Swiss IT Professional and TechNet Blog : patterns

White Paper – SQL Server Consolidation at Microsoft

mepprecht — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:49:00 GMT

A new white paper has been published on how Microsoft IT has used Virtualization (naturally Hyper-V) and consolidation to reduce cost, server sprawl and at the same time improve scalability, standardization and uptime in the SQL Server environments.

It is an interesting read, with some really detailed designs and metrics, that you can base your designs on.

You can find the white paper here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd557540.aspx

One key take-away is that the underlying storage really must perform well. Storage performance is one of those topics that has been highlighted many times in the past, but never receives the attention it deserves. No matter how good your design, unless the storage performs optimally, you will never good SQL Server performance.

SQL Server 2008 Infrastructure and Planning Design Guide

mepprecht — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:19:00 GMT

The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guide for SQL Server 2008 has been released here.

This guide is one in a series of planning and design guides that clarify and streamline the planning and design process for Microsoft infrastructure technologies. ‘Each guide in the series addresses a unique infrastructure technology or scenario. These guides include the following topics:

Defining the technical decision flow (flow chart) through the planning process.
Describing the decisions to be made and the commonly available options to consider in making the decisions.
Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
Framing the decision in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive understanding of the appropriate business landscape.

The guides in this series are intended to complement and augment the product documentation.

The series of guides cover Windows Server, to Virtualization, Desktop Optimization, System Center, Exchange and other mainstream Infrastructure products and technologies.

SharePoint Guidance – November 2008

mepprecht — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:25:23 GMT

The SharePoint Guidance has just been published on Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices Developer Center.

This guidance helps architects and developers build SharePoint intranet applications. The guidance contains a reference implementation (RI) that demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and lifecycle management challenges. This guidance discusses the following:

Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.
Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter.
Implementation examples demonstrated in the RI and in the QuickStarts.
How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
Set up of development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
Managing the application life cycle including upgrade.
Team-based intranet application development.

The following areas are not discussed in this version of the guidance:

Content-oriented sites that use Web content management.
Internet and enterprise-scale SharePoint applications.
Multilingual SharePoint applications.
Scale or security testing of SharePoint applications.

MSDN site: SharePoint Guidance
Codeplex site: http://codeplex.com/spg
Community Forum: http://www.codeplex.com/spg/Thread/List.aspx