Year: 2012

Setting up SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups – Part2

In the Previous Post, I explained how I created my 3 node Windows Cluster. Now, In this post let me show you Installing SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server 2012 for our AlwaysOn Setup.

As I already mentioned in previous post, we will be Installing 3 individual standalone SQL Instances(I’ll go with Just Default Instances to keep it simple) on three nodes participating in our Windows Cluster. FYI, I’ll be using the same Service account for all the three Instances.

Note: For Availability Groups, you should use the same service account on all the Instances participating, if you are using Kerberos Authentication. Use Separate Service accounts on your Production deployment only if you are 100% sure that your applications are not using Kerberos. 

I’ve already setup my service account in my AD and added as a user on all the 3 nodes locally and granted “Lock pages in memory” and granted “Perform Volume Maintenance Tasks” in local security policy.

Okay, now let’s begin the actual Installation.

Step1: I inserted my Media in my DVD drive and started setup.exe as you would do normally. Now I selected “New SQL Server Standalone Installation or add features to an existing Installation”. Got No Validation warnings as you can see below…

Step2: I proceeded further and Unchecked “Include SQL Server product Updates” – My Server is not connected to Internet/It can’t search Updates through WSUS in my case. Well, that’s fine! Once I clicked Okay, It started Installing base/Setup files as you can see below.

Everything worked fine as expected and got the below screen in few seconds…

Step3: Select your required features. I selected below shown features and Services.

Note: As you can see BIDS is gone. It has been replaced by SQL Server  Data Tools!

Step4: I selected Default Instance and my Root Installation is on E$ as you can see below(Screenshot Error, my bad).

Step5: Time to provide Service accounts. See below for my selection…

Step6: Time to choose Administrators. I’ll always add myself and the DBA group as Admins.

Very Important: Now, don’t just proceed with Next, go to Data Directories Tab and select your data and Log Drive paths. In my lab I’m having the same Drive letters and folder structure across all the 3 nodes and I recommend you to have a similar strategy for your real world deployments(Don’t leave it defaults…especially when dealing with named Instances, because SQL Server will create Folder specific to Instance name). This is required for successful Automatic Failover of your AG’s. If not you’ll end up with Database(s) not coming Online as expected and manual intervention is required(Similar behavior as DB Mirroring), which is not something we want in our real world deployments.

As you can see, I just created Folders named “Data” and “log” under my Data and Log Drives and will be doing the same on all other SQL Server Instances participating in this AG.

TempDB location is up to you and System Databases are also up to you. ( System Databases can’t participate in AG, same as Mirroring)

Everything is pretty simple/straightforward and went smooth right…..! Wait…..at this point my Installation had some issue and I got this annoying error Message.Erkkkkkkkkkkkkk…!@#$#

“Error While enabling Windows Feature : NteFx3, Error Code : -2146498298” while Enabling OS Feature ‘NetFx3’

Hmm this is something which we never expected at this stage, especially after we passed all the validations and checks at the final stage…! I Thought we will get this interruption only on Windows Server Core. Okay, Now we know we can expect this on Full Blown Windows as well(If we don’t take care of this prior to our SQL Server Installation)

Anyways, what is this all about? What is it talking about…What feature it is referring to? The Answer is “.NET 3.51 Payload“. Yes, we must manually enable .NET 3.51 Payload in Windows Server 2012. (Scroll a little but up and see the screenshot for Step3. you can see under the Prerequisites for selected features, it is saying that “Microsoft .NET framework 4.0 is already Installed, but it’s asking us to manually enable .NET framework 3.5 from GUI) For this you need to have Windows media handy or should be connected to Internet, OR you can enable this automatically by enabling Remote Management which you might not do on your Production Boxes.

So, How to Fix this Annoying thing? Yes, you are correct if you said PowerShell (Few of you might thought about DISM or Just GUI for adding this feature as you used to do in Win Server 2008R2….YMMV!)

Note: Even the Error Message says, go and enable this feature using Server Manager GUI, it might fail!!!….Avoid GUI for fixing this.  Instead use awesome PowerShell guys. I’ll show you powershell way of doing this…

1. Insert your Windows Media in your DVD Drive(in My case it’s D:)

2. Open Powershell as Admin and type  “Install-WindowsFeature Net-Framework-Core -Source D:\Sources\sxs” without double Quotes and hit enter.

After a minute or two, I got success message as shown below 😀

Before fixing this, my Installation was only able to Install few components and my Core DB Engine failed Installing as you can see below.

Once I enabled .NET 3.5 via Powershell,  I was able to re-Install the required components which we had issues earlier without any further Issues. Btw, I enabled this on rest of my nodes at this point to avoid this issue… 🙂

(May be I’ll come up with a short Blog post later just on this Error message)

Strange things right?? Anyways besides this error,  understanding Service Accounts Requirements and Data,Log Files placements for your SQL Instances is very crucial.

I’ll proceed further and Install standalone Instances on the remaining 2 nodes as well for now….Let’s see enabling AlwaysOn and setting up in upcoming post.

Hope this helps if you get into same situation as me while Installing SQL server 2012 on top of Windows Sever 2012.

Cheers!

Setting up SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups – Part1

I am in the process of setting up my lab for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups on top of Windows Server 2012 DataCenter Edition and would like to share my experiences . In this post, let me show you setting up your Windows Cluster which is the back bone for SQL Server AlwaysOn….

My Basic Lab setup:

4 VM’s (1 for DC/DNS and 3 other machines for SQL Server Instances). Before proceeding any further please make sure you understand the difference between AlwaysOn Failover Cluster and AlwaysOn Availability Groups(AG). They are not the same! Am talking about AG’s where I’ll be installing three individual Standalone SQL Instances on three different Windows Servers(These 3 windows servers will be acting as Nodes in a windows Failover Cluster, but with no shared Storage-No SAN required, can go with DASD’s or SSD’s or JBODS etc). In other words your Windows Servers participating in AG should be members of the same Cluster, but your SQL Server Instances can be Standalones which are completely isolated from each other! Hope am not confusing you…(Will explore more on SQL Server AG terminology in upcoming posts).

Note: All the Nodes participating in your Cluster should belong to same domain. Cluster validation may result in storage warnings as we are not using Shared Storage.

Step1: Build VM’s as needed.(For building VM’s and setting up networking Please see my previous posts on SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering)

Step2: Build Windows Cluster

Am on Server Manager of NodeA as Domain Admin-Add Features/Roles and select Failover clustering Feature.

After few seconds I got success msg as shown below.

Perform the same on all the nodes you plan for creating an AG.(In my case I’ll install FC Feature on remaining 2 nodes as well).

Once done Installing this feature on all the nodes, I started Failover Cluster Manager on my machine SreeSQLA and started to create Failover Cluster. Added my 3 machines as you can see below.

Now, it’s time to validating my Cluster(You can do this even before starting creating your cluster). See below warnings I got on my cluster.

Network Warnings I got:

Basically complaining about single point of failures, I am ignoring as this is my lab.(In our Prod environments, we should take care of these warnings before building cluster).

Storage Warnings I got:

Ignore them as we are intentionally doing this…
Now I assigned a name and IP for my windows Cluster as you can see below.

You can see “Add all eligible Storage to the cluster” button which is new to Windows Server 2012 – I unchecked it and clicked Next. After few seconds…I got the below screen 🙂

Now, for verification, see SREEWINCLUST being added in my AD.

Perfect!! Now Let’s open Failover Cluster Manager from Administrative tools and see how it looks with this strange configuration we did without storage.

As you can see it selected Node Majority(Remember, we’ve No Quorum Disk – FYI, we can change as needed)

It’s listing 3 Nodes and Networks as expected, Interestingly you can see “Disks” and “Pools” under storage(This is new with Windows Server 2012). If you select Disks or Pools you should see nothing in the right side pane as seen below.

You will get 0 pools as well under storage Node. Interesting Huh???

You can double check your cluster ip by just pinging your Cluster Name as shown below and double check everything looks as expected.

I’ll stop right here for setting up the foundation(Windows Server Failover Cluster) for SQL Server AlwaysOn AG!- Let’s see some actual SQL DBA stuff in upcoming posts…Stay Tuned!

Hope you learned something new and also hoping this helps in setting up your own lab. Cheers!

 

 

 

Logout/Log off in Windows Server 2012

Let me show you where you can find  log off Option in Windows Server 2012. I know this might sound stupid, but let me tell you this..I struggled for a while to find out where this is 😀

Most of us are already aware of this, where to get power off option right…? (Shown in the below screenshot for whoever is completely new to Win 8 World).

I got this Vertical Window by hovering my mouse at Bottom Right Corner of my screen, Once you get this click on Settings and you see something as shown below..

Well, I can only see Shutdown and Restart Options!! Where is this Log off hiding at??

you’ve to Click on the annoying Start Button( you will get this by hovering your mouse at the bottom left most corner of your screen, shown below)

Now, you will get this Metro Style Screen, where you’ve to click on your User account Icon at the Top Right Corner of your Screen and you get options as shown below.

There you go…Sign out is our new Log Off Button 😀

 

 

 

Windows Server 2012 Core – Graphical Shell.

In this post, let’s see one of the best enhancements we got with Windows Server 2012, flipping Graphical Shell as needed!

As you can see below, I’ve Installed the normal Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Eval Edition.(I did not selected CORE during the Installation).

Nothing strange right…!

Now, let’s see how we can uninstall the graphical shell from this Server.

Let me tell you this, all it takes is one Powershell command!

 Open powershell and type “Uninstall-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell” and hit enter. Before that I recommend to try the same with -whatif Option. Basically, It tells you what happens and what are the consequences if you enter that command in powershell instead of executing it right away:) See below for what I’m saying…

Okay, now I opened PowerShell as Admin and ran the same command without whatif, I got something like this.

After few seconds, it returned Success and requesting for Restart to apply the changes as shown below.

Once I restarted my Machine, all I got is the screen as shown below.(You’ll see Server Manager as well, I closed it)

Huhu…no Fancyyy pancyyyy GUI any more. All you got is cmd/powershell visible to you. The awesome news is you can just flip the coin the other way around and you’ll get your GUI back in place. No need of Re-Installing the OS from scratch 🙂

Behind the scenes, all it’s doing is adding and removing one of the features available in Windows Server 2012.

Adding back your GUI is as simple as it. Open Powershell from the command window you get and type the below statement as shown in the below screenshot…

Note: For actual execution run the above command without -whatif Option.

Once I restarted my Server, I was welcomed with normal windows appearance similar to first screenshot in this post 🙂

Bottom Line : Core OS is the Baseline which is always available and everything is built on top of the Core OS. Graphical Shell/Infra can be enabled and disabled as needed based on your requirements.

 

 

 

Windows Server 2012 – My Very First Impression!

Hey…I’ve Installed Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition today in my laptop and would like to share my initial experiences from twenty thousand feet distance 🙂 .

Let me tell you all, Installation Experience is awesome. It was very smooth and easy with less manual interventions! Everything was blazing smooth and fast. But I miss the Start Button 😦 Well, at least now everyone will start using Shortcuts and commands/Cmdlets 😀

Also, it looks like everything is built on Powershell 3.0 in Windows Server 2012. Most of the previous cmd utilities appears to be not working in this Version of Windows Server. Classic Examples, “DCPROMO” and “CLUSTER.exe” are no longer working. Looks like  Microsoft is pushing us towards Powershell, which is awesome. Well, there is lot of learning curve involved here!

Believe me folks…..GUI has been drastically changed from previous versions of Windows Servers.Few very basic screen caps are shown below just to show what I am taking about….

Very First Screen once you Install Windows Server:

As you can see below, there is no Start Button 😦

This comes with IE 10.0, which appears to be very better and fast compared to previous versions of IE 🙂

.Net FrameWork 4.5 and Powershell 3.0 comes out of the box once OS has been Installed.

Look at this strange new Add Roles/Features wizard below:

Though the core concepts remain same, it appears to me, MSFT made lot of enhancements and improvements for us.

Bottom Line – I liked it very much and I Should say, It’s time for exploring the real capabilities of PowerShell and ofcourse learning all the new features of this OS.