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.
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
Having troubles running SQL Server Manager on your shiny new Windows 2008 installation? Make sure you right click and do a “Run as administrator” on it. Took me awhile to figure this one out. Otherwise you’ll just get the error “Login failed for user domain\user. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18456)” even if you’re a member of the local administrators on the SQL box.
Yet another instance of where UAC sucks.
After having issues with a potential bug on Feb the 29th, I’ve finally gotten things straightened out.
Today I attempted to move the mailboxes again, but received the same error message.
Summary: 1 item(s). 0 succeeded, 1 failed.
Elapsed time: 00:00:08User’s Mailbox
FailedError:
The address list service on the server ‘servername.fqdn’ is not running. The Exchange server address list service failed to respond. This could be because of an address list or email address policy configuration error.The Exchange server address list service failed to respond. This could be because of an address list or email address policy configuration error.
Exchange Management Shell command attempted:
‘fqdn/Managed Users/User’ | move-mailbox -BadItemLimit ‘10’ -TargetDatabase ‘servername\First Storage Group\Mailbox Database’Elapsed Time: 00:00:08
It turns out that all I needed to do was restart the System Attendant service on the machine I was trying to move the mailboxes to. After I did that, everything moved successfully. I then attempted to hit OWA on the new machine and it was successful! So I finished moving all the mailboxes over, changed ISA to point to the new server name, imported the right certificate and I’m good to go. Almost 5 days of downtime, but no email lost, yay!
Now I just need to decommission the old Exchange box and give the new one more RAM. Not a bad few days work.
Well, I’ve got the new Exchange box up and running. However, I can’t move the mailbox from one machine to the other. Thankfully, I’m not the only one having this problem today. It appears as though because it is the 29th of February (leap year), there is a bug in Exchange 2007 preventing certain things from completing. There’s a nice TechNet thread on it, and it appears by setting your date to tomorrow fixes it. I think I’ll just wait to move the mailboxes till tomorrow or later then :)