The good news is that it is not an unreasonable requirement and it has been done before. The solution is to use Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA) and Credential Spec Files. A number of people have already documented their efforts. Some were more successful than others.
Click through for a detailed guide to getting this working.
Andrew Pruski shows us how we can build our own Helm chart to deploy SQL Server to Kubernetes:
Navigate to the new directory: –
cd C:\HelmAnd now create the new chart!
helm create testsqlchartOK, what that has done is create an empty chart so we need to drop in our yaml configuration files.
Read on to see how to generate the chart and use it to deploy SQL Server.
Chris Adkin continues a series on big data clusters in SQL Server 2019:
This post post will focus on creating a big data cluster so that you can get up and running as fast as possible, as such the storage type used will be ephemeral, this perfectly acceptable for “Kicking the tyres”. For production grade installations integration with a production grade storage platform is required via a storage plugin. Before we create our cluster, with the assumption we are doing this with an on premises infrastructure, the following pre-requisites need to be met:
Read the whole thing, but wait until part 4 before putting anything valuable in it.
Andrew Pruski writes up some issues he had with creating a LoadBalancer service in Azure Kubernetes:
I logged a case with MS Support and when they came back to me, they advised that the service principal that is spun up in the background had expired. This service principal is required to allow the cluster to interact with the Azure APIs in order to create other Azure resources.
When a service is created within AKS with a type of LoadBalancer, a Load Balancer is created in the background which provides the external IP I was waiting on to allow me to connect to the cluster.
Because this principal had expired, the cluster was unable to create the Load Balancer and the external IP of the service remained in the pending state.
There were a lot of steps here; click through to see just how many.
Database cloning is a key aspect of the SSRS scale out architecture, with database clones providing each container a complete set of databases. Two or more VMs operated behind a load balancer delivers a highly available and scalable reporting service. This article focuses on Windows SQL Server containers and Windows Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) based cloning, but the same architecture can support SQL Server Linux containers or conventional instances (Windows or Linux). Redgate SQL Clone, for example would support SQL Server instances. Other options include the use of storage arrays instead of Windows VHD based clones. The trade-offs between SQL containers and instances, and between VHDs and storage arrays are covered in separate sections below.
The combination of SSRS containers with database cloning is appealing for simplicity and operational savings. SSRS containers are also drawing interest as part of public cloud strategies, as SSRS containers can be integrated with AWS RDS or SQL Azure databases to provide a horizontally scalable reporting solution.
This is a bit more complex than Reporting Services scale-out with Enterprise Edition, but if you’re on Standard Edition and can’t use scale-out, it’s an interesting alternative.
Max Trinidad has an Ubuntu VM running Powershell Core on Docker:
While learning about Docker Container, I notice that is much easier to installed on a Linux system. In Windows, Hyper-V is a requirement to install Docker, and specially if you want to use the “Windows Subsystem in Linux” WSL feature, there’s more setup to complete. So, I’m not using Hyper-V, I’m using VMware Workstation. To keeping simple, I created an Ubuntu 18.04 VM using VMWare Workstation.
You can find the Docker CE installation instructions in the following link.
If you’re using Ubuntu 18.04. make sure to install Curl, as it isn’t included in the OS.
Click through for instructions on how to set this up and join the three layers club (which is not quite the three commas club but close).
Andrew Pruski doesn’t want to mess with a bunch of yaml files:
In previous posts I’ve run through how to deploy sql server to Kubernetes using yaml files. That’s a great way to deploy but is there possibly an easier way?
Enter Helm. A package manager for Kubernetes.
Helm packages are called charts and wouldn’t you know it? There’s a chart for SQL Server!
Helm comes in two parts. Helm itself is the client side tool, and tiller, which is the server side component. Details of what each part does can be found here.
They’re making it too easy now…
Andrew Pruski shows us kube-shell:
One tool that I’ve recently come across is kube-shell, an integrated shell for working with Kubernetes. What’s great about it is that it’s cross-platform and has intellisense for kubectl.
Installation is a cinch! The prerequisites are python and pip, which can be downloaded from here.
That auto-complete is quite useful.
I’ve long wanted to do this to help dbatools users easily create a non-production environment to test commands and safely explore our toolset. I finally made it a priority because I needed to ensure some Availability Group commands I was creating worked on Docker, too, and having some clean images permanently available was required. Also, in general, Docker is a just a good thing to know for both automation and career opportunities
Probably a little bit better to work on cmdlets you don’t know about in a sandboxed container rather than on production. Just a little bit.
Docker is designed to enclose environments inside an image / a container. What this allows, for example, is to have a Linux machine on a Macbook, or a machine with R 3.3 when your main computer has R 3.5. Also, this means that you can use older versions of a package for a specific task, while still keeping the package on your machine up-to-date.
This way, you can “solve” dependencies issues: if ever you are afraid dependencies will break your analysis when packages are updated, build a container that will always have the software versions you desire: be it Linux, R, or any package.
Click through for the details. H/T R-bloggers
Kevin Feasel
2019-02-22
Administration, Containers, Security
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