So SQL Server 2008 in Hyper-V is a supported configuration, and should perform well as long as you use fixed or pass-through disks and increase your processor/memory settings appropriately. My question is can I use snapshots as a reliable backup mechanism, or should I use the tried and trusted maintenance plan to do my backups?
You should NOT use Hyper-V snapshots as your backup strategy for SQL. Stick with something (built-in or otherwise) that will do SQL aware backups.
Hyper-V snapshots (in my opinion) should only be used on production servers for very short term disaster recovery. If you're doing an upgrade, do a snapshot first, immediately test when done, then ditch the snapshot. This sort of thing should be done along side your regular backups, not in place of it.
If you were to move to Hyper-V snapshots as your sole backup strategy, you'd lose the ability to restore your databse to another server & do point in time restores of the database - among other things that I'm sure I'm just not thinking of now.
Virtualization Snapshots for Hyper-V or any virtualization vendor are not supported to use with SQL Server in a virtual machine. It is possible that you may not encounter any problems when using snapshots and SQL Server, but Microsoft will not provide technical support to SQL Server customers for a virtual machine that was restored from a snapshot
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956893/en-us
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does anybody know a way to perform a periodic remote backup of the full environment (so comprehensive of the application servers and SQL databases) in Jelastic?
I wanted to use Google Drive to store the backups as I was already using it with Plesk.
Thanks.
Currently I am hosting my online application on an Azure VM. This is a pretty standard Umbraco website with around 300 visitors per day, nothing special here.
Details of Azure VM:
- Basic A3
- 4 cores
- 7 GB Memory
In the current situation MsSQL is installed on the VM itself and this is working fine, but I am not a great expert in maintenance. A solution I found is migrating the SQL database to SQL Azure.
Looking at my current website I decided to do this and I migrated the database to SQL Azure:
- S3 Standard
- 100 DTU
- 250GB
After the migration I switched the connection string with the connection string that was provided in the Azure portal. When I reloaded my website the loading time was suddenly three times slower.
For now I switched it back to the local SQL Database, but I am wondering if it is a normal situation that the local SQL is faster then SQL Azure in this case.
I hope someone can answer my question, please let me know if more information is required to answer my question.
Best regards, Martijn
EDIT
The issue is resolved! I found out that the SQL Azure Server that I created was located in a different region then the Azure VM. After I created a new SQL Azure server in the same region the performance issues where fixed.
Good to hear your perf issues are fixed. In general, comparing the performance of a local database versus a PaaS database is not always an apples-to-apples comparison for a number of reasons:
Azure SQL Database is a highly available service (99.99%) that requires synchronous commits to a secondary database. A local database typically is not configured for high availability.
Azure SQL Database provides automatic backup. Depending on your setup, a local database might may or may not be configured for backup.
The affect of network latency on a local database does not exist
The memory and CPU between of a S3 Azure SQL Database and a A3 VM are likely not the same
I am working on an application in my free time and I want to use a SQL Server database. I have the .iso for SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer but I don't have an extra computer to dedicate as a server. I assumed I could use VMware Player for a virtual server but from what I've read it seems that I would need VMware vCenter or another paid version.
Is there a free option for creating a SQL Server database virtually? This will be extremely small scale (3 tables and just for my personal use) so I am not worried about performance at all.
You can install that locally on your computer. There is no need for a virtual engine. Even if some of the MS documents say you need a server operating system, that is not the case. The setup has a check for valid operating system, and it just installs fine on Windows XP, Vista, 7 in my experience.
But if you want, VMWare Player would also work. In contrast to its name, you can also create virtual engines with it - but with some limitations.
And for a really small solution, even SQL Server Express, which is also free, would do. If I remeber correctly, the main restriction is that the data may not exceed 1 TB.
SQL Server can run locally without any problems, even in your dev/gaming/browsing computer without creating too much interference. There is no problem in installing it for testing and even for production of small systems (the express edition is free and valid for those uses).
Another, even slimmer, alternative, if you dare to upgrade to SQL 2012, would be to use a new feature called LocalDB. It's basically the very same db engine with a very important difference: it does NOT run as a service, but instead it's a regular program that is automatically started when a connection is attempted. Advantages would be that it does not consume resources until it's needed and yet you've got almost the full feature set of the real server. Here is an introduction on it. While I've never used it (always with the full express version), it seems good for the kind of programs you want to develop.
Apache database hosted in a virtual server to be used with a JSF and JPA application.It there any method where regular back ups can be performed, for example once a day? Like an script?
Here's a lot of information about making backups of a Derby database: http://db.apache.org/derby/docs/10.9/adminguide/cadminhubbkup98797.html
Choose a backup method that works well for you, then use your operating system's scheduling tools (cron, etc.) to arrange for that backup to be performed regularly.
I am using Azure VM role. I created a separate VHD (uploaded to page blob) for storing SQL data files (to overcome data persistence issue with VM role). The SharePoint 2010 has been configured on VM. I want to run 2 instances of Azure VM, where I am faining as mounting the data VHD in write mode on 2 instances is not possible. Can anyone help me out in this?
To add to what Joannes said:
A Cloud Drive may be mounted by exactly one writer, but you can make any number of read-only snapshots. This won't help with a scale-out scenario that you're describing, but I just wanted to clarify.
SharePoint 2010 is not a supported configuration in a VM Role currently. There's licensing, compatibility with SQL Azure to consider, scale-out, and potentially other issues. Same goes with installing SQL Server in a VM Role.
Support issues aside, you could look into Azure Connect as a way to reach an on-premise SQL Server instance. This alleviates your need to store SQL Server data files in a Cloud Drive. This will have bandwidth-related performance and cost implications, but it's certainly an option.
CloudDrive is not intended for scaling out. In other words, a blob can be mounted by no more than 1 VM at the same time. This limitation is very unlikely to be lifted in the future, as a single blob is note intended to support scalable writes.