MS-SQL Windows Server Failover Clustering on VCF - Best Practices

MS-SQL Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) is used for MS-SQL High Availability deployment on VMware VCF. 

Traditional (historical) WSFC deployment model is Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) Always On Failover Cluster Instance (FCI). Always On Failover Cluster Instance is a Microsoft SQL Server high-availability technology that provides instance-level protection. This means that the entire SQL Server installation including binaries, system databases (like master and msdb), user databases, logins, and SQL Server Agent jobs, is protected and fails over as a single cohesive unit to another node in the cluster if a failure occurs. 

An FCI uses a virtual identity (virtual network name and IP address) that is independent of the underlying physical or virtual node names, allowing applications to connect seamlessly regardless of which node is active.

An FCI requires shared storage accessible by all nodes in the cluster and supporting SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations (PR). vSAN ESA is a perfect fit for such shared storage.

Let's document typical topics and best practices about WSFC/FCI.

Virtualization of Microsoft SQL and AD

Lot of customers are still dependent on Microsoft operating systems and applications. The most business critical applications are Active Directory and Microsoft SQL Server. Virtualization of these business critical systems is easy up to some scale and availability. When the scalability, performance and availability are top priority, your Technical Design is starting to be more complex. That's exactly where the fun starts,

Following four documents are great sources for any virtualization of business critical Enterprise application on VMware Platform.

Private VLANs (PVLANs) in VMware vSphere ESXi

Private VLANs (PVLANs) provide a powerful way to improve network segmentation and security without creating a large number of traditional VLANs. They allow traffic isolation within a single logical VLAN, which is especially useful in multi-tenant environments, DMZs, and enterprise application tiers. 

PVLAN explained - Promiscuous, Community, Isolated

Let's dive deeper. 

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture and Fleet Components Latency

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Architecture is prepared to cover the whole planet. If your business covers the whole globe you proably have datacenters at least in three regions where these regions are typically located at EMEA (Europe / EU), AMER (America / United States), APJ (Asia / Malaysia, India, etc.). 

For such deployments, you have to consider network latency and the following diagram is for you.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Fleet Latency

However, there is also VCF Minimal Architecture starting with just 4 ESXi hosts (servers). 

In the rest of this blog post I will describe VCF terminology, VCF components and relationship between them.

VMware Certified Distinguished Expert (VCDX)

VMware is excited to announce the evolution of this iconic certification into a new, broader, and more inclusive framework: the VMware Certified Distinguished Expert (VCDX). This updated program extends beyond traditional design specializations and now welcomes a wider community of top-tier professionals, including Architects, Administrators, and Support specialists. The name change reflects a larger vision: to recognize excellence across all expert roles that shape, operate, and safeguard VMware Cloud Foundation environments at scale.

Introducing the VMware Certified Distinguished Expert (VCDX): A New Era for Elite Private Cloud Professionals.

 

How to expand ZFS on FreeBSD

Running out of disk space is one of the leading causes of IT outages. In this blog post, I will show you how to expand storage on FreeBSD with ZFS. ZFS works as volume manager and filesystem.

Datacenter Power Costs and Their Impact in the Virtualized World

I recently conducted a quick analysis of a VMware vSphere–based virtual datacenter for a customer, and here’s what I found.

The average monthly electricity consumption of a single vCPU with ~3 GB vRAM is 1.4 kWh, which translates to approximately $0.4  

The datacenter of my customer is located in Central Europe, and they pay 0.33 USD for 1 kWh of electricity in a Tier 3 datacenter facility (UPS + cooling included in energy cost).

Here are my questions for the broader worldwide infrastructure community.

• Q1: How much do you pay for electricity in your data center or server facility?
• Q2: What are the statistics of your cluster (CPU, memory, # of VMs, # of vCPUs, # of vRAM)?
• Q3: How much power do your physical servers consume on average?

For vSphere Cluster statistics, you can use the PowerCLI script Get-ClusterDensity. I use it to compare virtual cluster metrics (# of VMs, # of vCPUs) with the actual power consumption of physical servers, which you can obtain from your hardware’s management tools.

If you want to dive deeper into my quick analysis, read on.