Jeremy Carter

If you are interested in how you can work smarter with VMware vSphere, Orchestrator is your answer. If you haven’t heard of Orchestrator you are not alone. Until recently it has been one of VMware’s best kept secrets.

Orchestrator is a workflow tool that comes out of the box with a library of predefined workflows. There are also a large number of 3d party plugins that allow it to coordinate processes across multiple platforms and allow it to integrate with your own applications.

One of the coolest things about Orchestrator is that it allows you to enforce your business logic and best practices around how you manage your vSphere infrastructure. Gone are the days of each admin doing things their own way and occasionally forgetting proper procedure.

The other great thing is that it is FREE. It comes with vCenter so there is no excuse not to use it… Unless you don’t know how to use it.

If you aren’t familiar with Orchestrator, information has been a little tough to come by. That has been changed now with the release of the new book, Automating vSphere: With VMware vCenter Orchestrator . The author, Cody Bunch (website | twitter), is a Private Cloud architect and vExpert. I just purchased my kindle edition and started reading it yesterday. I’m pretty excited to learn more about it and will post a review when I complete it.

*Disclaimer: I work with Cody and am his co-author on two upcoming books, Exam Prep for VCAP5 DCA and Exam Prep for VCAP5 DCD. However any opinion expressed here is my own, for better or worse.

Well here we are, it is already time for another TSQL Tuesday. This month Jason Brimhall has asked what a dba should do before they head out on vacation. This is certainly a topic near and dear to my heart. While I certainly work my tail off and I am more than happy to be the first in and last to leave, I also like to play hard to.

In my current position I am pretty lucky all the way around but particularly when it comes to vacation time. I get a good amount of time each year and for the most part my team is very flexible when and how I spend that time. I’m not a production dba so there are not any systems which I am directly responsible. Instead I work as part of a small team providing consulting services for more than 9,000 servers running SQL Server.

So while I cannot make specific recommendations on what I do, I will try to make some recommendations from the standpoint of anyone walking into the unknown. There are occassions where I get called in because the companies dba is out on vacation. Whether it is a consultant or coworker filling in there are several things that can be done to help things run smoothly in your absence.

#1 Documentation- Document the heck out of everything. What is the application, who is it serving, what are the availability requirements, and how do we connect are great places to start. Take a few minutes and think about the db, the instance, and the server. Are there any quirks, any special jobs (particularly if they are scheduled outside of sql), or anything else that may not be inherently self documenting. The more information you provide the better, and the more likely your much needed days of R&R will go uninterrupted.

#2 Change Management - While this is a variation of #1 I think it is important enough to warrant bringing up seperately. I come from a law enforcement background and we were constantly told, “If it is not written down, it never happened.” I still firmly believe in this. Whether it is 3 days or 3 years later it is important to know what has been changed, when it was changed, and why it was changed. I can remember one time spending two days chasing down an issue only to find out someone had made a very simple and seemingly innocuous change. Had we known about the change and the time frame, we could have put two and two together and saved a whole heck of a lot of hassle.

#3 Monitoring – You are monitoring your servers aren’t you? It is great to see what is currently happening but it is even better to have a history of it. A good baseline of what is “normal” can go a long way. I have seen some servers that can easily handle and regularly do handle 1200 connections. Other times I may be on a server that regularly has 200 connections, but at 250 it falls over. Again this is about saving time and hopefully keeping the person filling in for you from running down unnecessary paths.

Looking over the post, I noticed a definite theme. In reality everything is a matter of good documentation and having good polices and procedures in place AHEAD of time. In the end it should not matter if you are skipping town for a week on the trip of a lifetime or if you need to take a last minute day off because of xyz… It is just a good practice to be prepared and make sure your absence goes smoothly. There is something wrong if everything will fall apart while you are gone and it is not a good situation for you or your employer. The real hero of the day will be missed because they are a true asset, not because the world stopped in their absence.

I have just released version 2.4.6 of SQLGlance. If you have not had the oppurtunity to check it out yet, now is a great time. It can be downloaded from the SQLGlance home page.

What is SQLGlance?

In my job I am rarely if ever familiar with the server I am about to work on. So I started to write some scripts to help me pull the most pertinent information from the server so that I could quickly become familiar with the environment. However it finally got to the point where there were too many scripts and I was still suffering from information overload. I desperately needed a way to pull all of this desperate information quickly and digest it even faster.

Enter SQLGlance. I wrote this to pool my collection of scripts into one place and generate a nice single page report that highlighted items of particular interest. While it is still a single html document the information gleaned has grown to 17 tabs of terrific information. So whether you have just inherited a new instance or want to checkup on an old friend, I hope you find SQLGlance convenient and easy to use. If you have any suggestions or comments I would love to hear it.

What’s new?

In this new version I revisted and tweaked a couple of older features. Namely I increased the SQL Agent job info from 2 weeks to 2 months. I also revamped the sp_configure portion, streamlining it behind the scenes and insuring compatibility with 2008R2.

I also recently watched the virtual training  sponsored by Quest Software and now available for on demand viewing. Brent Ozar had an excellent session on SQL Server takeovers which gave me a few additional ideas.  I have thus added the following information to a new Miscellaneous Information tab.

Is auditing enabled? Who are the securityadmin and sa logins? Are there any startup stored procedures? How about endpoints, resource_governors, triggers, or linked servers? Are the history tables in MSDB being cleaned?

Finally I had been toying around with the idea of checking for the Windows User Rights assigned to the sql service account, paying particular attention to the Lock Pages in Memory and Perform Volume Maintenance Tasks which directly relate to sql server performance. I really didn’t want to delve back into unmanaged code and I preferred to be able to remotely find the status. The answer ended up being a little utility called whoami which can be invoked with the /priv switch to display the user rights assigned.