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Category: Administration

Using containerd as a Kubernetes Container Runtime

Published 2021-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino does a switcheroo:

In this post, I’m going to show you how to install containerd as the container runtime in a Kubernetes cluster. I will also cover setting the cgroup driver for containerd to systemd which is the preferred cgroup driver for Kubernetes. In Kubernetes version 1.20 Docker was deprecated and will be removed after 1.22. containerd is a CRI compatible container runtime and is one of the supported options you have as a container runtime in Kubernetes in this post Docker Kubernetes world. I do want to call out that you can use containers created with Docker in containerd.

There are a few steps, but it’s not crazy by any stretch, and that’s part of why the post-Docker-in-Kubernetes world won’t be chaos.

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Splitting SQL Server Drives on Modern SANs

Published 2021-02-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Taylor checks up on some older advice:

Back in the day, “when I was a lad“, the recommendation for SQL Server was to split your data, logs and tempdb files onto separate drives/luns to get the most out of your storage. Jump forward to 2021, is this still relevant and should I be splitting my SQL Server drives on to separate luns on new SAN storage? A question which is often asked not just by customers as well as their 3rd party managed service providers / hosting companies. This question can also be along the lines of, “Why can’t we just put everything on a C:\ because the backend is all on the same lun“. This is slightly different as they’re questioning the drive lettering more than creating separate luns but still relevant to this topic.

Click through to learn what Chris has found.

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Visualizing Infrastructure with Terraform Graph

Published 2021-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan D’Aloia shows how we can visualize Terraform-based infrastructure with diagrams:

As can be seen from the image above we have every resource that is defined in the Terraform code that is to be deployed. At a first glance, it does appear that not all the information here is of such relevance, for example, the metadata referring to registry or root provider. However, if we look away from this we can begin to see how the Infrastructure model is going to look once it has been deployed.

We can see that we have one resource group called “example” which has an Azure SQL Server and also an Azure Storage account also both called “example” and that all of these resources directly link to the resource group. I would also point out that you can also see that Azure SQL database directly links to the SQL server giving a clear indication of which databases belong to which server.

Click through for an example as well as the process.

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Long-Term Backups on Azure SQL Database

Published 2021-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal takes us through a fairly new feature in Azure SQL Database:

There is a new (ish) interface to looking and configuring backups for your Azure SQL Database. This can be found within the settings section of the SQL Server.

As you can see, by default we have 7 days retention to allow for PITR – Point In Time Recovery, anything longer you will need to setup long term retention.

Click through to see how to set this up.

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Launching Linux VMs with Firecracker

Published 2021-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Julia Evans gives us an introduction to Firecracker:

Firecracker says this about performance in their specification:

It takes <= 125 ms to go from receiving the Firecracker InstanceStart API call to the start of the Linux guest user-space /sbin/init process.

So far I’ve been using Firecracker to start relatively large VMs – Ubuntu VMs running systemd as an init system – and it takes maybe 2-3 seconds for them to boot. I haven’t been measuring that closely because honestly 5 seconds is fast enough and I don’t mind too much about an extra 200ms either way.

That’s pretty fast. Click through for more info on installation and configuration.

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Checking for Missing Failover Cluster Dependencies

Published 2021-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan ran into an error creating a new database:

A tool that restores a model type database and does a bit of configuration work was failing. I took a look at the stores procedures and started to go step by step. It didn’t take long before getting this error message when attempting to restore/create a database:

Msg 5184, Level 16, State 2, Line 3
Cannot use file ‘D:\sql_log\CC_Test_name_4.ldf’ for clustered server. Only formatted files on which the cluster resource of the server has a dependency can be used. Either the disk resource containing the file is not present in the cluster group or the cluster resource of the Sql Server does not have a dependency on it.

Click through for the solution.

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Using Active Directory Authentication for SQL Server on Linux

Published 2021-02-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick takes us through a lengthy process:

SQL Server has been supported on several Linux distributions for a couple of years now. For some people, the primary stumbling block to implementing SQL Server on Linux is the need to retain Active Directory (ie Windows-based) authentication for their database users and applications. Below we’ll go over how to join a Linux server (Ubuntu release 20.04) with SQL Server 2019 to an Active Directory domain, and then configure SQL Server to allow Windows-based logins.

There are quite a few steps here and I appreciate Jamie providing us an image-filled, step-by-step process.

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SSIS Framework Manager Community Edition

Published 2021-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard has a new product announcement:

I’m excited to announce SSIS Framework Manager CE (Community Edition) is available for download at DILM Suite! SSIS Framework Manager CE is designed to support SSIS Framework Community Edition, providing a GUI to facilitate SSIS Framework Application creation, configuration, and management.

Three views are supported in this initial edition: Catalog, Application, and Package. The Catalog view incorporates the same Catalog treeview used in SSIS Catalog Browser (also free) and SSIS Catalog Compare (not free):

Click through to see what’s included.

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Using the Model Database

Published 2021-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley explains the utility of the model database:

Below I will outline the model database, which has a unique purpose for SQL Server.

The model database is an empty shell of a database that has the sole purpose of providing a database template for any new User Database created in SQL Server. With that being said, you can make configuration changes to the model database and then expect those baseline settings to be applied to all new user databases.

Read on to see some of the things you can set. I was a bit disappointed in some of the things which model doesn’t apply across to other databases, but it does carry over quite a bit.

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