Within the last several weeks, I've taken action to address a problem with Virtual Center 1.3. When I upgraded from VC 1.2 to 1.3, I aggravated an issue regarding the performance graphs. For a while now, I've been experiencing gaps in graphed data. With the upgrade, it became a real issue (see picture). Working with our support vendor, they determined that running MSDE as our SQL backend must be the problem. However, I remain unconvinced.
First, there is much debate about whether this configuration is supported or not (see discussion threads here and here) I maintain that MSDE is SQL lite and so I am running SQL for Virtual Center. I know about the limitations but I'm nowhere near meeting those. I don't think you should be required to spend money on a full-blown SQL license just to run Virtual Center. Products from Cisco's Security Agent Management Center to NetIQ management products use MSDE as their database.
Second, there was no exploration of the database content itself to see if it was "corrupt" as the support engineer claimed based on the graphs. More investigation would need to be made before identifying MSDE as the cause.
Lastly, we made another change which addressed the issue. We changed the number of samples taken and time interval. This seemed to do the trick. Changing the time interval from 5 minutes to 10 minutes and samples from 288 to 144 fixed the graphs. I don't believe I should have to do this and I already have a gripe about the lack of real-time averages to gauge real performance but it's resolved for now.
Is it MSDE? I won't know without a more thorough investigation if it happens again.
posted by Kevin @ 7:40 AM
1 Comments:
Go for SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. It simply rocks and has the new GUI for simplified management (SQL Server 2005 Management Studio Express).
HTH
Alessandro Perilli
http://www.virtualization.info
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