Lab for MCITP: DBA

[RobertKaucher]

I have been redoing my lab this weekend and wanted to share my setup. I was originally using VMware ESXi but I had issues with the network card. I intend on writing a tutorial to post about the setup.

Hardware:
Intel Core 2 Quad, 8 GB RAM, 4 HDD
OS Server 2008 x64 Datacenter with Hyper-V
iSCSI SAN using iSCSI Cake Trial

Right now I am setting up two virtual Servers running SQL 2005 in a two node cluster. I have each virtual machine running on its own HDD and the iSCSI system runing on its own as well. I plan on adding another virtual box with a few hard drives to run a system to practice partitioning tables, etc. That virtual box will just run on the same hdd as the host.

[dynamik]

Cool. Keep us posted of any labs you come up with. I think I'll be moving on to this after I wrap up a few misc certs later this year.

Have you tried OpenFiler for iSCSI at all? I use it for SAN storage for my ESX lab.

[RobertKaucher]

No, I was using an iSCI virtual appliance I downloaded, but the ESXi system was giving me so much trouble I decided to switch to Hyper-V. I will certainly look into this. Since I went with Hyper-V though I wanted to avoid Linux if possible. I have only had headaches getting the integration tools to work... Truthfully I have never gotten them to work correctly on Linux. I just don't want the disk performance to be terrible.