Bacon wrapped frog legs (twelve of them) for Christmas.  No more drumming for these guys!!

What could be better than bacon wrapped frog legs?  Oh yeah, more Virtual lab setup.

We will delve into setting up a SQL Cluster today.  We will also cover some high level tips for dealing with virtual box.  This will be good information and the type of stuff I would have like to have known heading into setting up a Virtual Lab.

Season Cleaning First.

• Domain Setup – 11^th Day
• Virtual Storage – 10^th Day
• Death and Destruction, err Deadlocks - 9^th Day
• SSRS Schedules – 8^th Day
• Runaway Jobs – 7^th Day
• Maintenance Plan Gravage – 6^th Day
• Table Compression – 5^th Day
• Exercise for msdb – 4^th Day
• Backup, Job and Mail History Cleanup – 3^rd Day
• Service Broker Out of Control – 2^nd Day
• Maint Plan Logs – 1^st Day

On the Twelfth Day of pre-Christmas…

My DBA brought to me a Virtual SQL Cluster.  And with that cluster, we have a a few tidbits for Using VirtualBox.

The first tidbit is an administration aid.  Occasionally it is good to have similar machines grouped together.  At the same time, it is also necessary to start multiple virtual machines at the same time.  This is done through groups in VirtualBox.

Here you can see some of the groups that I have created.  If I right-click on a machine name, I will be presented a menu that has the Group option.

Once I have a group created, I can get a few different options if I were to highlight the group name I would get different options as shown in the following image.

The notable options here are to “Ungroup”, “Rename Group”, and “Add Machine.”  Another option is “Start.”  Though this option is present for the machine menu, the behavior is different.  This option allows you to start the entire group.  This can be a handy tool when dealing with a cluster for instance.

The next handy tidbit is the snapshot.  A snapshot allows point in time image of the VM to be taken so different configurations can be tested – and then quickly reverted i necessary.  Here is what I have for one of my VMs in the snapshot manager.

From this very same screen you can also see one of the many methods available to create a clone of a virtual machine.  The clone icon is the little button above the right hand pane that looks like a sheep.  Cloning a VM is a quick way to create several machines for various purposes.  As you will hear from many people – you should build a base image first, then run sysprep against it.  Sysprep is necessary in order to help prevent problems down the road.

The next tidbit for today is in regards to the file locations for virtual machines and virtual disks.  I recommend changing the default path for the VM files.  This can be done through the preferences option on the file menu.  Shown in the attachment is what it may look like if you have not changed it.  Notice that the default path goes to your user profile directory.

Ignore the red text on this page for now.  We will not be discussing the Proxy.

The last tip is in the network settings within the preferences that we already have open.  In the network settings, we can find an option to configure DHCP settings for the Host-Only Ethernet Adapter.  These are settings you may want to configure to ensure you have more control over the environment.  It is also helpful when looking to configure those IP settings for the FreeNAS that we have already discussed.

As I wrap up these tidbits, I have decided that this is a lot of information to soak in at this point.  So in the spirit of Christmas, I have decided to finish off the clustering information in a 13th day post.  This final post may or may not be available on Christmas day.  Worst case it will be available on the 26th.

Part of that reason is I want to rebuild my lab following the instructions I will be posting and I need time to test it.  I want the instructions to be of great use.

Please stay tuned as we conclude this series very soon.