Available for download: Our High-Availability hands-on labs and SQL Server 2008 JumpStart materials

For me, what’s *REALLY* cool is that the site also has a downloadable VPC plus lab manuals for all of the AlwaysOn High-Availability hands-on labs that SQLskills.com wrote. We originally wrote these labs for SQL Server 2005 and I updated them all for CTP-5. The VPC has a long lab on each of the following:

• Database Snapshots
  
• Data Recovery and Preventative Techniques
  
• Instant Initialization
  
• Peer-to-Peer Replication (including the new Topology Wizard I blogged about here)
  
• Table and Index Partitioning
  
• Snapshot Isolation
  
• Online Operations
  
• Database Mirroring (including a demo I wrote of Automatic Page Repair, described here)
  
• Service Oriented Database Architecture

There is some great depth in each of these – Kimberly blogged more info about the exercises in each lab here. There’s also another VPC image with some higher-level labs on a variety of 2008 features and written by a number of different people- including some labs on Policy-Based Management and Performance Data Collection that Kimberly wrote.

So – where can you get these from? Go to http://sqlserver2008jumpstart.microsofttraining.com/ and hit the Download link on the right-hand side. Register and then you can get to the materials. The AlwaysOn VPC image is Collection 2 at the bottom of the page, and you’ll see all the slide decks as you scroll down the page.

Enjoy!