In the last few months I’ve been presenting a new session at community events that’s had a positive reception that I’m pleasantly surprised at.

It’s had several titles, but currently its “How to be a more successful architect” and I originally created it as an overview of my Microsoft Certified Architect journey, although I’ve taken it on a different course since then.

Hopefully of interest to everyone

The session is hopefully interesting to everyone in the IT industry, not just a specific type of SQL Server professional.  It’s foundation is the idea that regardless of your job title, you’re probably informally, or formally, performing the role of an architect at some point in your working day.

It could be you have to clarify someone’s requirements so you can understand how whatever you create for them demonstrates its value the most.  Or, you could you to justify to someone, or yourself, why the solution design you’ve come up with is the right design as you’ve taken a structured path to designing it.

Presentation slides

The slides from my most recent delivery of the session at SQLSaturday #194 in Exeter are available here.   Like all architectures its evolving, so I’m sure there’ll be newer versions in the future.

Presentation links

Within the presentation, and during my delivery of it, I mention numerous online resources that I recommend reviewing as you develop your IT architect skills.

Architect Certifications

Global IT Architect Association’s CITA-P here.

The Open Group’s Certified Architect here.

Microsoft’s Certified Architect here.

Architect Resources

Microsoft’s The Architect Journal here.

Perspectives Based Architecture for requirements gathering here.

ATAM for prioritising requirements here.

Waterfall vs. Agile methodologies here.

Influencing Without Authority book here.

MSDN Patterns and Practices library here.

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide here.

Solution Lifecycle Management

ITIL Application Life Cycle Process here.

Hopefully something somewhere in this post or the web links has caught your imagination, in which case, please share just what in the comments section.

Someone recently asked if I could post the demo script that I mention in my RCSI blog post on this site.

I’ve saved it as a PDF file as WordPress doesn’t like .sql or .txt files, but you can still copy and paste from it.

The file is here.

While advances in technology are seemingly continuous, and the limitations of yesterday’s systems are now the minimum requirements of tomorrow’s, care should still be taken to make sure every capability scales as much as you need it to.

Virtualisation of yesterday

In the last few years, the capabilities of virtualisation have increased dramatically.  It was only a few years ago that virtual servers were limited to 4 vCPUs, had only average performance storage, and never had enough memory.  That explains why for a long time it was only ever our “small footprint” servers that we virtualised.

Virtualisation in 2013

Today, the enterprise virtualisation platform vendors deliver capabilities that we only dreamt of a few years ago; 32 vCPUs, 1TB of memory, and high availability by default, for every virtual server.

That’s a lot of engine power we can put behind our virtual servers, allowing us to virtualise hopefully most of our data centres if we choose to these days.

Watch for the subtle limitations

However, despite these great headline capabilities, there are still inherent capability limits that the small print carries.  I found one of these during a cluster build recently and that prompted me to write this article.

Our project was using VMware 5 to host some fairly large nodes of a SQL Server failover cluster instance.  Each virtual server had 16 vCPUs and 128GB of memory, something that VMware can adequately provide, but it was the storage configuration where we hit a limitation by surprise.

The SQL Server cluster design we initially created required upwards of 60 mount points to be presented to each of the cluster nodes, however we then discovered that VMware has a limit of 45 clustered/shared SAN volumes (raw device mappings) being presented to a virtual server.

What it quickly demonstrates is that while our focus was initially on whether or not the virtual server would run fast enough, the limitation that actually mattered to us was actually related to storage provisioning.

Published configuration limitations

The links below provide details from VMware and Microsoft about the complete limitations of their virtualisation software, and are worth reading if you’re planning to deploy virtual servers with more than the default resources.

VMware 5 Configuration Maximums

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Scalability