Free Webinar - DBAs vs. SysAdmins in Cloud Availability
SIOS and Heraflux are proud to host a joint free webinar entitled “DBAs vs. SysAdmins in Cloud Availability” on Thursday, April 19th, at 1pm Eastern. This webinar is hosted by MSSQL Tips.
Database and system administrators have historically had different perspectives on many topics such as high availability, disaster recovery, and performance tuning. Since one silo generally does not have full visibility into the other silos, the age-old shouting match exists when an availability challenge occurs. “Your systems must have the issue, not mine!” is a constant theme during these situations. However, moving these critical systems to the cloud presents some new challenges. Availability becomes an even more critical topic, as outages can occur more randomly than with on-premises systems, and the two sides must work more closely to achieve system availability that meets their organization’s SLAs. Come learn tips on how to work with your system administrators to achieve a higher level of ability for your critical SQL Servers in the cloud.
Register today for this exciting interactive webinar!
Speaking at SQL Saturday Chicago
Heraflux is proud to contribute to this year’s SQL Saturday event in Chicago on March 17. Not only is our own Bob Pusateri one of the primary event coordinators, David Klee is presenting a new session called “Level Up Your Cloud Infrastructure Skills“.
Session abstract: 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!
Register for this exciting event today, and we look forward to meeting you there!
Guest Post at Pure Storage - VVols and SQL Server are a Game Changer
Heraflux is thrilled to have contributed a blog post on how SQL Servers, VVols, and Pure Storage’s unique implementation of VVols combines to make SQL Server DBA jobs better over at Pure’s blog. Pure’s implementation of VVols is simplifying our world and improving our ability to support our businesses.
Foreword in HPE and ScaleArc Performance Whitepaper
Heraflux is proud to have contributed an industry perspective to a recent whitepaper highlighting scale-up architectures using HPE’s Superdome X and ScaleArc. Sometimes database-specific workloads do not scale out well because of years of legacy design and engineering, and in those occasions you need to scale up. Scaling up a business-critical applications, just like scaling them outwards, is not a trivial task. Leveraging modern scale-up technologies such as the HPE Superdome X servers and ScaleArc’s database acceleration and availability solution can help you scale your applications up without dramatic and costly modifications to your code.
Check out this reference architecture for Superdome X and ScaleArc here!
PASS Linux for the SQL Server DBA Webinar - Dec 13
Join David Klee for a session on Linux administration for the SQL Server DBA as part of the PASS SQL Server on Linux webinar series marathon on December 13th!
Times are certainly changing with Microsoft’s recent announcement to adopt the Linux operating system with the SQL Server 2017 release, and you should be prepared to support it. But, what is Linux? Why run your critical databases on an unfamiliar operating system? How do I do the basics, such as backing up to a network share or add additional drives for data, logs, and tempdb files? This introductory session will help seasoned SQL Server DBAs understand the basics of Linux and how it differs from Windows, all the way from basic management to performance monitoring. By the end of the session, you will be able to launch your own Linux-based SQL Server instance on a production ready VM.
Register now for this exciting webinar series!
VMworld 2017 Recap
Heraflux was proud to participate in both VMworld USA and EMEA over the last month, and our enterprise SQL Server content stole the show!
Our VMworld USA experience was simply amazing.
First, David Klee from Heraflux, along with Deji Akomolafe from VMware Corp. presented an all-day boot camp the Saturday before VMworld on SQL Server virtualization, where we presented an incredible amount of tips and tricks on SQL Server-on-VMware performance, availability, and scalability topics.
Both of our general session presentations made the VMworld USA best-of-the-day list for Tuesday, August 29th! They are now available for you to watch and learn from out on YouTube.
Monster VMs (Database Virtualization) with vSphere 6.5: Doing IT Right [VIRT1309BU] with Michael Corey
Performance Tuning and Monitoring for Virtualized Database Servers [VIRT1430BU] with Thomas LaRock
Our panel session with Argenis Fernandez from Pure Storage, Thomas LaRock from Solarwinds, Allan Hirt from SQLHA, and Niran Even-chen from VMware Corp. was also a smash hit.
Thanks Argenis for the great photo!
Special thanks goes to Don Sullivan from VMware Corp. for championing the enterprise database content at these conferences!
Heraflux also announced a partnership with SIOS Corporation for an upcoming add-on for the SIOS iQ product for advanced SQL Server state collection into the iQ machine-learning platform to boost the advanced performance anomaly detection into the application layer in a virtual environment. Stay tuned for more details regarding this exciting development!
David Klee and Sergey Razin, PhD., from SIOS Corporation demonstrating the SQL Server enhancements in SIOS iQ
David Klee and Jon Shields at the SIOS booth in the exhibition hall
David also presented with Argenis Fernandez from Pure Storage in the Pure booth in the exhibition hall on SQL Server storage benchmarking fallacies.
Heraflux also met with our good friends at Rubrik to discuss the impressive state of their SQL Server-integrated backup platform, who won both the VMworld 2017 Best of Show and Gold awards for their incredible platform.
Argenis Fernandez of Pure Storage, David Klee of Heraflux, Biswaroop Palit from Rubrik
Argenis and David also presented in the Intel booth on modern CPU architectures and VMware vNUMA for enterprise SQL Server workloads.
As you can see, our VMworld USA conference was quite the show.
Just one week later, Heraflux participated in VMworld EMEA in Barcelona, Spain.
Just like in Las Vegas, all of our SQL Server content made the featured videos list! They are now available for you to watch and learn from out on the VMworld EMEA featured videos list.
Monster VMs (Database Virtualization) with vSphere 6.5: Doing IT Right [VIRT1309BU] with Michael Corey
Performance Tuning and Monitoring for Virtualized Database Servers [VIRT1430BU] with Thomas LaRock
David also presented a session for the vBrownBag TechTalks series called vNUMA and You.
We even held an impromptu SQL Server architect open Q&A in the VMvillage to help folks successfully improve their SQL Server virtualization experience.
The announcements from VMware at both of these shows were a bit mixed, in our opinion. The announcement of the general availability for VMware Cloud on Amazon AWS is an interesting shift in strategy. Pivotal Container Service shows VMware’s commitment to containers and workload portability, which to us is a sign of the direction of VMware Corp. On-premises virtualization is generally seen as the new beige at this point, and the unified direction of VMware, based on the messaging from these shows, demonstrates that VMware is shifting to attempt to be the conduit between the various platforms for on-prem virtualization and public cloud providers. The jury is still out on how well the industry will adopt and embrace this shift, but we at Heraflux are quite interested to know your thoughts!
We’ll see you at the next one!
Q&A Session with SQL Server on VMware Experts at VMworld EMEA
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!
SQL Server on VMware VMworld USA Videos Now On YouTube
We just saw that our two SQL Server on VMware sessions that David Klee co-presented on Tuesday at VMworld USA, both of which made the top 10 sessions of the day list at the conference, are now on YouTube! They are free to watch for everyone!
For those of you with virtualized SQL Servers, regardless of platform and cloud or on-premises, we urge you to watch these two sessions at your convenience.
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)
New eBook with Pure Storage - Overcoming SQL Server Storage Challenges
Heraflux 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.
PASS Summit Precon on Virtual SQL Server Performance
PASS has just announced this year’s precon sessions for the PASS Summit in Seattle this October, and I am humbled to announce that my session, “Virtual SQL Servers – Right to Ludicrous Speed” has been selected for one of the Tuesday precon slots. 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 16 years of performance tuning.
If you are less interested in SQL Server infrastructure than other topics, I urge you to check out the other precons being presented at this conference. The topics and presenters are world class, and if I was not presenting this precon on Tuesday, I’d be in one of the other precons!
I hope all of you can attend what I consider the best SQL Server ecosystem conference in the world. I’ll never miss it, and I look forward to meeting you all there!
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!