I was working recently with a customer who was looking to deploy a SQL Server 2005 cluster across 2 geographically dispersed sites using Windows Server 2008. They were looking to utilise the new clustering improvements in Windows Server 2008 to build a highly available SQL Server solution. The customer...

Had a weird problem with Virtual PC 2007 where the blue screen would flash up when I ran the program, yet the console window would not appear even though Virtual PC was running in the task manager and the system tray. The Virtual PC console had effectively disappeared. All this was bad enough, but this...

Microsoft has launched the Sysinternals Live beta, allowing execution of Sysinternals tools directly from the web. Enter a tool’s Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer or a command prompt as \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname> or view the entire Sysinternals Live tools directory in...

Hyper-V Release Candidate 1 for Windows Server 2008 was released on the 20th May. This is a full functionality release and provides improvements to security, stability, performance, user experience, forward compatibility of configurations, and the programming model. Further details and downloads available...

SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition introduced support for the use of Windows 2000 Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) to address 8GB of memory on Windows 2000 Advanced Server and 32GB of memory on Windows 2000 Datacentre. With AWE, SQL Server can reserve memory not in use by other applications and the...

PAE (Physical Address Extension) PAE is the added ability of the IA32 processor to address more than 4GB of physical memory. The following OS's can use PAE to take advantage of physical memory beyond 4GB: Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacentre Server Microsoft...

The host node in the failover cluster performs a "looks alive" check every 5 seconds. An IsAlive check is performed every 60 seconds using SELECT @@SERVERNAME. If this fails the IsAlive retries 5 times and then attempts to reconnect to the instance of SQL. If all fail, then the SQL Server resource fails...