SoSSE is not designed to be a full blown VMWare monitoring package.  Quest has one of those (it’s called vFoglight) if the you’re interested.  SoSSE is hoping to provide you with enough information about your virtual environment so that you can rule in, or out, VMWare as the cause of your performance issue.  By showing a you the amount of resource utilization that ESX is “stealing” from your database server, you can immediately know whether or not your performance issue is caused by your SQL Server instance, or is caused by VMWare taking your resources.  Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise can now provide full visibility into the entire OS stack that the database instance is running on. SQL Server -> Windows OS -> VMWare ESX.

This is exactly what DBA’s have been needing since VM’s became prevalent, the ability to know whether a problem is theirs to troubleshoot, or whether they are wasting their time looking into an issue that is caused by some other machine.  Obviously with any metric showing overhead, you want the value to be as low as possible.  SoSSE can raise alarms, if you’d like, whenever this metric exceeds a user definable percentage.

In addition to this single homepage metric, SoSSE also now has two additional drilldowns to provide more detailed information.  The Virtual CPU drilldown shows a historical graph showing  CPU % (idle and used) as well as the CPU that has been stolen by ESX% (in red).  In addition to CPU %, this drill down also shows the MHz of CPU that a VM has consumed.  We discussed in the last post how critical it is to analyze these two metrics  together!

If you determine that VMWare is taking resources from your VM, you can also view a list of VM’s managed by ESX so that you can view which VM is taking your resources.  You can sort this list by host to view all VM’s you are sharing an ESX server with, and then see how much (in GHZ) each VM is consuming.

We hope you find this feature useful and, as always, would love to hear your feedback!

“The SQL Server was performing great yesterday and all of a sudden today the performance is terrible.”

Foglight Performance Analysis has a very powerful feature that allows you compare two different properties of your SQL Server workload.  This scenarios could be:

• Comparing the performance of a database over two different time ranges.
• Comparing the performance of a single stored procedure over two different time ranges.
• Comparing the performance of database A to database B over the same time range.
• etc…

Take a look at this short tutorial and see how the feature could help you in your environment!  Any questions, feel free to comment.

Brent Ozar says, “This is definitely my favorite way to check wait stats performance on my SQL Servers to find out what’s going wrong at a glance.”

1) As a database administrator, all of my critical data files are on my F and G drives.  I don’t want to monitor those drives with the same thresholds and alerts as I do my C drive.

2) I have different backup policies for different databases on my servers and I don’t want to alarm on every database the same way.

All of these use cases can be met with Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise’s alarm configurations.  Please watch the video below to see how its done.  If anyone has any questions or comments, or you want to be walked through a use case of your own, leave a comment or post in the forums!

LiteSpeed’s Object Level Recovery helps you restore individual objects from a SQL Server backup – either native or LiteSpeed.  Brent Ozar shows how in this short video.