vSphere 5.1 SSO issues

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing a lot of customers having issues logging into vCenter after upgrading to vSphere 5.1. I upgraded the lab and had some issues as well, but was able to fix the issues and wanted to share what I’ve learned. As you may know version 5.1 of vSphere requires the SSO service to be installed before vCenter can be upgraded. SSO is required for this version and cannot be skipped. ...

November 13, 2012 · 2 min · eshanks

SQL HA Mirroring with vCenter

We’re probably all aware of the benefits of clustering things like SQL Server in order to provide highly available data. But shared storage clustering has some drawbacks on VMware ESXi clusters such as not being able to vMotion. • Database Mirroring – SQL Server database mirrors utilize a non-shared storage availability solution, using built-in SQL Server replication technology to create and maintain one or more copies of each database on other SQL Servers in the environment. SQL Server database mirrors provide application-aware availability, and the lack of a quorum disk makes this a VMware-friendly solution, allowing the full use of vMotion, DRS, and HA. ...

April 15, 2012 · 3 min · eshanks