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Category: Containers

Storing SQL Server Helm Charts in GitHub

Published 2019-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shows how we can use GitHub to store Helm charts and access them easily:

In a previous post I ran through how to create a custom SQL Server Helm chart.

Now that the chart has been created, we need somewhere to store it.

We could keep it locally but what if we wanted to use our own Helm chart repository? That way we wouldn’t have to worry about deleting the chart on our local machine.

I use Github to store all my code to guard against accidentally deleting it (I’ve done that more than once) so why not use Github to store my Helm charts?

Cluster configurations are still code, and code belongs in source control.

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Issues From Using gMSA Accounts with Docker

Published 2019-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Michal Poreba shares some lessons from trying to set up Docker and SQL Server to use gMSA accounts:

While in the end I was able to make it work on Windows Server 2016, 1803, 2019 and 1809 I wasted some time trying to make it work with docker 17.06. Unsuccessfully. Docker 18.09.1 and 18.09.2 worked every time.
There are some reports of intermittent problems with specific OS updates breaking stuff, like the one here but I wasn’t able to reproduce it. I wonder if the updates changes something else that it causing problems, in other words is it the problem with the update itself or the update process?

Read on for several helpful tips, as well as dead ends to avoid.

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.Net Core On Docker Connecting Via AD To SQL Server

Published 2019-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Michal Poreba shows us how to connect Windows Docker containers running .Net Core to SQL Server via Active Directory when the containers are not connected to the domain:

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.

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Creating A Big Data Cluster

Published 2019-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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Azure Kubernetes LoadBalancer External IP Woes

Published 2019-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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Reporting Services Scale-Out With Docker

Published 2019-01-30 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Stanton architects out a scenario using Windocks to create cloned Reporting Services containers in order to scale out Reporting Services:

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.

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Powershell Core On Ubuntu Using Docker

Published 2019-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

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).

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Deploying SQL Server To Kubernetes The Easy Way

Published 2019-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

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…

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