Podcast - Database Protection in the Cloud Era
We’re proud to announce that we were part of a podcast recording with Rubrik recently where we discuss database protection in the public cloud era.
Today, companies are on a journey to modernize their infrastructures and meet the changing demands of businesses. The cloud is becoming a strategic part of this initiative due to its potential to unlock cost savings and increase agility. However, the cloud also brings a new set of migration and data protection challenges.
In this episode, Michael Fal (Rubrik), David Klee (Heraflux Technologies), and John Morehouse (Denny Cherry & Associates) explore the database landscape in the cloud era and share protection best practices.
The podcast is hosted over at SoundCloud. Check it out!
SQL Server Sessions at VMworld 2018 USA
We hope to see you all at this year’s VMworld 2018 USA conference where we are fortunate 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. and David Klee from Heraflux 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 David 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 David will be presenting a session called “Database Virtualization (Monster VMs) with VMware vSphere: Doing IT Right” (VAP1296BU), which is an updated version of the 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, David has a solo session called “Database vDisks and You” (VMTN5520B), where he’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! Contact us 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
Heraflux is extremely proud to announce that we are 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.
David Klee from Heraflux will be joining Oleg Ulyanov from VMware Corp. 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 a trivial business-critical application to manage in a virtual environment, and come learn many real-world tips and tricks for making these databases run as fast and smooth as possible.
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! |
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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!