Hi all. At work I’m moving into SQL server admin. Currently Oracle . Not having done much before I thought it would be handy having a sandpit environment at home aside from the work one.
Was thinking of getting / building a new PC anyway.
I’d like to be able to set up a single windows server 2012 cluster running SQL server 2012 or 2014.

1. What spec PC would I need. I was thinking of a ssd hybrid with multiple partitions.
2. With VMware what’s the crack with windows licenses and installing the OS?

Anyone done this and how did you go about it.

Plenty of RAM (boggo Intel chipsets do 32GB now).

SSD is cheap, don’t bother with hybrid drives.

As above, processing power isn’t too important but put plenty of RAM in it.

If storage isn’t a big thing then a 256 Gb SSD is cheap as chips these days so may as well just use that and add a storage drive later if need be.

Licensing is the same as on a desktop so to be 100% you would have to pay for them.

I’ve been out of it a while, but when you took Microsoft server side courses in the past you got time and usercount limited versions of the software to take away. If you can’t get hold of one of those to play on, can you get a developer account, that can get you access to all the platforms and previews?

if you have a bit of cash get a HP Microserver, they are about £180 for the latest ones and you may even get a bit of cashback.

you can get some cheap ram from crucial to up it to the max as its usually a single cpu and 2gb ram with a 250gb disk. 3 spare bays in it.

can you get a developer account, that can get you access to all the platforms and previews

That is probably a good shout, the Microsoft technet subscription normally gets you full licenses of everything for about £200.

Thx to all for the replies. Food for thought.

With a new physical box I’d stil install ms onto it then vmware workstation or player to then create vm’s on. Install esxi within the vm’s, then install vm’s within the virtual esxi boxes… To use the microserver as one esxi box is a waste of resources when you could install many vm’s and freenas onto it, you would then have the opportunity to create rdm’s which you could then use for sql clustering.

Ms products are good for 180 days and vmware are 60 days.

Cheers,

Technet doesn’t exist any more (and mine has finally lapsed). Some tiers of MSDN have the “unlimited evaluation” that Technet used to offer, although to get everything you used to get for £200 or so per year is now costing several times that and has a load of stuff I don’t need.

As said, 180 day evals are standard for most MS stuff now, and they seem to be committing to that for future stuff.

If your pc has virtual hardware support then the new VMware suff is probably best bet.
However you can run vmplayer on hardware without virtual hardware support. On my p4 It runs fine.
On win7 iv tried virtual pc, virtual box and VMware player. Vm player seems the least problematic.
With caveats,you need an Ms licence for each virtual operating system.
What I do with win 7pro is convert the Ms virtual xp mode machine to VMware player then clone it. I run sql server 2008 r2 tho.
Microsoft licensing is horrific and most people make wild assumptions and/or know jack 5**t. Read the eula if you need to be completely sure on licence compliance.
The 2008r2 sql server evaluation licence is pretty ace for learning and testing. Install as many copies as you like etc.
Check the eula for 2012/4 it may be the same.
Server 2008r2 will work just fine on limited ram – it will chug along ok with 128mb allocated. When you start throwing stuff at it, it may collapse but we found small batch and rbar stuff ok. Ssis ran ok to. Can’t comment on Ssrs or ssas performance.
Note the eval editions is basically an enterprise edition so has all the bells and whistles. Was about £55 quid.
You can get vm test machines from Microsoft with sql server built in but they need to run under hyper v. I have converted them to run under vmware player on vt assisted hardware but it is a bit of a faf.

I wouldn’t bother with buying VMware Workstation, in your shoes I would build a machine around an AMD FX 8 core with 16GB RAM (32GB if you have the cash) and then Windows 8.1 Pro or Enterprise Editions. These editions come with Hyper-V 3 which IMO works really well.

If you are not up for forking out on a full windows licence you could use the free bare metal Hyper-V install and then evaluation versions of Windows server.

VMware also offer a free bare metal hyper-visor and there is also KVM/QEMU for Linux – Proxmox is definitely worth a look if that’s your bag and you shouldn’t have issues running windows VM’s on it.

As already stated when running VM’s it is usually RAM and Storage IOP’s that are the limiting factors rather than CPU power. I recommended the AMD CPU because its cheaper than Intel and all 970 and 990 motherboards fully support the processor virtualisation instruction sets. Most ASUS boards can also support unbuffered ECC memory too. All of this can be a little bit hit and miss with some Intel boards, especially those usually aimed at gamers and ECC memory requires more expensive boards and Xeon (or bizarrely i3) processors.

Good luck with SQL Server, it doesn’t have as many configuration options as Oracle and its default concurrency model may seem odd at first but you will find it far simpler to deploy in clustered environments, although there is no direct equivalent of Oracle RAC.

BaronVonP7 – I think you are referring to the developer edition of SQL Server. It costs around £50 and does not expire. The evaluation versions are free and time limited to 180 days use I think, but are fine for labs use.

It’s a real shame they got rid of tech-net.

Tis true. Developer edition. Beer post error.