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!
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!
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.
Presenting #vBrownBag TechTalk Session at VMworld Europe
Heraflux is proud to announce that David Klee is presenting a session in this year’s VMworld Europe #vBrownBag TechTalk lineup entitled “Performance Perspectives“. Currently it is scheduled for Tuesday, October 18th, at 2:30 PM local time. The 15-minute session will discuss how the perspective on performance and resource consumption from the VM-layer is not the only perspective that should be weighed when evaluating large, mission-critical app VMs. Come check out this and the other sessions near the Hang Space at VMworld Europe!
Speaking at SQL Saturday Dallas
Heraflux is proud to be participating in this year’s SQL Saturday Dallas on Saturday, September 24th. David Klee is presenting a redeveloped version of a session called “Objective SQL Server Performance” at 11:00 am in Room 100.
Session Abstract: “It’s slow! FIX IT!” is not a fun way to walk into the office on a Monday morning. However, putting objective metrics to the subjectivity of ‘slow’ is as much a science as it is art. Performance engineering takes effort well before an issue arises. Collecting the right metrics, trending and comparing against an established baseline, and identifying bottlenecks are all part of the performance process. This interactive session will help the DBA fine-tune their performance tuning approach so that the foundation for long-term proactive performance review is in place. The DBA can then shift the job responsibilities from a reactive response to a more predictive and proactive role.
We look forward to meeting you there!
Announcing DiskSpd Batch
Heraflux has released a free PowerShell-based testing script to help you see how well your storage performs under varying types and intensity of workloads.
Microsoft’s SQLIO disk benchmarking utility had served the SQL Server community extremely well for many years. However, Microsoft has recently released a new storage benchmarking utility, called DiskSpd, as an open-sourced project for the community. This utility provides a more granular storage testing methodology, along with sub-microsecond latency values that are very important with today’s all-flash and hybrid storage devices. DiskSpd is now Heraflux’s preferred method for stress-testing storage devices.