The team that I’m currently working on is focused on performance testing. None of us on the current team are really SQL experts though and we’re running into an issue that appears to be SQL related. Well, it turns out in SQL 2005, there’s these great new things: Database Management Views. What makes them even cooler is that you can pool them all together. And the hottest thing about this whole thing, is a script we found to do most of the work on our own. This things is awesome for SQL performance testing, and will definitely get a lot of reuse, that’s for sure.
Having issues accessing Commerce Server 2007 performance counters remotely? We were too. It seemed like only specific ones were able to be remotely accessed. Well, it turns out that is “by design” (bullet point #2). However, you can get around this by allowing the Remote Registry service run as an account that has access to the database. Down side to that is I’m not exactly sure what permissions are actually required for the Remote Registry service (something above a normal user), and who knows what that breaks.
On my current project, I’m doing a lot with performance testing using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Test Load Agent. Now, there’s not a whole lot of things on Microsoft’s site about it, and blog postings are fairly sparse too. Hopefully some small nuggets listed here will be beneficial.
The first thing to note is that there is some documentation for 2005, but very little about the 2008 version. Do not use the 2005 version if possible. It has many blocking issues you probably will encounter. Use 2008 as many have been fixed. Many of the guides below are for 2005, but work just as well for 2008.
Installation:
Configuration:
How-To’s and Walkthroughs:
FAQs and Indexes:
Hopefully those links will help people. This is usually the set of links I send people who are knew to the whole Visual Studio Load Test Agent stuff.
I’ve been playing with getting DPM running on Windows 2008 (SQL) for awhile now. Mostly on and off, just when I have time to think about it. Well, today I finally got around to getting it installed, successfully.
First of all my setup:
Things I found out while trying to install:
Now I just need to start backing up my Exchange 2007 server, since it has log files dating back to March the 3rd (ouch).
*Update*
Well, it looks like the DPM team has finally released the Rollup package to allow for Win2k8 system state backups (among other things). Check out the news.
Having issues installing the WCF Extensions on Visual Studio 2005 when you have .NET 3.0 SP1 installed? Getting an error message the looks something like the following?
Setup has detected that a prerequisite is missing. To use Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP you must have the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime installed. Please install the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime and restart setup.
Well, instead of just installing the application by double clicking on the MSI, run it the following way. This ends up bypassing the prereq checks and it installs successfully. Yay to broken installers!
msiexec /i vsextwfx.msi WRC_INSTALLED_OVERRIDE=1
See the second update for the correct way of setting this up :)
You may be like me, and have a test lab running VI3. You may also only be running Microsoft VMs for whatever reason. I happen to be because that’s all I deal with as I work for a MS Consulting company. Anyways, whenever I wanted to create a new machine I needed to have the ISO copied out to the ESX storage device. This was always a pain because I’d have to use WinSCP or Filezilla to copy it from a host virtual machine to the storage device. Plus there was the fact that I was now using 2x the space on the storage device because it’s accessible to ESX and it’s stored in a VM. Lame.
With VI3 you can use NFS shares as storage devices. Downside is, is that by default Windows only uses CIFS (or SMB) sharing. However, with Windows 2003 R2 (you may be able to do it in Win2k3 too) you can install the Unix NFS tools which allows for the creation of NFS shares.
From the Windows machine you want the NFS share(s) located on, you need to open Add/Remove Programs from the Control Panel and then Add the following Windows components. Under Other Network File and Print Services select to install all of the Microsoft Services for NFS. I don’t think if you need all of them, but it’s working with them all (feel free to leave feedback if you play).
After you install those, it will require a reboot. Once you’re back up, open up the Microsoft Services for NFS in the Administrator Tools. Right click on the root (Microsoft Services for NFS) and select the user name mapping you want. I set mine to AD lookup, but I’m using anonymous read only access on the share anyways.
If the CIFS share has already been created, you will need to create the NFS share from the command line. This can be done with the following command: nfsshare -o anon=yes
If the CIFS share hasn’t already been created, then you will see a NFS Sharing tab when you attempt to create the share.
Once the share has been created, within your VirtualCenter client (or host based VI Client), select the host, go to configuration tab, and then Storage (SCSI, SAN, and NFS). Select Add Storage and select the Network File System option. Enter the info for the server you just set this up on and the folder (/
As mentioned before, this NFS mount point can be a virtual machine on the host. I haven’t restarted the host yet, so I’m not sure how nicely it plays with that though.
Resources used for this:
http://levelsofdetail.kendeeter.com/2007/01/setting_up_an_nfs_server_on_wi.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324089
**Update**
Ugh, so just doing the above doesn’t work. At least it didn’t list the contents of the iso directory. No good. Further research comes up with one possible solution, but it’s ugly.
Add anonymous login read access to the share and ntfs permissions on the share. This seems to work, but I’m not really a fan of it. For some reason, user mapping doesn’t seem to be working. You should be able to do user mapping by grabbing the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files from your VI3 host and then importing them into the Microsoft Services for NFS User Name Mapping section (right click and define the location for these two files).
I’ve mapped the local admin to the root account. I get no love though as soon as I disable anonymous access on the NFS share. Boo. What really makes me angry is that I want to host templates on this Windows NFS share. That would require me to enable read/write access to the anonymous user. Needless to say, something I’m really not comfortable with. Maybe I can fix this stupid user mapping issue, and then I won’t have to worry.
Oh yeah, be sure to enable the NFS client firewall rule on your host…
**Update #2** This is the way to get this setup
Alright, I’m retarded as to why I couldn’t get this figured out. The real steps to get this going:
Well, it was a day late, but I got my 7.5 mile run in! I ran it on Saturday and then yesterday put in a small 1.5 with Yow-Yow. Good times. Now I’m off to the gym…