Availability Groups are a fantastic way to provide high availability and disaster recovery for your databases, but it isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to pull off correctly. To do it right there’s a lot of planning and effort that goes into your Availability Group topology. The funny thing about AGs is as hard as they are to plan…they’re pretty easy to implement…but sometimes things can go wrong. In this post I’m going to show you how to look into things when creating your AGs fails.

My new course “LFCE: Network and Host Security” in now available on Pluralsight here! If you want to learn about the course, check out the trailer here or if you want to dive right in check it out here!

This course targets IT professionals that design and maintain RHEL/CentOS based enterprises. It aligns with the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) and Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) and also Redhat’s RHCSA and RHCE certifications. The course can be used by both the IT pro learning new skills and the senior system administrator preparing for the certification exam

Speaking at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2017!

  I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2017 on the conference runs from April 9th 2017 through April 12th 2017. This is an incredible event packed with fantastic content and speakers. <a href="https://eventloom.com/event/home/summit2017">Check out the amazing schedule</a>!

  This year I have two sessions!

  On **Tuesday, April 10th at 10:00AM** – My session is with none other the <a href="https://twitter.com/theJasonHelmick/">Jason Helmick</a>. Our session is “**Cross platform Management – Windows/Linux**”

  Here’s the abstract

<blockquote>

    Let Jason Helmick and Anthony Nocentino take you through a fun filled, demo heavy adventure of how Windows and Linux admins can work together managing a heterogeneous environment. You will learn all you need to know from both sides of the aisle to get started!

</blockquote>

  On **Wednesday, April 11th at 10:00AM** – I’m presenting solo on “**Linux Fundamentals for the PowerShell Expert**”

  Here’s the abtract

<blockquote>

    PowerShell is now available on Linux and your management wants you to leverage this shift in technology to more effectively manage your systems, but you’re a Windows guy! Don’t fear, iIt’s just an operating system! It has all the same components Windows has and in this session we’ll show you that.

    We will look at the Linux operating system architecture and show you how to interact with and manage Linux system! By the end of this session you’ll be ready to go back to the office and get started working with Linux In this session we’ll cover the following – Process control – Service control – Package installation – Configuration management – System resource management (CPU, disk and memory) – Using PowerShell to interact with Linux systems

</blockquote>

  <a href="https://eventloom.com/event/home/summit2017"><img loading="lazy" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.png" src="/images/2017/03/NewImage.png" alt="PowerShell Summit" width="315" height="65" border="0" /></a>

OK, so if you haven’t heard of the dbatools.io project run by Chrissy LeMaire and company…you’ve likely been living under a rock. I strongly encourage you to check it out ASAP. What they’re doing will make your life as a DBA easier…immediately. Here’s an example…

One of the things I like to do as a DBA is backup my databases, restore them to another server and run CHECKDB on them. There are some cmdlets in the dbatools project, in particular the Snowball release, that really make this easy. In this post I’m going to outline a quick solution I had to throw together this week to help me achieve this goal. We’ve all likely written code to do this using any number of technologies and techniques…wait until you see how easy it is using the dbatools project.

Where – Thursday, May 18, 2017

Where – TUGA IT – Lisbon, Portugal

Full Day Session – “Open Source PowerShell on Linux – Skills to Manage Your Heterogenous Data Center“ 

Registration Link – https://app.weventual.com/detalheEvento.action?iDEvento=4011

• Early Bird Price – before 03/18/2017 – 150€
• Normal Price – before 05/01/2017 – 200€
• Late Registration – 05/18/2017 – 250€

PowerShell is now available on Linux and Mac and you want to use it to manage your multi-platform data center. In this workshop we will introduce Open Source PowerShell and learn why this is such a groundbreaking technology shift. Then we’ll get into the essentials of using PowerShell on Linux and Mac, we’ll start with installing Powershell and building PowerShell from source, work our way into using cmdlets and bash integration, building pipelines, remoting scenarios with heterogenous operating systems and discuss Desired State Configuration.

Speaking at SQLSaturday Chicago!

  I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/600/EventHome.aspx">SQL Saturday Chicago</a> on March 11th 2017! And wow, 600 SQLSaturdays! This one won’t let you down. <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/600/Sessions/Schedule.aspx">Check out the amazing schedule</a>!

  If you don’t know what SQLSaturday is, it’s a whole day of free SQL Server training available to you at no cost!

  If you haven’t been to a SQLSaturday, what are you waiting for! <a href="https://www.sqlsaturday.com/600/registernow.aspx">Sign up now</a>!

  My presentation is **“<a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/600/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=56730">Networking Internals for the SQL Server Professional</a>” **

  <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/600/EventHome.aspx"><img loading="lazy" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.png" src="/images/2017/02/NewImage.png" alt="NewImage" width="116" height="57" border="0" /></a>

  Here’s the abstract for the talk

<blockquote>

    Once data leaves your SQL Server do you know what happens or is the world of networking a black box to you? Would you like to know how data is packaged up and transmitted to other systems and what to do when things go wrong?  Are  you tired of being frustrated with the network team? In this session we introduce how data moves between systems on networks and TCP/IP internals. We’ll discuss real world scenarios showing you how your network’s performance impacts the performance of your SQL Server and even your recovery objectives.

</blockquote>

I’m excited to announce that I have been named a Friend of Redgate for 2017. The program targets influential people in their respective technical communities such as SQL,.NET and ALM and enables us to participate in the conversation around product and community development.

As a multi-year awardee in the program I get to see first hand the continuing dedication Redgate has to the SQL community and to making great software. I met a ton of really cool, very dedicated people along the way. Thanks for the recognition and I look forward to another great year!

Proactive Reporting for SQL Server

If you’re a return reader of this blog you know I write often about monitoring and performance of Availability Groups. I’m a very big proponent of using monitoring techniques to ensure you’re meeting your service level agreements in terms of recovery time objective and recovery point objective. In my in person training sessions on “Performance Monitoring AlwaysOn Availability Groups”, I emphasize the need for knowing what your system’s baseline for healthy replication and knowing when your system deviates from that baseline. From a monitoring perspective, there are really two key concepts here I want to dig into…reactive monitoring and proactive monitoring.

This month I’ll be speaking to the PowerShell Virtual Chapter of PASS. The session is on Linux OS Fundamentals for the SQL Admin. At the core of the session we will introduce you to OS concepts like managing files and file systems, installation packages, using PowerShell on Linux, managing system services, commands and processes and system resource management. This session is intended for those who have never seen or have very little exposure to Linux but are seasoned Windows or SQL administrators. Things like processes, memory utilization and writing scripts should be familiar to you but are not required.

This week we started our Centino Systems weekly newsletter. Check out the first edition here!

The newsletter is going to include the latest in SQL Server and other things in technology that I think are important or interesting…and maybe you will too!

So if you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter go ahead and sign up here!