Windows Archives

July 11, 2013

Allan’s Mission Critical SQL Server Book Ordering Information and FAQ

(Updated 12/31/2016 – see this blog post)

Mission Critical SQL Server is available for preorder here. Below you’ll find all of the information you need about it. And if this doesn’t answer your questions, post a comment or contact us.

1. Why am I publishing the book on my own this time?

This is not because I had a falling out with Apress; we’re on good terms. We just didn’t agree on the vision for the content. I wanted a larger no-compromises book more like my Pro SQL Server 2005 High Availability one; they did not. It’s really that simple. With all of the changes in Windows and SQL Server just through their 2012 versions (as well as SQL Server 2014), this is not going to be anything approximating a 300 page book; that’s too tiny and would be too incomplete. You guys benefit from my being unwilling to compromise here, but I get to drive myself nuts in the process being the perfectionist I am. After this book I may do another for Apress again if this book doesn’t beat me!

2. What versions of Windows and SQL Server are covered in the First Edition?

See the product description on the store for details.

3. What electronic format(s) will Mission Critical SQL Server be available in?

Initially, the eBook and all associated content will be in the ubiquitous Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) format. Most platforms have programs that can read this for free even if your preferred platform isn’t Windows. I hope to offer it in other formats like Kindle/Mobi, ePub, and maybe iBook in the future.

4. Will there be digital rights management (DRM) on the PDF file(s)?

This is a sticky wicket. DRM makes life hard and I respect people do not want it. Passwords make it difficult to put on reading devices. Non-DRMed files make it easier to consume. At the same time, I also don’t want to see my content thrown up for free on some torrent site, nor do I want people to be able to easily republish it. Each copy will essentially be watermarked for who buys it and restrictions as laid out in Mission Critical SQL Server Store and Content Terms apply.

5. Will I only be able to buy Mission Critical SQL Server at http://sqlha.contentshelf.com/shop?

For now, yes. I hope to offer the book elsewhere over time. As noted in #2, the goal is to convert the content to other popular formats such as ePub and Kindle/Mobi – maybe even iBooks. That would need to happen before I can offer the content elsewhere. With the number of graphic elements in the book, that may prove to be both challenging and expensive. If you are wanting another format, contact us. The more evidence I have, the more likely it will be to happen. Converting it to other formats will be costly, so if there is not enough interest, I may not be able to do it. I am being realistic here.

6. I live in <insert country here>. Can I buy the book?

Yes. As long as you can check out, it’s a digital download making it easy to get to you. All prices are in US Dollars.

7. I live in <insert country here> and do not read or speak English well. Will you be offering non-English versions of the book?

There are no plans for the book to be translated to other languages.

8. Will there be a physical/print version of the book?

I would love to be able to offer one. Once the book is complete and I know a page count, I may reconsider a print version if it is possible and the cost will not be astronomical. Stay tuned.

9. What is an updated content subscription and why are you offering one?

Books are like snapshots: they are a moment frozen in time. Updating them is difficult and usually there is a long time between releases. A lot can change in a few months, a year, two years.What I’ve decided to do to combat that is to offer a subscription where you will get all the updated content as it is finished. For example, once SQL Sever 2016 and Windows Server 2016 are released, those updates could be incorporated before doing a major edition of the book which would be a year or two out. This gets you newer content quicker – if you want it.

Also, since the release cadence is changing for the Microsoft server products, traditional publishing just may not be possible for specific versions. By the time you’re done writing it, it’s obsolete. I want to have a good foundation to build upon and just extend it. Hope that makes sense.

10. How long does a subscription last?

It’s a yearly subscription which you will manually have to resubscribe to.

UPDATE 5/21/2015: If you preordered the book with an update subscription prior to May 31, 2015, look for an e-mail from me soon. Post-May 31, it will be only one year from the date that this edition of the book is published. So if it is officially released, say, on 10/1/15, your subscription would end on 9/30/16 if not renewed.

11. How much is a subscription renewal?

It’s $25/year. And as pointed out in the previous question’s answer, you elect to renew or not. My goal is to provide high value content so that you want to.

12. Do I need to buy the book again when you publish a new edition and I already have an updated content subscription?

If you have an active subscription, no. The goal is to only have you buy one major edition of the book and then you get updates as they happen. Information changes over time, and I’m trying to be agile and deliver you content ASAP and not have to wait years between releases. If you only want to consume major versions, just buy the new edition of the eBook when it is published. Simple.

13. If I buy the book from anywhere else but your store, can I get a updated content subscription?

No. If I do convert the book to other formats and offer it for sale elsewhere such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., those stores will only get the major edition (i.e. First Edition, Second Edition, etc.). I have to give myself some sort of exclusive, right? I may change my mind on this once the book is available elsewhere and offer something. Time will tell, but do not hold your breath.

14. Can I get access to pre-release content like other publishers offer?

Yes. It’s not free, but it is pretty cheap considering you’ll get to see things months in advance. Two of the bundles offer this option. There is currently pre-release content with more coming. Remember that the pre-release content has not been reviewed or edited, so it’s going to be raw and could contain errors.

15. Why are things priced the way they are?

I can tell you from authoring books in the past I make pennies on the proverbial dollar taking into account all the work and hours I put into the final product. This time, since I’m self-publishing, I make even less PLUS I’ve got very real, very tangible costs I need to deal with such as editing as well as costs for hosting and selling the book (including fees associated with subscriptions). I am not rich. I can’t operate at a substantial loss. I also know that I can’t charge $100+ for an eBook. I’ve priced the main eBook competitively with other similarly priced books even though it will be larger than most of them. I think it represents good value for the price you’ll pay.

16. Do you offer discounts or coupons?

I run specials, so check the store.

17. Can I use the PDF(s) I get from you directly on any device I own?

Absolutely! See our Mission Critical SQL Server Store and Content Terms for more detail. There’s a reason I chose this format.

18. Can I buy multiple copies of the for multiple people such as a class, seminar, DBA department, etc.?

19. Can I share the PDF(s) of the content with people I know? They’re really nice people and need some information on these subjects. I vouch for them.

NO! The copy you purchase is only licensed for the person buying the book (hence the watermark). I didn’t put DRM or passwords on it. Respect me and ensure that everyone buys their own copy. And if you upload the content to some nefarious site, I’ll see the watermark. It’s things like this that would make me never do this again. I know I can’t stop it 100%, but you hurt me more than you help me.

20. What if I am unsure if I want to buy it? Will you have some sort of a sample for me to look at?

I am planning on providing this as things get finished and posted; nothing is ready yet. If you have read any of my other books or writings, though, you have an idea of what you’re in for. 🙂

[Updated 5/21/15] 21. It’s May 2015. Is the book done?
See this blog post for more details.

July 11, 2012

Anti-Virus + Windows Failover Clustering + SQL FCIs = Bad

Recently, I helped a customer plan and configure a three node multiple instance failover cluster. The Windows failover cluster (WSFC) had four instances of SQL Server (3 x 2008 R2 with SP1 and 1 x 2012 with CU2). However, when they went to go enable their anti-virus on the cluster nodes (Symantec if you must know) and set the exclusions I document in my book, things went south. Pretty much everything went offline. They were able to get pretty much everything up but SQL Server Agent for one instance just wasn’t working. I just got off a troubleshooting call with them and I think we fixed that (I’ll know for sure later once they do a few other things). If you think this is an uncommon event, it’s not as evidenced by this quick Twitter exchange I had:

With most customers, anti-virus is a standard piece of kit to install on all servers no matter what. The base rationale makes sense. I mean, who wouldn’t want to protect your servers from potentially bad stuff, right? Here’s where I lose the plot a little bit. First and foremost, your production servers are not desktops. Joe and Jane Administrator should not be surfing the ‘net from there. Assuming that is the case, the risk of getting things like malware is probably really small. If they’re doing that, you’ve got to fix your processes and lock things down. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but it shouldn’t. If you’re on the server and need to use the Internet to go read a support KB, that’s perfectly acceptable usage. But to check their Hotmail/gmail/match.com/watch porn/personal stuff? Hell no. Most admin work should be done from workstations with remote tools – you shouldn’t have to log onto or RDP into the server for most tasks. That drives the risk up of something going wrong.

The other aspect of this is really file-based. Think about it – we get documents and download files from various places. That’s arguably how a lot of the whole malware thing started. A production SQL Server server (that always looks weird to me) should not be a file repository whether it is clustered or not. I will always say that in most cases, a production boxes with SQL Server on it should be dedicated for that purpose only. I know people want to maximize usage and you can create a clustered file share, but I’m assuming here that in most cases where you deploy FCIs, it’s on dedicated WSFCs just for SQL Server. If that is the case, why would you need anti-virus especially if you’re monitoring to ensure people are not doing rogue thins on the cluster. Again, it’s easy to minimize your risk exposure with having good processes. Imagine that.

If your company is still not convinced by these rational arguments, have a quick gander at these KB articles from Microsoft:

Pay particular attention to this bit in 250355:

You can run antivirus software on a SQL Server cluster. However, you must make sure that the antivirus software is cluster-aware. Contact your antivirus software vendor about cluster-aware versions and interoperability.

Not all anti-virus programs are created equal. So make sure if you need to install anti-virus, you get the right thing. If what you have is not cluster-aware, caveat emptor.

Let me add to this cautionary tale: back in the SQL Server 2000/2005 days on Windows Server 2003, I was working with another company. We got things up and running on the cluster with no issue. I told the team responsible for anti-virus how to configure it for the clustered instances of SQL; not much more I could do. Right after we went into production, a day or two in, my databases were marked as Suspect. I did a bit of digging and the smoking gun wasn’t hard to find: right in the Event Log, it was clear as day – a virus scan kicked off at about 11AM and minutes later my databases decided to take a dirt nap from which I had to restore them from backup. They were permanently corrupted due to the scan kicking off. The admins swore up and down it wasn’t them (even though I had the proof). Things were fine for one day and I bet you can guess what happened the next day at the same time. I was livid and took this up the chain. The problem eventually got fixed, but it should have never happened to begin with. That was largely a political issue at the end of the day, but it also speaks to the fact not everyone knows about clusters and SQL Server.

This is a major reason you set filters for things like the the .mdf, .ndf, and .ldf files even on standalone SQL Servers. This is magnified on clusters where if you have an instance that fails over to another node that now takes ownership of the disks associated with that instance, the anti-virus program is going to now see them and say, “Awesome! New files to scan.” That will not only hold up your instance starting, but see my previous paragraph – you may get more than you bargained for. Not only may you blow SLAs, you have the potential of hosing databases. Just what every DBA needs.

UPDATE: Also check out Allen Kinsel’s (Twitter) blog post SQL Server 2008 & IPV6 vs Symantec. It shows where Symantec does something even more fun: endpoint protection. As my friend Nic Cain (blog | Twitter) pointed out to me, endpoint protection can be even worse than anti-virus on a clustered configuration – especially since IPv6 is enabled by default on Windows Server 2008 (and up) and you shouldn’t disable it. Allen’s post is probably why my customer’s cluster went south to begin with, and SQL Server Agent for the one instance was just a casualty.

My recommendation to you: DON’T PUT ANTI-VIRUS ON SERVERS WITH SQL SERVER INSTALLED ON THEM AND ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE CLUSTERS. You’ll be much, much happier.

February 15, 2012

Stop Automatically Updating Production Servers

Everything old is new again – well, not really. Many of the core concepts I teach or talk about be it in a session or onsite as part of knowledge transfer on a consulting engagement haven’t changed over the years. Implementations may change, but ultimately, the things that drive them do not. If you care about such arcane concepts like uptime, availability, and mission critical, you understand that downtime is bad. Very bad. Yet I still see and talk to quite a few customers who like to cause themselves unnecessary pain. I mean, it’s perfectly legal here in the USA to own a gun and shoot yourself in the foot, but why would you? It makes no sense.

Move Forward, Not Backward

A big part of staying mission critical is patching your servers – be it an application, the OS, hardware drivers, BIOS … you get the idea. You want to stay supported and up to date. The farther behind you are, the tougher it is to catch up or make the next major upgrade (say, SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012) because you are not at the right minimum level. But that’s not the focus here – the focus is on those more regular patches that get installed such as security updates, browser updates, and so on. Those are the thorns in the proverbial rose bush.

Most companies have outage windows to apply updates and perform other maintenance to servers regardless of OS and other choices. That makes sense and is definitely needed – 100% uptime is largely a fallacy. (Sorry to burst your bubble if you really believed it was possible.) But whether it’s a security patch or a “routine”, more infrequent service pack, care must be taken.

Summertime … And The Updates Are Easy

George Gershwin is probably rolling in his grave, but I parody with the deepest respect. Microsoft has made it painfully easy (emphasis on painful) to update your servers. If you’re connected to the interwebz, you can set the handy, dandy Windows Update feature to download updates automatically. Even better – you can even have Windows automatically install them for you, too. What’s next? A tiled interface that makes Windows harder to use and makes your Server look like Windows Phone? Nah, something that silly could never never happen in a million years. Oh wait …

All kidding and sarcasm aside, look at your production servers: are they set to automatically update? If so, you are NOT mission critical. You may think you are, but you’re not. You’ll never convince me otherwise. Why?

Mission critical is a mindset. Part of that mindset is caring about things like SLAs, RTOs, and RPOs. Allowing servers to spontaneously download and update themselves – possibly requiring a reboot or worse causing one without you even asking – is 180 degrees from that mindset. You might as well just remove any redundancy and leave your chances to fate, who is a cruel mistress. You NEVER want to see this should you have to log into a production server:
Updating for the sake of updating is never the right approach. File under “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”. Key tenets of mission critical are predictability, consistency, and stability. Servers, especially those participating in a clustered configuration (Windows and/or SQL Server), should be evaluated before applying an update to see if they actually need them. Some do NOT apply, and others may be specific to a configuration (such as a cluster). All patches should be tested prior to going on a production box, and some should be given more weight than others. For example, a fix that touches, say, TCP/IP would be one I would test the heck out of since servers don’t rely on networking or anything. 🙂
To add to #2, I’m going to stick on the consistency point for a moment: servers, especially ones considered mission critical, should all be configured the same. You don’t want varying patch levels and such. That spells trouble with a capital T. (Thank you, Meredith Wilson … I’m on a musical roll tonight!)
If you are going to do anything automatic, just download the updates but for heaven’s sake, don’t let the server automatically apply them. That would be a huge step forward.

The Bottom Line

Look, I realize many of you struggle on a daily basis with your servers and doing this one thing – automatic updates – seemingly makes your lives easier by taking a big task off your proverbial plate. In reality, it may be making it harder. And I also know that in smaller shops especially, you don’t always have the time or (wo)manpower to evaluate each patch/update. I get it. There’s a happy medium somewhere. Don’t turn short term gain into long term pain. There’s no easy or right answer here per se. You have to update. Do what’s best for you, but realize you may blow anything relating to uptime and reliability in the process.

January 9, 2012

Once More With Feeling: Stop Using Active/Passive and Active/Active

Happy 2012, everyone! I figured I might as well kick of the new year by beating a dead horse (not literally – don’t call PETA; I’m not an animal abuser). If you’ve ever heard me speak, read my books or whitepapers, seen a tweet, a blog post, or heck, know of me, you know there’s nothing more that gets my dander up than the use of active/passive (A/P) and active/active (A/A) as it relates to SQL Server failover clusters. This will not be my first time ranting, nor will it be my last. I ranted in this forum post over at SQL Server Central last May as part of a response to something I felt added to the confusion of why people still cling to this silly terminology today. Expect yet another diatribe in my upcoming SQL Server 2012 book, too (although if I like what I write here, I’ll just link this blog post). Anyway …

You may be asking yourself, “Why does he care?” The answer is not as simple as just using wrong terminology.

A Bit of History

Let’s take a way back machine for a moment. July of this year will mark 10 years since the publication of the SQL Server 2000 failover clustering whitepaper I wrote while at Microsoft. That paper has a lot to do with my career today, and I am forever indebted to MS for publishing it. That paper also features the first use of non-A/P and A/A terminology. The terminology is really simple and SQL Server specific. That was a main driver in doing it. You’ll see why as you read on.

SQL Server 2000 marked the biggest change in concepts with failover clustering with the introduction of instances. I think we take it for granted now, but 10+ years ago, it was a pretty big deal to have more than one SQL on a single box or a cluster. There were very practical issues which made having multiple instances of SQL Server 2000 difficult, namely how scalable both Windows and its underlying hardware were. Single core processors, poor hyperthreading support, not much memory (8GB was a luxury for most), needing AWE to go beyond 4GB of memory, 32-bit (discounting the very limited Itanium variant which was released near the end of its lifecycle), DAS, no mount points – shall I go on?

Now let’s back up to the previous release – SQL Server 7.0. SQL Server 7.0 allowed you to cluster up to 2 separate installations (not instances) on two nodes of a Windows failover cluster (I won’t touch that terminology in this post … people still uses MSCS which is wrong, too). Very few of you reading this post may have ever used SQL Server 7.0, let alone clustered it, but let me tell you it was a miserable experience and anyone complaining about things today (and even I do) should put things in perspective. Yes, failover clustering today still has a few things I’d love to see addressed (mainly in Setup), but I’ll take what we have now any day of the week that was the misery known as SQL Server 7.0. Why?

SQL Server 7.0 forced you to put the binaries for SQL Server on the shared disk – meaning you only had one copy and you could only run the management tools from the node which did the installation.
To apply a SQL Server service pack, you had to uncluster the SQL Server installation, run the update (such as SP2), and then re-cluster the install. Let’s just say that didn’t always work.
The clustering implementation was a bit of a hack prior to 2000. As part of the clustering process for SQL, MS replaced some DLLs to get SQL to work in a cluster. This is why specific versions of MDAC and such were required, and if you updated them on your own, you had the potential to break your cluster with 7.0. Fun stuff that I’m glad went away with the rearchitecture of failover clustering in SQL Server 2000. The MDAC issue had a lot to do with bad perceptions of SQL Server (in general – not just clustering) as well. Those issues were fixed a long time ago – notice you never hear about MDAC and issues related to it much, if at all, any more 🙂

So you can see why the ability to easily have more than one clustered installation of SQL Server on the same Windows failover cluster was so appealing when Microsoft fixed this in SQL Server 2000. SQL Server 7.0’s failover clustering implementation burned a lot of people, and unfortunately helped create part of the perception that failover clustering is bad. I know a lot of folks had a hand in that, including Richard Waymire (Blog | Twitter) who was the PM for the feature at the time.

SQL Server 2000 didn’t do clustering any favors in helping out in the perception department, either if I want to be a bit honest all these years on. With the aforementioned limitations (especially memory), you were really limited as to how many instances you could configure on a single Windows failover cluster. People had some really bad experiences with failovers. That’s why to this day I believe you still see a lot of single instance deployments on two-node Windows failover clusters – somewhere along the line they had something bad happen when more than one instance tried to run on a single node. This leaves us in a fun conundrum with other wrong perceptions, such as so-called “wasted resources” but that’s a topic for another time, too. The failover condition wasn’t the only thing that contributed to the poor perception of clustering with 2000 (the other bigger issue tended to be around the occasional file not being laid down during an update or on a remote install – not all customers encountered it which was what made it frustrating), but the entire experience was greatly improved.

In a long-winded way, this is how both “single instance (SQL Server) failover cluster” or “multiple instance (SQL Server) failover cluster” came about. This is more important than ever since Windows Server 2008 and beyond also uses the terminology failover cluster, which used to be a SQL Server only one.

Looking back at SQL Server 7.0, A/P and A/A made sense – even I’ll admit that. You could only have up to two nodes with Windows NT 4.0 Server (the predominant OS used around that time; SQL 7.0 was not developed with Windows 2000 Server in mind), and up to two installations. One instance? A/P, two instances? A/A. In that context, I have no real issue. But once the concept of instances was introduced with SQL Server 2000, all of that should have gone out the window. Now, sure, technically you could have two nodes with two instances and have it “technically” meet the A/P and A/A criteria. I get it. But it’s wrong now, and has been for 10+ years. I can’t be any more clear on this.

Let’s look at scenarios to drive the point home further.

Two Instances, Two Nodes

OK, so this is the “classic”. In a perfect world, you’ve got two nodes, each with its own instance. Since both nodes are running an instance, they are both actively hosting a SQL Server instance. In that case, it’s easy to buy into A/A if you wanted to. What happens – assuming capacity is not an issue – if there is a failover? Technically you are no longer in an A/A configuration. One node is hosting both instances. The other is down or not running any SQL Server instances. Is that now AA/P? No. This where using the right terminology – a multiple instance SQL Server failover cluster – is much more descriptive and actually makes sense.

Three Instances, Two Nodes

This one is a riff on the previous scenario. This one is a simple math problem: is it AA/A? A/AA? AAA/P? It certainly isn’t A/A/A, nor A/A/A/P. Again, the multiple instance SQL Server failover cluster terminology works shockingly well here. (“I’ve got a three instance SQL Server failover cluster.”)

Three Instances, Three Nodes

This one is similar to the Two Instances, Two Nodes scenario. If you have one instance (perfect world: no failovers) per cluster node, to some that would be A/A/A. But how many slashes do you get before things get out of control? And then what happens if failover happens (see previous scenarios for how that will go).

Two Instances, Three Nodes

Here’s another one that I see wrong, so I can kill two birds with one stone here. When Windows gained the ability to have more than two nodes in a failover cluster, the idea of a dedicated failover node – especially when you had multiple instances – was introduced. Because the limitation was at most four nodes with the of Windows 2000 Server Datacenter edition, this was often known as the N+1 scenario. When you really could have more than four nodes and more than one dedicated failover (not getting into specific configurations and things like preferred or possible owners in this post, either), this is N+i, where i would be the number of nodes that are failover ones.

From a SQL Server point of view, how would you denote the N+1 scenario? A/A/P? That’s just silly. Again, saying something like “I have a two instance SQL Server failover cluster with a dedicated failover node” makes a whole lot more sense.

Many Instances, More Than Two Nodes

Here’s where I throw up my hands and if I could curse, I probably would. If you plan on having, say, six instances on however many nodes (let’s pick four for the sake of argument), A/A/A/A/A/A (denoting the number of instances), nor is it really A/A/A/A (denoting the number of nodes). It sure as heck isn’t A/P or A/A. Capiche?

Doesn’t Microsoft Use Both the A/P and A/A Terms Still?

Unfortunately, they have and some still do to this day. I’ve seen it in more current documentation and blog posts from them. Sigh. It doesn’t mean they are right, though. We tried with the release of SQL Server 2000 and all of the corresponding documentation (including my SQL Server 2000 High Availability book) to make things consistent. The same could be said for 2005. But A/P and A/A seem to be sticking around like a cockroach will long after humans after a nuclear blast. Not everyone studies their history, so I guess we’re doomed to repeat it.

In Conclusion

Stop the insanity!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=p063wg78Yss#t=11s

OK, maybe that’s a bit overblown but I wanted to work that reference/kitsch in somewhere. Who wasn’t entertained by that infomercial back in the day?

Like I said in the forum post I link above, I won’t publicly shame anyone for using A/P or A/A, and I may not even correct or embarass you (I may … my apologies if I do), but I hope I’ve explained to you why they’re wrong. Honestly, I don’t get why people are not embracing the right terminology as they accurately describe the configuration. I would even venture to guess that there would be less confusion around more complex clustered SQL Server configurations if people talked about them properly.

December 27, 2011

Think Setup Is Bad? Try Removal!

Last week, I wrote a blog post entitled “It’s Just Setup – Who Cares?”. What I didn’t do was go into the other side of that equation: uninstalling/removing an application. As bad as some software installers can be, trying to remove that software can sometimes be 100x more painful. I’m sure you’ve experienced this either on your own personal machines (regardless of OS) or your enterprise servers at some point in your lifetime.

To be honest, this annoys me much more than a bad installation process. In my mind, any piece of software that gets put onto your computer should be able to be removed completely with none of its traces or hooks still around. I think that’s not an unreasonable expectation … or is it? I mean, I’ve seen numerous times where the odd folder/directory, configuration file, or set of registry entries is still hanging around like that bad party guest who doesn’t want to leave at the end of the end of the night.

Oh, and don’t get me started on programs that will require a reboot to complete the software removal. I have never seen an uninstaller tell me that little fact when the process begins, and I love one of these two situations more:

At the end, a dialog pops up and says something like “Your computer must be rebooted to complete this process” with an OK button. You click, computer reboots.
No dialog, just reboot with no care as to what else may be going on. Working on a document you haven’t saved? Too bad, so sad.

Do you want either of these situations on your computer – especially a mission critical server? Heck no! If whatever you’re trying to eradicate from your computer or server does require a reboot, at least give me the option of when I choose to do the reboot. Again, I don’t think this is a completely unreasonable request of any software vendor. I am not thrilled I’m left in a pending state, but at least I control my own destiny.

Both of these blog posts underscore one thing that holds true: pick your software carefully and test things like install and uninstall before you go live. Knowing is better than flying blind, especially in a production environment that has very tight SLAs for uptime. That 128GB server isn’t coming back online in 30 seconds after a reboot.

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