Musings of
"The Todd"
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SQL Server 2012 - Edition Condensation and Licensing Changes
With SQL 2012 Microsoft has decided to make some major changes in the way it is licensed, as well as the number of editions and features offered.
First off, if you were licensed by CPU before you’ll now be licensed by core. Microsoft basically decided that 1 CPU = 4 cores and based its pricing off that model. So if you are running a dual socket 4 core processor your pricing won’t change, but if you were running dual socket 6 or 8 cores your price increases by 50% or 100%. Also, for SQL standard, if you license per core you minimally have to pay for 4 cores. It doesn’t matter if you have a VM that only has 2 CPU’s (which are really cores), you still have to pay for 4 cores.
SQL Server 2012 Enterprise allows you to license on the physical cores of a server, and then virtualize it however you wish. The Standard and BI versions do not allow that.
If you license by Server + CAL the price of CAL’s are going up 27%.
All told this will definitely result in a significant increase in price. One avenue you may have to delay this increase is to talk to your sales person about entering into an EAP agreement. This will basically allow you to enter into a new license agreement backdated to an effective date of March, 2012 with no penalty to your current agreement. This allows you to sign up for 3 years with the previous pricing model.
As far as editions, they’ve done away with Datacenter and Workgroup. Enterprise now has all the features of Datacenter (unlimited cores and memory). A new edition called SQL Server BI was introduced. This version is basically SQL Standard, plus additional BI tools to empower BI users. SQL Standard remains as it has been, with no feature reduction. SQL Standard and SQL BI are limited to 16 cores and 64GB of RAM per instance. The RAM limit is going to be my only concern. With RAM getting cheaper and denser all the time it’s very easy to justify installing 64+GB in a server.
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Laptop Power Supply Efficiency
I’ve been considering setting up a laptop to monitor and trend my home electricity, water use, as well as the entering and exiting water temperature in my GeoThermal Furnace. I have some older IBM T31 thinkpads that aren’t being used for anything right now, and was thinking of using one of them for this purpose. That got me wondering about the power efficiency of a laptop and the AC/DC adapter that’s connected to them.
It took a little digging, but I eventually found this page here which outlines some of the power supply efficiency ratings. What I found is that there is basically a ratings system.
Now, if I look very closely at my power supply I can locate the rating:
So, since my power supply is greater than 6 volts I’m looking at around 87% efficiency. Not great, but not terrible.
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Haven’t seen one of those in a while.
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SQL 2012 Launch event in Southfield #sql2012
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Directory Size via CLI in Windows
I’m looking for a way to trend the growth of user and group directories on my file server. Just knowing that the drive is 80% full, or even how much the drive grows from night to night is not good enough. I want to know how much each major directory grows.
To that end I did some searching and came across du.exe from sysinternals. Utilizing this with a scheduled task and generating a csv output file I think I’ll be able to get exactly what I want. I’ll make another post once I have the details worked out.
Source: thebits.info
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Windows Server “8” Beta
Just watched the little PR Video for windows server 8.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/v8-default.aspx
Storage Spaces sounds pretty cool, though I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be running my enterprise storage on windows servers that need windows updates every week.
The New Hyper V Networking sounds neat, though I thought it already did all that o.O We’re a VMware shop so no experience with Hyper V.
When I saw they were going to talk about powershell I rolled my eyes, but the script editor with intellisense is pretty cool. Currently trying to script anything with powershell can seem pretty daunting. Hopefully that will help.
Source: microsoft.com
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Send & Receive SMS from your computer Text anywhere, anytime!
–MightyText - Send & Receive SMS Text Messages from Computer | Android Sync
Neat APP I ran across. Works ok with Firefox using their web interface. I’m sure it’ll be better once they release an addon similar to the Chrome one.
Source: mightytext.net
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Using FORFILES commands to Delete log files
I started getting some emails that one of my servers was running low on free space. After using WinDirStat to look at the server I found that the log directory had grown to be over 10GB in size.
I sorted by date modified and then selected all files between 1/1/2011 and and 12/31/2011 and manually deleted them. Based on the fact that the oldest files in the directory started at 1/1/2011 I must have done the same thing sometime in the past year.
This got me thinking there must be an easy way to script out a rolling delete. A quick search on google found the FORFILES command.
Using forfiles you can script out any action you wish on files based on criteria you set.
Here’s a couple examples:
REM Lists all files in the current directory that are at least 90 days old
forfiles /s /m *.* /d -90 /c “cmd /c echo @file is at least 90 days old.”
REM Lists all files in the specified directory that are at least 90 days old
forfiles /p “D:\Program Files\CA\SCM\Log” /s /m *.* /d -90 /c “cmd /c echo @file is at least 90 days old.”
Based on this I was able to write a delete script.
REM Delete all files with a modified date greater than 90 days ago
forfiles /p “D:\Program Files\CA\SCM\Log” /s /m *.* /d -90 /c “cmd /c DEL /F /Q @PATH”Here is an example showing before the delete, the delete, and then after.
A scheduled task in task scheduler later and I never have to worry about this again.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753551%28v=ws.10%29.aspx
http://www.howtogeek.com/50528/automating-the-process-of-deleting-old-log-files/
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GPT vs MBR and NTFS
We recently had some confusion on the max size of a NTFS partition. One member in my group recalled how he had to switch to GPT (GUID Partition Table) in order to make a drive larger than 2TB. I countered that I had just done some research on this and the maximum size of an NTFS partition is actually dependent on the allocation unit chosen when formatting the partition. That the default value of 4K allocation units will support a drive up to 16TB in size.
As a result I did some more research and found that I was fundamentally wrong. The problem was I was thinking of GPT and NTFS as direct competitors to each other. That thought was wrong. NTFS is the file system that sits on top of disk. The disk itself can use either GPT or MBR (Master Boot Record). It is MBR that has the 2TB limit in file size.
More details about GPT: Microsoft adopted the GPT disk partitioning scheme in 2001 from Intel’s EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) specifications. It accommodates disk partition sizes up to 18 EB (Exabyte’s) or 1 million terabytes. Each GUID (globally unique ID) partition contains a 36-character field to allow a readable name to be associated with each partition.
Another shortcoming of MBR-based disk partitions is the limitation of 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition. The extended partition can be further divided into multiple logical partitions. By limiting the number of partitions on a disk, you effectively reduce the number of partitions to organize or manage the data. With GPT-based disks, Microsoft supports up to 128 partitions per disk. There are several partitions reserved for dynamic disks and EFI-boot support so only 124 partitions are available for data.
Resiliency: Perhaps one of the biggest pitfalls of MBR-based disks is their potential for corruption of the partition table, a region on the disk that maps sectors to logical block numbers. MBR disks only have 1 partition table to keep track of all the blocks in the partition. If the table becomes corrupt, the entire disk must be recovered from backup. Windows GPT-based disks have multiple, redundant partition tables so that if one is detected as being corrupt, it can self-heal itself from a redundant copy of the table.
MBR
GPT
Partitions < 2 TB
Yes
Yes
Partitions > 2 TB
No
Yes
Primary Partitions Per Drive
4
128*
OS Compatibility
ALL
Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows XP x64
Bootable
Yes
Only Windows for Itanium
Compatibility and Converting: For compatibility purposes, the Master Boot Record is kept at LBA 0 in GPT-based drives, and the GPT header begins at LBA 1. The partition type of a GPT disk is marked as 0xEE, which prevents MBR-based disk utilities from recognizing the partition type and potentially corrupting the data. It is possible to convert an MBR disk to a GPT-based disk and vice versa, but any data must first be backed up and all the partitions deleted.
Performance: From everything I’ve read, there is no real performance gain or loss in going from GPT to MBR or vice versa. GPT is reported to perform better because it’s automatically aligned whereas MBR needs to be aligned manually. Most people neglect this, thus it appears to perform not as well. The choice between GPT and MBR will more likely be based on need.
Microsoft Recommendation for GPT Disks: NTFS is recommended on all basic data partitions and all dynamic volumes. Windows Setup and the Disk Management snap-in offer only NTFS. To circumvent that, the partition or volume must be formatted explicitly via the Format command-line tool.
http://www.orthogonalthought.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/mbr-vs-gpt-comparison-windows-vista/
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1485447
