Read the full Document here.

We have seen this behavior on a few systems, and found that carving up the backups into smaller batch files has solved the issue for us but we plan to move back to large batch files with the upcoming 6.5.6 update in Q2 of 2010.

This past evening, I had an email conversation with a former colleague who is on the development side of Cloud Computing.  Morgan Catlin, Vice President of IT for Valtira, and I discussed how Cloud Computing is changing our relationship between Development and Administration.

By chance, I just re-read Jason Boche’s thoughts on Cloud Camp Minneapolis that day, which happened to be organized by EnStratus’ George Reese, a co-founder of Valtira.  Some of the comments on virtualization and Cloud Computing, in Jason’s blog post, got my wheels spinning even more.

Some of the major points I took away from all these different perspectives and points:

• Virtualization is much more than a simple brick in the wall of Cloud Computing, however the abstraction of the hardware, software, networks, storage, Administrators that make Virtualization possible and therefore the Cloud allows us to easily downgrade it’s importance in this process.
• Cloud Computing and Virtualization is rapidly evolving beyond Hypervisors and Infrastructure as a Service (Buzzwords) into APIs, Automation, and even Platform as a Service (More Buzzwords).  I admittedly still live and think in a IaaS world, and need to begin to think toward PaaS.  This again will dramatically change how Administrators think of Virtual Infrastructure, and manage it.  Not necessarily a bad thing, just different.
• Cloud Computing is changing the way both Administrators and Developers view and rely upon each other.  Scale Out vs Scale Up is a great example, Developers can hit application or server bottlenecks and without any Administrator interaction simply continue to Scale Out their application.  Old days of buying upgrades to Scale Up existing equipment is non-existent to Developers and should be.  This resource management is now left solely to Administrators to handle on the Infrastructure side without any Developer interaction.  I believe this work will continue to wane as Hypervisors evolve, see the next point.
• Administrators will have a change in function and thought coming, there will still be Infrastructure work to be done but as Hypervisors become smarter, more redundant and less interactive we will see a change.  Specifically, hardware will be managed more from an aggregate pool perspective, throw disks and CPUs into the pool and the Hypervisor will determine where and how to best use these new resources for you.
• VMware and Microsoft appear to be the leaders emerging in this market beyond Virtualization; as Big Iron has collapsed, and Xen appears to be floundering.  With this increased competition beginning to focus less on what the Hypervisor does and how it does it, and instead on application support and functionality outside of the Hypervisor.  See VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource, and Microsoft’s Azure.  They appear to be aligning themselves for a whole new fight.

As the Virtualization and Cloud Computing market continues to heat up, and sides are chosen between VMware and Microsoft we will see very interesting developments.  How it will be divided is far beyond my limited insight, but know it is coming.

*Edit* Serves me right for slacking, no sooner than I finally post this and catch up on my Tweets, I find another great article from Massimo of IT 2.0 on this very topic!  Read it here, great article.

*Edit* Adding another recent blog post on this topic from Bernd of VirtualizationPractice.  Read it here.

It isn't just ancient, it is actually just plain stupid and short-sighted.  Thankfully, Microsoft has stepped up and reconciled this with the real world.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/32260

I do believe that this will help some companies finally make the push to VMWare for virtualization, but I think VMWare has such a battle on it's hands with Microsoft that Microsoft has just put down a move that might lead to a "checkmate" scenario in the future.  Unless VMWare can forge ahead, and stay far out in front of Microsoft with new Enterprise Datacenter features for higher availablity, lower power consumption, and the like, they will be crushed by just a war of attrition from Microsoft.  This move sets Microsoft up to just absorb all those VMWare customers when that War of Attrition finally wears them down.

 Take a look at the software directly from Quest here .

 From my hands-0n with it, it offers you a dashboard view of all your SQL Servers performance in real time making it very simple to troubleshoot bottlenecks, or even users/tables/queries/dbs that are running improperly.  Even more impressive was their ability to combine Litespeed backups and snapshots into a great timeline menu for rollback and restore across the environment.

1 year evals of everything comes with attendance.

Well, I am writing from phone, will update more later!

Updates:

I attended sessions from both the IT Professional and Technology Decision-Maker tracks at the event.

Session 1: TDM: Enabling Dynamic IT and Optimizing Your Infrastructure, Processes and People
  – Presenter:  Indikab@microsoft.com (Indy)
  – Building a Dynamic IT
    -  Fully automated, knowledge captured, and access to information from anywhere
       -  Archiving and Reporting
       -  Data mining and Reporting
   -  Business Enabler
       -  Microsoft Infrasture Optimization
       -  Most businesses fail at Disaster Recovery
   -  Virtualization
      -  Virtualization of not just the hardware level but also the application and presentation layers for access to information and applications from anywhere.
         -  Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008
            -  Runs off local and remote resources to allow for greater number of users per server.
            -  Virtualizes each application and runs each application only over one session per user, no longer a session per application per user.
   -  SBS 2008 will allow for multiple servers to allow for more functionality at a lower price point for SMBs.

Session 2: TDM: Optimizing your IT Infrastructure with Windows Server 2008
  – Presenter:  Indikab@microsoft.com (Indy)
    -  Microsoft System Center
      -  Microsoft System Center
      -  Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager
      -  Microsoft Virtualization
      -  Patching, Knowledgebase, and System Health from one Dashboard
         -  Virtual Machine Manager is also available for Hyper-V
            -  Hyper-V/VMM will be able to virtualize live physical or VMWare systems running Windows Vista, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008.   Windows 2000 does require offline migration.
    -  Microsoft Case Studies
    -  Roadmap for the future includes many products built around componetized and secure platform.
       -  One example is updating Biztalk Server and offering Biztalk Services for free, similar to Windows Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal Server.
    -  Microsoft Security
       -  NAP (Network Access Protection)
          -  Already does exist in Windows Server 2003 SP1!
          -  Microsoft Eating It's Own Dogfood – Uses only ISA Server, they no longer use ANY Cisco or Checkpoint firewalls.
       -  Bitlocker
           -  Encrypt whole drives
           -  Encrypt Read-only Domain Controllers, laptops, desktop, etc to be shipped to remote locations.
           -  Able to backup certificates to fileshares, etc.
       -  Data Protection Manager 2007
           -  Sits on the network as a Snapshot/Tape/Disk backup server.
           -  Can be virtualized itself.
           -  Support for Windows/Exchange/Sharepoint/Active Directory/SQL Server in one server.
           -  Windows 2008 Core allows for a minimized attack surface.
              -  Allows for remote GUI administration as well as local command-line administration.

Session 3: IT Pro: Virtualization and Your Infrastructure

Session 4: IT Pro: Securing Your IT Infrasturure with Windows Server 2008

Session 5: IT Pro: Exploring Winddows Server 2008 Web and Application Technologies

LSASS.exe and Store.exe during online maintainance would suddenly compete for CPU resources, and wouldn't stop.  Resulting in Store.exe needing to have a service restart every morning at 4AM PT after online maintanance was finished.  This was obviously a severe problem, with little to no known cause.

 For the migration, we followed Microsoft's recommendations of backing up the pub and priv dbs.  Installing Exchange with the /disasterrecovery switch and patching to identical levels, and then restoring.   Everything was flawless, all mailboxes intact, remapped users to mailboxes with no issues….but that was when this resource competition began!

So, we began testing, we used the migration wizard to move all the mailboxes to a new server, since we now trusted the domain and Exchange environment that had been rebuilt.  And suddenly, our resource competition disappeared!  Perhaps Microsoft hadn't actually tested a migration/recovery path quite as completely as they claimed?  So, now, I am testing the complete rebuild and recovery of the Exchange system to the same DNS name.