Installing vCenter with External Platform Services Controller

Recently the company I work for has upgraded all their VMware ESXi licenses to Enterprise Plus and with great licenses come great configurations. So, I’ve decided to install a fresh install of vCenter 6.5 in a lab with a couple of ESXi hosts attached so I can start configuring the awesomeness like distributed switches (which will be documented too). I’ve always wanted to play with this, but licensing was an issue.

This is for a new install of vCenter, using the UI. I included a very brief CLI deployment too. I will also include an upgrade vCenter post to show the upgrade procedure from 6.0 to 6.5 (and the issues faced with that).

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Install and configure SQL AlwaysON AG with Listener on Azure

This is going to be a multi-part post, based on a very recent deployment.

I had to urgently build an AlwaysOn Availability Group and Listener in Azure on SQL Server 2014. The only issue was,  I have limited Azure and SQL knowledge. I can maintain and install, and create a few scripts here and there. But not enough to be called a DBA or Cloud Boff. However, I decided this would be an awesome thing to learn how to do. So, during the course of man flu, about 40 hours of crunch time, I can now install, configure and maintain a SQL AlwaysON AG with Listener on Azure.

So, lets get cracking.

Prerequisites:

  • 1x Domain Controller
  • 1x Service account for the SQL Server Service and for the SQL Server Agent Service
  • 1x Delegated permissions on AD for the cluster to create computer objects.
  • 1x Load balancer (on Azure)
  • 2x Windows Servers installed with a minimum of SQL 2012 installed
  • Shared location on each node (this will be used for adding DBs to the using a “Full” model)

Some of these pre-requisites are listed in this post – so don’t worry if you don’t know how to do certain things.

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