Hi,
The Clustering team is coming to TechEd New Orleans from June 7-10!
Sign up now at: http://northamerica.msteched.com/
In addition to many technical presentation, the team will be manning the Cluster Booth (Orange - WSV - 7) throughout the week, so please stop by to ask your questions and share your feedback.
Sessions from the Cluster Team
WSV313 | Failover Clustering Deployment Success
Session Type: Breakout Session
Wednesday, June 9 | 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM | Rm 295
Track: Windows Server
Speaker: Symon Perriman
Level: 300 - Advanced
Learn all about setup and deployment of Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clusters. This session gives an overview of the interaction of Failover Clustering with a variety of deployment strategies and considerations, upgrades, migration, sysprep, automating deployment, AD considerations, validation, patching, scripting, Hyper-V Clustering, and SKU selection.
WSV314 | Failover Clustering Pro Troubleshooting with Windows Server 2008 R2
Session Type: Breakout Session
Tuesday, June 8 | 3:15 PM - 4:30 PM | Auditorium C
Track: Windows Server
Speaker: Steven Ekren
Level: 300 - Advanced
Failover Clustering with Windows Server 2008 R2 has seen the fastest adoption rate of any clustering release, but do you know all the tips and tricks to make it even better? Do you know what to do when your mission critical solution breaks? Do you know how to quickly triage issues to achieve the highest possible levels of availability? This session addresses some common issues for 2008 and 2008 R2 Failover Clusters, and offers strategies to identify, troubleshoot and solve these problems, leveraging the various tools of Validate, new eventing channels, and generating and collecting the verbose debug Cluster.log for analyzing the cluster.
VIR06-INT | Failover Clustering with Hyper-V Unleashed with Windows Server 2008 R2
Session Type: Interactive Session
Tuesday, June 8 | 9:45 AM - 11:00 AM | Rm 350
Track: Virtualization
Speaker: Steven Ekren, Symon Perriman
Level: 300 - Advanced
This is a freeform session that demos, whiteboards, and discusses what’s on YOUR MIND! Share the pain you have using Failover Clustering with Hyper-V today, ask difficult questions or let us know why some customers avoid clustering even when there is a need to implement a high availability solution. Get the answers you need directly from Microsoft’s Clustering and High-Availability product team.
VIR303 | Disaster Recovery by Stretching Hyper-V Clusters across Sites
Session Type: Breakout Session
Wednesday, June 9 | 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM | Rm 276
Track: Virtualization
Speaker(s): Symon Perriman
Level: 300 - Advanced
As servers are consolidated into VMs, the availability of those VMs is becoming increasingly important, along with providing disaster tolerance and business continuance. This session covers considerations of multi-site clustering, where virtual machines can be configured on a Hyper-V Failover Cluster that spans across sites. This session also covers conducting live migrations across datacenters and considerations of Cluster Shared Volumes with replication software.
WSV01-HOL | Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2
Session Type: Hands-on Lab
Track: Windows Server
Level: 300 - Advanced
This consistently top-rated lab introduces you to Failover Clustering and some of its features and improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2. This lab is for both those new to clustering, and experienced users, as it covers creating and validating a cluster, deploying resources and Windows PowerShell, and the new management utility.
Breakout Sessions
ARC308 | High Availability: A Contrarian View
Session Type: Breakout Session
Tuesday, June 8 | 3:15 PM - 4:30 PM | Rm 279
Track: Architecture
Speaker(s): Udi Dahan
Level: 300 - Advanced
Many developers are aware of the importance of high availability, critically analyzing any single points of failure in the infrastructure. Those same developers rarely give a second thought to the periods of time when a system is being upgraded. Even if all the servers are running, most systems cannot function in-between versions. Yet with the increased pace of business, users are demanding ever more frequent releases. The maintenance programmers and system administrators are left holding the bag, long after the architecture that sealed their fate was formulated. Join Udi for some different perspectives on high availability -- architecture and methodology for the real world.
DAT207 | SQL Server High Availability: Overview, Considerations, and Solution Guidance
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Database Platform
Speaker(s): Vineet Rao
Level: 200 - Intermediate
Mission-critical applications require careful planning to achieve maximum uptime. Various factors like availability SLAs for RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective), log generation rates, latency, storage environment, data size, application dependencies, virtualization, etc. contribute towards building the availability strategy. As an architect or DBA it is important to develop the right HADR strategy and corresponding solution which meets the availability requirement and at the same time provide the cost benefit for your organization. Come to this session to learn about how you can develop the right HADR solution for your environment. In this session, we discuss different solution alternatives and explain the key metrics to use for making the decision as well as discuss best practices.
DAT303 | Architecting and Using Microsoft SQL Server Availability Technologies in a Virtualized World
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Database Platform
Speaker(s): Damir Bersinic, Joel Shalaby
Level: 300 - Advanced
The addition of virtualization support has changed the way architects and DBAs need to look at availability in the SQL Server world. How does Hyper-V Live Migration or vMWare's vMotion work in conjunction with existing SQL Server availability technologies like log shipping, database mirroring, or replication? As you architect your SQL Server infrastructure virtually, what do you need to know to ensure that you help provide the best solution using available technologies? Through demonstration using a scenario-based approach, learn when and how to use virtualization availability features and Windows Failover Clustering in combination with SQL Server technologies and the impact of combining them. See how Live Migration does not cover you in all cases and how database mirroring and other SQL Server features can enhance your virtual infrastructure to ensure databases continue to operate when things go wrong. We also evaluate using a mixture of virtual and physical environments for SQL Server and the impact on availability when combining them. Come to this session and get answers to questions your managers or customers will be asking you, if they are not already.
DAT305 | See the Largest Mission Critical Deployment of Microsoft SQL Server around the World
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Database Platform
Speaker(s): Kevin Cox
Level: 300 - Advanced
How do they scale; do they scale up or scale out? How are High Availabilty and Disaster Recovery architected? Are there any common techniques that bring the largest gain? This session is intended for people interested in learning how we have solved some very hard problems in the database tier. Take the lessons we have learned back to your business to improve your solutions.
DAT401 | High Availability and Disaster Recovery: Best Practices for Customer Deployments
Session Type: Breakout Session
Thursday, June 10 | 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM | Rm 272
Track: Database Platform
Speaker(s): Prem Mehra, Sanjay Mishra
Level: 400 - Expert
Microsoft SQL Server provides various High Availability and Disaster Recovery technologies. This session involves discussions on how various customers use these technologies to achieve their HA and DR goals. Focus is on deployment architectures, lessons learned and best practices from real-life customer deployment scenarios.
DAT407 | Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Failover Clustering Implementations
Session Type: Breakout Session
Wednesday, June 9 | 3:15 PM - 4:30 PM | Rm 261
Track: Database Platform
Speaker(s): Allan Hirt
Level: 400 - Expert
Forget a good portion of everything you know about deploying failover clustering if you're used to Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 or 2005. With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 and with further improvements in R2, Windows failover clustering is a different experience than in the past. Come to see how the changes and improvements to Windows affect clustered SQL Server deployments. There are quite a few things that can trip you up in the areas of setup, upgrade, and patching processes (among other things) with SQL Server 2008 with its changes. This session bridges the gap of what you may have known to what you now need to know to have successful deployments of SQL Server 2008 failover clustering on Windows Server 2008 R2.
UNC304 | Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: High Availability Deep Dive
Session Type: Breakout Session
Wednesday, June 9 | 9:45 AM - 11:00 AM | Rm 391
Track: Unified Communications
Speaker(s): Scott Schnoll
Level: 300 - Advanced
This session starts with a brief overview of the mailbox resiliency features in Exchange 2010 SP1, and then dives deep into planning and design considerations, advanced operational tasks and troubleshooting of database availability groups. We’ll cover database availability group sizing and design, database copy count and distribution, server capacity planning and storage and network design.
UNC305 | Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 High Availability Design Considerations
Session Type: Breakout Session
Tuesday, June 8 | 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM | Rm 265
Track: Unified Communications
Speaker(s): Ross Smith IV
Level: 300 - Advanced
Go beyond the basics of Exchange High Availability and gain a solid understanding of what you need to know to design a highly available and site resilient Exchange 2010 solution. In this session we cover Exchange 2010 Mailbox DAG design, including DAG sizing, database copy count/distribution, server capacity planning, storage design, and network design.
Interactive & BOF Sessions
UNC01-INT | Real-World Database Availability Group (DAG) Design
Session Type: Interactive Session
Tuesday, June 8 | 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM | Rm 351
Track: Unified Communications
Speaker(s): Kumar Venkateswar, Scott Schnoll
Level: 300 - Advanced
Microsoft provides a great deal of content covering the theory around designing highly available and site resilient solutions, but there is very little discussion of how to apply that to “non-standard” customer scenarios. Not all customers have 50% of their users in one datacenter and 50% in a second datacenter, or one “hot datacenter” for all user access and one “warm datacenter” for site resilient scenarios. In this session, we apply the theory of DAG design and utilize the tools provided by Microsoft to design some real-world site resilient solutions.
VIR02-INT | Hyper-V Live Migration over Distance: A Multi-Datacenter Approach
Session Type: Interactive Session
Monday, June 7 | 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM | Rm 351
Track: Virtualization
Speaker(s): James Schwartz, Ryan Sokolowski
Level: 300 - Advanced
Join us to explore a proven architectural approach to migrating VMs between geographically separated datacenters. While there has been a lot of buzz in the industry around the VMware/Cisco/EMC “VCE Coalition", Microsoft and partners deliver compelling and differentiated solutions. This architecture leverages Hyper-V and multi-site Windows Server 2008 R2 clustering from Microsoft, “Best-in-Class” storage replication technology from Hitachi Data Systems and a real-world data and Fibre Channel infrastructure from Brocade. Also featured, Hitachi Storage Cluster (HSC) for Hyper-V allows simplified management of your VM operations, without requiring manual intervention on your storage arrays. Not a marketing presentation, this is a highly interactive and technical session, featuring demos and walkthroughs, diagrams and explanations of the architecture and more. You'll leave this session knowing everything you need to deploy this solution when you get home (and then get promoted, or at least justify your next trip to Tech•Ed). All session attendees also receive a FREE copy of the joint Microsoft / Hitachi Data Systems / Brocade Whitepaper! Do not miss this session - this is sure to be one of the highlights of the show!
BOF34-IT | Microsoft Exchange Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery: Are You Prepared?
Session Type: Birds-of-a-Feather
Thursday, June 10 | 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM |
Track: Unified Communications
Speaker(s): Vladimir Meloski
Microsoft Exchange Server is a business-critical system for many organizations. Are you prepared to respond to the challenges of managing its reliability and availability? What are your plans and experiences regarding high availability technologies such as Network Load Balancing and Database Availability Groups? What are your backup procedures and how about the domain controllers and communication devices availability? And at the end, have you tested your solutions and strategies at all? In this BOF session share your experiences, discuss, and learn from others about high availability and disaster recovery in Microsoft Exchange Server.
Hands on Labs
DAT01-HOL | Create a Two-Node Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster
Session Type: Hands-on Lab
Track: Database Platform
Level: 300 - Advanced
During this lab, create a two node failover cluster using Windows Server 2008 R2, Enterprise Edition.
DAT02-HOL | Create a Windows Server 2008 R2 MSDTC Cluster
Session Type: Hands-on Lab
Track: Database Platform
Level: 300 - Advanced
During this lab, create a highly available Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC) service using both the high availability wizard and using advanced procedures in Failover Cluster Manager snap-in.
DAT09-HOL | Installing a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 + SP1 Clustered Instance
Session Type: Hands-on Lab
Track: Database Platform
Level: 300 - Advanced
During this lab, create a highly available SQL Server 2008 + SP1 clustered instance on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster using Slipstreaming process.
DAT12-HOL | Maintaining a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Failover Cluster
Session Type: Hands-on Lab
Track: Database Platform
Level: 300 - Advanced
During this lab, perform typical maintenance tasks for a SQL Server 2008 failover cluster.
UNC02-HOL | Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 High Availability and Storage Scenarios
Session Type: Hands-on Lab
Track: Unified Communications
Level: 300 - Advanced
After completing this lab you will be able to design and implement a DAG solution that will include a simplified Mailbox with High Availability and Disaster Recovery on a unified platform, that is server and storage group independent, can replicate data for High Availability and Disaster Recovery, and has Data Center resiliency. Other topics addressed are server availability, full redundancy, and no single point of failure.
VIR06-HOL | Implementing High Availability and Live Migration with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V
Session Type: Hands-on Lab
Track: Virtualization
Level: 200 - Intermediate
We will see you soon!
Symon Perriman
Program Manager II
Clustering & High-Availability
Microsoft