VMware
VMworld 2018
Heraflux is proud to continue our support of VMware’s flagship conference, VMworld, in Las Vegas in 2018. Stay tuned for more details!
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.
David Klee Awarded VMware vExpert for 2018
Heraflux is very proud to announce that David Klee has been re-awarded the VMware vExpert award for 2018. This award is awarded for those individuals who are engaged with the VMware-oriented technical communities around the world, and only around 1600 individuals were given this award this year. Thanks VMware for the effort put in to this program, and we look forward to continuing our advocacy efforts!
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.
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)
VMworld EMEA SQL Server Sessions
This trip to Barcelona for Heraflux to the next VMworld EMEA conference next week will be our second trip to this conference in two years. David Klee from Heraflux is 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 us and schedule some time. We look forward to meeting with all of you at the show!
VMworld 2017 USA SQL Server Sessions in Top 10 of the Day
Heraflux is proud to announce that both of our SQL Server on VMware sessions that David Klee co-presented on the Tuesday of the VMworld USA conference have made the top 10 sessions of the day list! These sessions were recorded and are now available for the general public to watch. 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.
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)
Stay tuned for our sessions at VMworld Europe next week, and our wrap up post once the dust clears from the next conference. Thanks to all of the attendees to our sessions.
New Whitepaper - Capture Production Error States
System administrators of the world, if a VM experiences a problem that takes down business-critical application, your job is to get minimize the impact to the business. You are caught in a difficult decision.
Do you repair the VM as quickly as possible, but possibly lose traces of what went wrong. In doing so, that loss of evidence might mean that this outage returns at a future point in time.
…or…
Do you prolong the outage and continue to impact to the business to investigate and get to the root cause of what actually happened so that it does not happen again?
The business almost always pushes you to perform the former, which puts you in a bad position if the VM issue returns.
Now you can do both.
For those of you on VMware vSphere platforms, the latest revision of VMware’s PowerCLI PowerShell extensions contain a little publicized feature that allows you to capture the production server’s error state and preserve it for later investigation so that you can repair the VM as fast as possible to minimize the impact to the business.