this was windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012.

Coming from a VMware background, and a light one at that, it seems that Microsoft is very serious about virtualization and their hypervisor.

Without a hands on, I can’t say for sure how well these nee features work, such as environment templates. The idea is you can design an application environment and simply “deploy” it. Looks really good in theory, but we’ll have to see.

Internet Advertising – You’re Doing it Wrong

I’ve been tasked with the job of finding a monitoring solution for our environment. Now that is a pretty vague requirement to say the least. I’m looking at tools that perform website “end user experience monitoring”, through to VM environment monitoring tools, and everything in between.

I was given a shortlist to work with – vendors that have been approved by HQ and HQ’s HQ, which significantly simplifies the internal procurement procedure.  All these tools are great in their own right – the price vs features puts all these tools in good standing, despite their different approaches.

This isn’t the big deal.

What I have found most interesting is how ad I see when browsing online from work have changed. I’m seeing a noticable amount of ad for monitoring applications. Most people think this is a problem – clearly Google or somebody else is paying close attention to what I’m doing. I typically see this the other way – if you know what I’m looking for, perhaps you can help my find something that I want to buy.

Here is the problem – all the ads that I see are for tools that I have already looked at. No number of ads here are going to convince me to purchase these products.

Dear Google and others – if you’re going to analyse my internet activity to place ads – at least place ads for stuff I haven’t already looked at.

Another case like this – open a flight or hotel booking confirmation email in Gmail. Look at the ads – I bet you mostly see ads for flights or hotels. This isn’t what I want – I’ve just been there. What I want is rental cars, ads for attractions at places I’m going to.

We’re getting there….

A project I’m working on

Although my current position is a DBA, I do like to expand my skills by setting myself interesting little side projects in my personal time. Having some programming experience, I decided I would start to build an application that would scan publicly available social media posts, and present them in website form.

Presenting them in a meaningful manner would be difficult. So I narrowed my scope to include posts that referenced pictures or videos. My plan is to present a constantly moving feed of “new” images and videos in thumbnail form, with clicking on that image obviously taking you to the original URL/post.

If anyone out there has any ideas or thoughts, let me know.

Team Foundation Server Cache

Today I was approached with a solution to a problem, and asked to implement it. Not an uncommon approach around here. The problem – TFS is responding slowly when developers check in or get the latest versions of code. The person approaching me believed the TFS cache was causing this.

Not being at all familiar with this, I started investigating. I found this MSDN page that gives a good explanation of TFS performance:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd904316(v=vs.90).aspx

After reading the section on cache size, I found myself at this page Change Cache Settings for an Application-Tier Server, and proceeded change the cache location & size.

After adding a new disk to the server (this is where VMs are worth their weight in gold), and modifying the web.config to point to this location, I found the cache started to form at this new spot. Perfect. I modified the size of the cache to take up to 50% of this new volume (10GB). This would give us a cache size maximum of about 5GB.

Before I started, I took note of the vales given by the TFS web service http://localhost:8080/VersionControl/v1.0/proxystatistics.asmx?op=QueryProxyStatistics, and I also noted the four Windows performance monitor metrics for the “TFS Proxy Service”, specifically cache size, cache hits, total download requests, and total files in cache.

After I made this change, I looked at these figures again. The hit ratio % reported by the server is virtually unchanged, as it the other metrics from windows performance monitor.

I’m yet to get any info from the developers on how their TFS is running. I’ll update this post when it happens.

LG and Windows Phone

As a proud owner of the LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone, I follow stories about both with a fair bit of interest. To the point I read Windows Phone Central nearly every day, as well as a number of other gadget blogs.

The other day, a report in the Korea Herald mentioned that LG hadn’t sold many Windows Phones. At some point this was turned into a story that LG had walked away from Windows Phone to focus on its Android offerings, particularly in the face of competition from the likes of Samsung, and one would also presume Nokia.

A spokesperson today confirmed that LG are still on board with WP, but at the same time focusing on delivering Android phones.

What can we take from this? Nothing really. The headline should be “Smartphone maker focuses its efforts on primary area of demand whilst keeping its eye on other areas”.

Monitoring your SQL Server environment

My last two jobs have been into environments where there was really no DBA presence prior to my arrival. Before that, I was working in well established environments with their own management & monitoring solutions in place, so all I had to do was start working. What I’ve since learned is there are so many different ways to manage your instances of SQL, it’s not funny.

I personally have used a “roll my own” solution, which has varied from place to place. The downside of this is having others eventually support this can be a challenge, especially if they are just being a “caretaker” whilst you’re on vacation. Using “out of the box” solutions can offer some distinct advantages.

One post I read today looks like a great place to start, using Central Management Server (CMS) in SQL. A great write-up was posted on SQL Server Central today. The post, titled Manage your environment with CMS provides a good overview of the solution and should be more than enough to get you started.