I understand from the talk last night that the big reason to go Xen at UVM for Blackboard was the shared disk resource locking issues with VMWare.
I don't know how useful this will be or not, but this blog post has a step by step list of how to create a SQL Server cluster, inlcuding dealing with shared disk locking issues. I don't know if this would be considered new information that would have been helpful when dealing with the Blackboard development server setup, or if y'all at UVM already had this info, and found it to still not help. Anyway, thought I'd share: http://sqladvice.com/blogs/repeatableread/archive/2005/08/01/4273.aspx Our setup at Stone is not advanced or well-supplied enough to have too much fun with VMWare - we just use Workstation and VMWare Server. We tried the recently released ESXi, but it wouldn't install on the only machine we had free, so we haven't had a chance to go back. I had used an old version of ESX for a little while a year or two ago, but the demo ended, and we weren't sold. Still, Workstation and Server serve their purposes here - allowing us to develop software in isolated environments, and also install old software and troubleshoot conflicts it might be causing, without actually installing that old software on a machine used daily. Typical development stuff. We use VMWare Server to run development servers, but we only have one virtual server in production. I'm still daydreaming about have 2TiB of RAM to use... I'd probably dedicate 1TiB as RAM disk just to avoid ever using the slow disk drives! :) -Nick --- Nicholas Floersch (pr. Floor-sh) Web Application/GIS Specialist Stone Environmental, Inc. Montpelier, VT Desk: 802.229.1872 Fax: 802.229.5417 This communication, including any attachments, is solely for the confidential use of the person(s) named above. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete/destroy the original. Any reader other than the intended recipient is hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited.
