Storage | Convergence of Data and Infrastructure

PASS Summit 2017 Precon – Virtual SQL Servers: Right to Ludicrous Speed

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, User Groups, Virtualization No Responses »

Sep 152017

PASS has continues to ramp up the plans for the PASS Summit in Seattle this October, and my precon session, “Virtual SQL Servers – Right to Ludicrous Speed” has a few open slots for this Tuesday session. This topic is near and dear to my heart, and I’m thrilled to be able to present to the group advanced SQL Server VM tuning techniques learned from over 17 years of performance tuning.

If any of you want to excel your DBA skills, not only for your on-premises SQL Server VMs but also your VMs in the cloud, I hope all of you can join me in what I consider the best SQL Server ecosystem conference in the world.

Session Details:

Join this full-day introduction session focused on managing and boosting the performance of a virtualized SQL Server environment. The focus of the course is to help those new to virtualization, infrastructure, and cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service concepts to become familiar with the concept and purposes of virtualization and how it can benefit them as data professionals. Participants will gain exposure to all layers of virtualization underneath SQL Server, from storage to hypervisor to the SQL Server instance, no matter if on-premises or in the cloud, and will learn how to construct the entire stack with a strong emphasis on SQL Server performance.

Intended Audience
The intended audience of this course is information workers (both business and IT-centric) involved with architecting a virtualization strategy for SQL Server, or managing business-critical SQL Servers that have already been virtualized.

Course Topics
The following topics will be addressed during the course:
• The Physical Infrastructure Underneath the VM
• Storage and SAN Concepts and Design
• Virtualization and Infrastructure Fundamentals
• The SQL Server Virtual Machine
• Networking, Support, and Licensing
• SQL Server Infrastructure in the Cloud
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery and SQL Server
• Performance Investigation and Tuning of the Entire Stack

A working set of the screens and configuration settings referenced in the session, together with the reference slides and documentation, will be provided to attendees, for strategic reference in working with virtualized SQL Server in their own environments.

Register today! Seats are sure to fill up for these precons!

SQL Saturday Minnesota Preconference Training Session

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, User Groups, Virtualization No Responses »

Sep 072017

This is just a quick reminder to encourage you to attend my next round of all-day precon training session at the upcoming SQL Saturday in Minnesota on Friday, October 6 called ‘The Complete Primer to SQL Server Infrastructure and Cloud‘.

The focus of the course is to help those new to the enterprise server infrastructure concepts become familiar with the concept and purposes of each layer of the architecture around their databases, and how this knowledge can benefit them as data professionals. Participants will gain exposure to all layers of infrastructure, virtualization, and cloud underneath SQL Server, from storage all the way through to the SQL Server instance, and will learn how to review and engineer the entire stack with a strong emphasis on SQL Server performance.

The following topics will be addressed during the course:

Datacenter Fundamentals
Cloud versus On-Premises
Infrastructure Stack Fundamentals
Storage and SAN Concepts and Design
Networking and Interconnect Topologies
Physical Server Technologies
The SQL Server Virtual Machine
High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Performance Investigation and Tuning of the Entire Stack

I am really happy to be delivering this precon, and look forward to seeing you all there! Reserve your seat at this exciting event here. Tickets are available at just $110!

Q&A Session with SQL Server on VMware Experts at VMworld EMEA

Best Practices, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, Virtualization No Responses »

Sep 072017

Greetings everyone! We had so many people stay after our SQL Server on VMware sessions at VMworld USA to ask great questions, I thought I’d extend an offer to everyone at the European show coming up in a week! Let’s talk SQL Server! We are going to crash the VMvillage hang space on Tuesday, September 12 at 3pm local time to hold an open-ended SQL Server on VMware Q&A session. This unscripted and unofficial session is for you, has no official agenda, and marketing is strictly off-limits.

Our illustrious experts include:

Michael Corey, Founder – Corey and Associates	Thomas LaRock, Head Geek – Solarwinds
Argenis Fernandez, Principal Architect – Pure Storage	Niran Even Chen, Double VCDX, VMware Corp.
… and me!

Mark your calendars, and bring your questions, specific challenges, or discussion points, and let’s do this! Anything goes – performance, availability, setup and configuration, conflicts between best practices for SQL Server and VMware, anything!

VMworld 2017 USA Best Of

Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, Virtualization No Responses »

Sep 052017

I’m prepping for VMworld EMEA in Barcelona next week and will do a wrap up post for both events afterwards, but wanted to share something with the world. I’m proud to announce that the two SQL Server on VMware sessions that I co-presented on Tuesday at VMworld USA made the top 10 sessions of the day list at the conference! As such, they are recorded and now available for non-attendees to watch! For those of you with virtualized SQL Servers, regardless of platform and cloud or on-premises, I urge you to watch these two sessions at your convenience.

First, go to the top sessions page here. Scroll to Tuesday, and look for the following sessions:

Monster VMs (Database Virtualization) with vSphere 6.5: Doing IT Right (VIRT1309BU) (co-presented with Michael Corey)

Performance Tuning and Monitoring for Virtualized Database Servers (VIRT1430BU) (co-presented with Thomas LaRock)

Thank you for everyone that attended these sessions, and special thanks to those who submitted your kind and supportive comments in the session reviews. We are looking forward to an amazing Barcelona experience!

VMworld EMEA SQL Server Sessions

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, Virtualization No Responses »

Sep 052017

This trip to Barcelona for the next VMworld EMEA conference next week will be my second trip to this conference in two years. I’m ecstatic to get there and start talking SQL Server content with folks! I’m presenting on SQL Server performance, scalability, and monitoring in three sessions at this conference.

Tuesday 11am – Monster VMs (Database Virtualization) with vSphere 6.5: Doing IT Right (VIRT1309BU) with Michael Corey

Wednesday 12:30pm – Performance Tuning and Monitoring for Virtualized Database Servers (VIRT1430BE) with Thomas LaRock

Wednesday 5:30pm – vBrownBag session – vNUMA and You (VMTN6680E)

We are also going to hold at least one impromptu SQL Server experts open Q&A session in the VMvillage at some point early in the week, so stay tuned to this blog for when and where to meet up!

If you want to schedule some time to meet, please contact me and let’s meet up! I’d love to meet you and answer any questions at the show.

New eBook with Pure Storage – Overcoming SQL Server Storage Challenges

SQL Server, Storage No Responses »

Aug 212017

My company, Heraflux Technologies, is proud to announce a new ebook as part of our joint partnership with Pure Storage! This ebook, entitled Overcoming SQL Server Storage Challenges, discusses the current state of infrastructure technologies and how it interacts and impacts the performance of Microsoft’s flagship database engine SQL Server. Arguably, storage has historically been the slowest part of the infrastructure stack underneath the database, so much so that the core database engine makes some assumptions that it will always be the case. Modern CPUs, memory, and even the network are much less a bottleneck than administrators commonly realize. Even modern SQL Server in-memory features, such as in-memory OLTP and columnstore indexes, are heavily dependent on the performance of the storage underneath them.

Learn more about how SQL Server and the enterprise storage your data rests on complement and contradict each other in this exciting new ebook authored for Pure Storage! Download this exciting PDF today!

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