Virtualization – Convergence of Data and Infrastructure

PASS Summit 2018 Activities

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

Nov 062018

What a whirlwind year this has been! I’m thrilled to invite you to my sessions at this year’s PASS Summit, happening this week in Seattle WA.

Tuesday 11:30am to 1:00pm I’m part of the cloud availability panel over lunch at the SentryOne Data Day precon at the Summit. I hope you already registered for this exciting opportunity to learn more about performance and availability-related topics in this whole-day discussion.

Next, for those of you that still have your mission-critical workloads in your on-premises datacenter (or even for those who have them in the cloud, because almost all of the topics directly apply!), come to my session Wednesday morning at 10:45am entitled “On-Prem SQL Servers, Interstellar Performance“. This deep-dive on virtual SQL Server performance will help you squeeze the most performance from your virtualized SQL Servers, and will help you communicate with your infrastructure team on things that matter the most to performance-oriented SQL Servers. You’ll be sure to have quite a bit of real-world tips and tricks to take back to the office as soon as you return from the conference.

Thursday morning I’m part of the SIOS PASS the Bacon breakfast panel, where we’ll get a good chuckle while we discuss a number of topics pertinent to today’s DBA, such as availability both on-prem and in the cloud, disaster mitigation and preparation, and other availability topics. Come register here, get a great breakfast on the house, and learn while you laugh!

Next, Bob Pusateri and I have a session Thursday afternoon called “SELECT STARS: A SQL DBA’s Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB”, where we discuss and present Microsoft’s new Cosmos DB offering on the Azure platform. This platform is a completely different model of databases than what most SQL Server professionals are accustomed to, and we’ll give you the details you need to expand your horizons and learn about this exciting platform. This session is more of the ‘what’ session to get you amped to learn more about the platform on Friday.

Friday my final session of the conference is entitled “Cosmos DB for SQL Server Pros”, designed to give you more of the ‘how’ when continuing your exploration of Cosmos DB. Bob Pusateri and I will share more of the use cases, scalability details, and live code demos of how to access and alter data in a Cosmos DB database.

I hope to see you at the show! If you want to sync up and talk geek, make sure to ping me to set up some time over your favorite form of caffeine.

VMworld 2018 SQL Server Sessions

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

Jul 242018

I hope to see you all at this year’s VMworld 2018 USA conference where I’m lucky enough to have been selected to present four SQL Server-themed sessions!

The first is an all-day boot camp (VAP3768WU) with Oleg Ulyanov from VMware Corp. where we take participants through a comprehensive journey of understanding how to manage, performance tuning, and business continuity planning for high performance SQL Servers on the VMware virtualization platform. It’s the Sunday before VMworld officially ramps up, and if you have infrastructure engineers attending this conference, please tell them to register for this boot camp.

Next, Thomas LaRock from SolarWinds (@sqlrockstar) and I will be presenting a session called “Performance Deep Dive for Demanding Virtual Database Servers” (VAP1425BU). We’ll be discussing advanced performance-related topics such as CPU scheduling and vNUMA, “right-sizing” for both performance and licensing, virtual disks and performance discrepancies, and general operational efficiency.

Next, Michael Corey from LicenseFortress (@michael_corey) and I will be presenting a session called “Database Virtualization (Monster VMs) with VMware vSphere: Doing IT Right” (VAP1296BU), which is an updated version of our continued track of performance-related tips and tricks. Come see us laugh our way through over a hundred slides packed full of things you can take back to your environments!

Finally, I have a solo session called “Database vDisks and You” (VMTN5520B), where I’ll talk about all of the various layers of queueing between the SQL Server database and the enterprise SAN, and how to measure and monitor these layers, plus discuss ways to performance tune each layer.

As always, it’s going to be a great show! Ping me if you want to meet up in person while at the show, and let’s geek out and talk shop! Register for this conference here, and make sure to enroll in the SQL Server on VMware boot camp!

SQL Server on VMware Boot Camp at VMworld 2018

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Virtualization 1 Response »

Jul 212018

I am extremely proud to announce that I am presenting in conjunction with VMware Corp. an all-day boot camp for advanced SQL Server operations, performance tuning, and business continuity strategies at this year’s VMworld 2018 USA in Las Vegas on Sunday, August 26th, at the Mandalay Bay conference center.

Oleg Ulyanov from VMware Corp. and I are teaming up together to present this all-day intensive workshop.

Workshop Abstract: Learn the essential skills necessary to run SQL Server implementations on VMware vSphere. VMware expert Oleg Ulyanov will be joined by Microsoft MVP David Klee from Heraflux to cover best practices and optimal approaches to deployment, operation, and management of SQL Server on VMware vSphere. This technical workshop delivers real-life, instructor-led, live training and incorporates the recommended design and configuration practices for architecting business-critical databases on VMware vSphere infrastructure. Subjects covered in depth will include performance, monitoring , high availability and disaster recovery with failover cluster instances or availability groups, and advanced storage architectures.

Register for this exciting workshop as part of your VMworld conference admission ASAP, as seats are filling up! SQL Server is not an easy application to manage in any environment, so come learn many real-world tips and tricks for making these databases run as fast and smooth as possible.

SQL Saturday Iowa City Precon June 22

Cloud, Events, Professional Development, SQL Server, Virtualization No Responses »

May 222018

I’m extremely proud to announce that I have been selected to present an all-new preconference training session on Friday, June 22, ahead of the SQL Saturday in Iowa City, Iowa. This all-day training class, entitled “Level Up Your Cloud Infrastructure Skills“, is designed to help you, the SQL Server professional, ramp up your knowledge so you know how to better manage workloads in the cloud.

Think infrastructure in the cloud is still just for sysadmins? Think again! As your organization moves into the cloud, infrastructure skills are more important than ever for DBAs to master. Expert knowledge of cloud-related infrastructure will help you maintain performance and availability for databases in the cloud. For example, know what an IOP is? How many does your database consume during a given day? Properly sizing a cloud database depends on your knowledge of this metric. Failure to properly configure storage performance at the time of deployment will slow down your SQL Server considerably. Come learn many of the key cloud infrastructure points that you should master as the DBA role continues to evolve in this all-day boot camp on ramping up your knowledge on cloud management!

RSVP for this exciting preconference training session here for just $125! Seats are limited, so register soon!

PASS Summit Session – On-Prem SQL Servers, Interstellar Performance

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

May 092018

I’m very pleased to announce that one of my sessions submitted for this year’s PASS Summit in Seattle, held from November 6 to 9th, called On-Prem SQL Servers, Interstellar Performance, has been selected and one of the first sessions to be announced for the conference. On-premises virtualization is still the principal location for your organization’s mission critical SQL Servers. Even during the journey to the cloud, improving the performance while on-prem improves your life and makes your databases more efficient.

Session Abstract: Your business-critical SQL Servers should not suffer from infrastructure-related bottlenecks. When properly architected and managed, the principal bottleneck to performance of these SQL Servers should be only limited by code. However, if not properly constructed, silent and seemingly random performance killers can strike and significantly hurt your database performance. Layers like virtualization, storage, and networking can all detract from database performance, and they are tough to identify. This session is packed with many live examples of tips and tricks gained from years of experience for getting the most performance from your physical and virtual SQL Servers. The major roadblocks to performance will be discussed and the knowledge gained will help you work with your infrastructure teams so that you can optimize the system stack for performance. Tools, techniques, and processes will be demonstrated to help you measure and validate the system performance of the key components underneath your data.

Register for this amazing conference today and take advantage of the lower conference fees now before they raise the price!

Multiple disk controllers in VMs can mean improved performance

SQL Server, Storage, Virtualization 1 Response »

Feb 012018

I recently had a great question on some of the differences in virtual machine disk presentation from one of our amazing clients, and I thought I’d share the answer here because it’s a common question that I receive.

Some hypervisors (including some hyper-converged compute platform vendors who shall remain nameless) do not give you much flexibility in the way storage is presented to a VM. You pick the VM and click to add drives. That’s it. No knobs to turn, no mess, no fuss. It’s meant to be easy, and for almost all situations, that’s just fine.

But, that might not be the completely optimal way to configure a VM that is hungry for I/O (such as a large SQL Server), if you have the option to configure it a bit more closely.

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