Book on Azure and SQL Server

Posted on February 6, 2017 by Amit Banerjee

My last contribution to a book was in 2012. With the advent of the cloud and my continuing work with SQL Server, I jumped at the opportunity when my friends and colleagues, Pranab Mazumdar [t] and Sourabh Agarwal [t], talked to me about contributing to a book on running SQL Server on Azure.

The book “Pro SQL Server on Microsoft Azure” attempts to teach the basics of Microsoft Azure and see how SQL Server on Azure VMs (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and Azure SQL Databases (Platform-as-a-Service) work. This book will show you how to deploy, operate, and maintain your data using any one or more combinations of these offerings along with your on-premise environments. You will also find some architecture details which are very important for an end user to know in order to run operations using Azure.

The book is available on Apress and Amazon.

We would love to hear any feedback about the book. It could be good, bad or ugly. You will find the resources available for download on the site.

SQL on Azure VM BPCheck

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Amit Banerjee

After a long hiatus, I am back on the blogosphere and have decided to dedicate a series to running Best Practices checks using PowerShell on Azure virtual machines running in the new deployment model: ARM (Azure Resource Manager). If you have worked on the classic deployment model, then you will need to unlearn a few things and re-learn a little more. However, the learning curve ain’t that great. Think of Azure Resource Manager as a container for all the cloud components that make up your solution. If you had a SQL Server instance running on an Azure virtual machine, then you would be using compute, networking, storage components in Azure which would together be encapsulated in a Resource Manager group.

I had previously done a series of posts around running best practices checks on Azure Virtual Machines running SQL Server. Some of those checks are still valid today as they only dealt with the SQL Server instance. You will see components of those scripts reused. Some of the checks are way easier due to the way ARM deployments are managed in Azure and the endpoints that the Azure PowerShell 1.0 exposes.

The PowerShell scripts available on the GitHub repository are mentioned below. I will run a post on each of these scripts to explain what each of these do and what to expect as the output of each of these scripts.

Get-AllocationUnitCheck.ps1 – Checks if the allocation unit size for the disks attached to the VM is 64K
Get-DBProperties.ps1 – Checks if any database has AUTO CLOSE or AUTO SHRINK enabled
Get-FilesOnTemp.ps1 – Checks to see if any database files are hosted on the temporary drive
Get-IFI.ps1 – Checks to see if the SQL Server service account has instant file initialization security privileges
Get-LPIM.ps1 – Checks to see if Lock Pages in Memory privilege is granted to the SQL Server service account
Get-OSFilesDB.ps1 – Checks to see if database files are hosted on the OS drive
Get-StorageAccountBP.ps1 – Checks to see if the storage account has replication enabled
Get-VMSize.ps1 – Checks if the right virtual machine tier is being used
Temporary Drive.ps1 – Finds out the temporary drive on the virtual machine
Get-Backups.ps1 – Finds out if any backups are being taken to local disk

The PowerShell scripts are available on GitHub repository SqlOnAzureVM. Since these scripts are now on GitHub, please feel free to pull them and enhance them as per your needs.

SQL Server 2016 Public Preview (CTP2) – Deploying to Azure VM

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Amit Banerjee

I had written a post earlier on deploying a SQL Server instance on a Azure Virtual Machine. Now that SQL Server 2016 CTP2 is out, let’s see how that looks on Azure. The wizard is the same as before but a new gallery option exists for deploying SQL Server 2016 CTP2. The catch is that any virtual machine created with this gallery image will expire on June 30th, 2016. The locations where this image can be deployed are East Asia, Southeast Asia, North Europe, West Europe, Central US, East US, East US 2 and South Central US. The gallery image gets provisioned with a single disk.

After the deployment is complete, you will need to enable connectivity for your SQL Server database engine as outlined in an earlier post of mine. What you get is the default instance of Database Engine, Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services. The deployment will not have the “PolyBase Query Service for External Data”. So if you are planning to test the PolyBase options in SQL Server 2016, then you will need to run the installation from the C:\SQLServer_13.0_Full folder. The other feature that is not available is the Distributed Replay. So, if you are planning to play around with these two features, then you would need to run the installer again.

Another feature which the gallery image does not use is the tempdb multiple file option setup parmater, “SQLTEMPDBFILECOUNT“. This is left at 1 so you will end up with the default tempdb configuration which you saw in the older releases. I would recommend using a virtual machine instance which has a SSD drive as the temporary drive so that you can use a SSD for testing out any intensive workload which requires either high tempdb usage or a local disk which supports high IOPs.

So now you have any option to play around with SQL Server 2016 CTP2 without having to hunt down a separate virtual machine or physical box in your environment.

Azure Storage and SQL Server – Part 5

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Amit Banerjee

In this post, we will start checking if the SQL Server files are following best practices for Azure storage recommendations. In Part 4 of this series, I had written about how to identify the temporary drive on an Azure Virtual Machine. I am going to use that snippet of code to perform the file layout test that I will perform here.

The script performs the following operations:

1. Finds out the temporary drive letter

2. The script first finds out if the Azure Virtual Machine is a D-series machine or not.

3. Then it fetches the file location from the SQL Server instance using the Invoke-Sqlcmd cmdlet.

4. Using the above information, it determines if files are present on the temporary drive or not.

If this is a D-Series virtual machine, then the script will not report a warning if it finds the tempdb files on the temporary drive as it is supported. For any other series, the script will report an issue since database files residing on the temporary drive are not supported on the temporary drive other than the D-Series.

The PowerShell script is available below:


# Find out the IDE drives on the machine which has a SCSI target = 1

$Name = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_DiskDrive -Filter "InterfaceType = `"IDE`" and SCSITargetId = 1" | Select-Object Name

# Find the parition id corresponding to the IDE temporary drive

$Antecedent = "*" + $Name.Name.Replace("\","").Replace(".","") + "*"

$Dependent = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_DiskDriveToDiskPartition | Where-Object {$_.Antecedent -like $Antecedent} | Select-Object Dependent

# Find the logical disk which corresponds to the temporary drive partition

$Antecedent = "*" + $Dependent.Dependent.Split("`"")[1] + "*"

$TempDrive = (Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_LogicalDiskToPartition | Where-Object {$_.Antecedent -like $Antecedent} | Select-Object Dependent).Dependent.Split("`"")[1]

Write-Host "INFO: Temporary drive on the machine is:" $TempDrive -Foregroundcolor Red

# Variable to track if this is a D-Series VM

[boolean] $DSeries = $false

# Using Get-AzureVM to get the instance size property

$InstanceSize = Get-AzureVM -ServiceName "<azure service name>" -Name "<azure vm name>" | Select-Object InstanceSize

# Find out if this is a D-Series VM

if ($InstanceSize.InstanceSize -like "*_D*")

{

$DSeries = $true

}

# Get the location of the database files from the system catalog

$dbfiles = Invoke-Sqlcmd -ServerInstance "." -Database "master" -Query "select physical_name, name, db_name(database_id) as dbname, type_desc from sys.master_files"

# Run a foreach loop to determine if any user or system database files are on the temporary drive other than the tempdb

foreach ($file in $dbfiles)

{

# Tempdb can be hosted on the temporary drive on D-Series VMs

if ($DSeries-eq $true)

{

if ($file.physical_name.substring(0,2) -eq $TempDrive -and $file.dbname -ne "tempdb")

{

Write-Host "ISSUE:" $file.dbname "(Filename:" $file.name " Location:" $file.physical_name") found on temporary drive" $TempDrive -ForegroundColor Red

}

}

# Report any databases on temporary drive for non-D-Series VMs

else

{

if ($file.physical_name.substring(0,2) -eq $TempDrive)

{

Write-Host "ISSUE:" $file.dbname "(Filename:" $file.name " Location:" $file.physical_name") found on temporary drive" $TempDrive -ForegroundColor Red

}

}

}

Please keep in mind that the above script has not been tested for mount points.

Previous post in the series

Azure Storage and SQL Server – Part 1
https://troubleshootingsql.com/2014/11/10/azure-storage-for-sql-server/
Azure Storage and SQL Server – Part 2
https://troubleshootingsql.com/2014/11/11/azure-storage-and-sql-server-part-2
Azure Storage and SQL Server – Part 3
https://troubleshootingsql.com/2014/11/12/azure-storage-and-sql-server-part-3
Azure Storage and SQL Server – Part 4
https://troubleshootingsql.com/2014/11/13/azure-storage-and-sql-server-part-4/

References

Azure Storage
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/

Azure Subscription and Service Limits, Quotas, and Constraints
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-subscription-service-limits/#storagelimits

* This blog post has been written based on the service details available on 10th November, 2014.

Lessons learnt while using the Cloud Adapter

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Amit Banerjee

During the last week of August, I had blogged about how to get your on-premise database to your SQL Server instance running on an Azure virtual machine. I had run into a few issues while trying to run the wizard provided by Management Studio.

The First Stumble

This error is easy to circumvent and pretty much mentioned in the online documentation. The error message would read as:

Failed to locate a SQL Server of version 12.0.2000 or later installed on the remote machine. Please verify that a SQL Server of the same or higher version than the source SQL Server is installed on the remote machine.

The above error is self-explanatory. There is a requirement that the source database engine version be lower or equal to the version of the SQL Server instance running on Azure. Eg. You cannot deploy a database from a SQL Server 2014 instance to a SQL Server 2012 instance running on an Azure VM.

The Second Stumble

The second common error that you might run into is:

The Cloud Adapter port configuration is not valid. Verify the virtual machine endpoint configurations.

The above error will be encountered when the endpoint is not configured for the Azure virtual to accept connections from the outer realm! This can be easily rectified by adding a TCP endpoint to your Azure virtual machine for 11435 which is the port that the SQL Server Cloud Adapter Service is listening on. This is also mentioned in the online documentation. Once you have created the endpoint for your Azure virtual for your on-premise server to connect with the Cloud Adapter service, your endpoint configuration should look like the one in the screenshot below:

The Third Stumble

The next issue could be with permissions/authentication or it might not be as easy as it seems.

Cloud Adapter operation failed due to invalid authentication. Verify the virtual machine name, user name, and password.

So the first thing to check if you have the correct account name and password. If it is due to an authentication error, then the application event log of the Azure Virtual Machine will show the following error with the source as SQL Server Cloud Adapter service as shown in Screenshot 2. The text of the error message is mentioned below.

Access denied for user <user name>

The other error that you might encounter is when the SQL Server Cloud Adapter service tries to enumerate the database engines installed on the virtual machine. The error would still be talking about the authentication which is reported by the management studio wizard but a little investigation into the application event logs of the virtual machine will show the following error:

[Error] <ip address> Exception in GetSqlInstances(): SQL Server WMI provider is not available on <machine name>.. Stack trace: at Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi.ManagedComputer.TryConnect()
at Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi.WmiSmoObject.get_Proxy()
at Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi.WmiSmoObject.EnumChildren(String childTypeName, WmiCollectionBase coll)
at Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi.ServerInstanceCollection.InitializeChildCollection()
at Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.CloudAdapter.Tasks.GetSqlInstances()
at Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.CloudAdapter.CloudAdapter.GetSqlInstances(String username, String password). Inner Exception: Invalid namespace .

The above error clearly states that the GetSqlInstances() method failed. Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi namespace contains classes that provide programmatic access to the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) from an SMO application. I had talked about needing the shared management objects in an earlier post. The SQL Server 2014 WMI provider is also required which is available by installing the client connectivity components from any SQL Server 2014 setup including SQL Server Express. The components that I had installed were:

a. Client Tools Connectivity

b. Client Tools Backwards Compatibility

If you are not sure if you have the WMI provider, then look for the file “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\120\Shared\sqlmgmproviderxpsp2up.mof“. This is the SQL Server 2014 MOF file. Another way to test if the WMI provider is working without running the wizard every time and have it fail is to run the PowerShell commands below on your Azure Virtual Machine. This script will tell you where the instance enumeration being performed by the deployment wizard will work or fail.

[System.reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo")
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.SqlWmiManagement")
$m = New-Object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Wmi.ManagedComputer') '.'
foreach ($svi in $m.ServerInstances)
{
	$svi.Name;
}

This post was intended to document that common issues that you might run into while deploying a database from an on-premise SQL Server instance to a SQL Server instance running on an Azure Virtual Machine.