House of Brick Principal Architect

The week of November 5th was a very busy week here at House of Brick. First, knowing that the SQL PASS Summit was taking place in Seattle, we held a five-hour boot camp for Virtualizing Your Business Critical SQL Servers at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel — just two blocks from the Seattle Convention Center. We consider ourselves the leaders in the virtualization of Business-Critical Oracle and SQL Server workloads on VMware. Based on the positive comments from SQL Saturday and SQL Server User Group attendees over the last year, we decided to release the full five-hour training at this free event.

I co-presented the boot camp with Dave Welch (HoB’s CTO and Chief Evangelist), and I must say that I had a blast. We had a solid attendee roster, and the enthusiasm and conversation from the attendees was fantastic. I feel as if we could have spoken for twice the amount of time and still not tackled every component of this topic.

The outline of the training was as follows:

Introduction to SQL Server Virtualization

Virtualization Trends
Common Objections and Misconceptions

Physical Stack Fundamentals

SQL Server Licensing Concepts
Storage, vSphere Host, and Networking

Virtual Machine Layer

VM and Guest Operating System Customizations
Virtual Storage and Presentation Options
Installation and Optimally Configure SQL Server

SQL Server on VMware Prototype

Benchmarking and Baselining Performance
Workload Selection

Beyond the Prototype

Disaster Recovery and High Availability Options
SQL Server Clustering
SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn

This event was House of Brick’s first full-length SQL Server training opportunity, but it most certainly will not be the last. After the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the attendees, we are working to develop an official 2013 training curriculum for both Oracle and SQL Server. More details will be posted here once these offerings are formalized.

(Image Source: David Klee)

Once SQL PASS Summit started, I spent a lot of time in the exhibit hall in the VMware Corporation booth. Over the next three days, I answered hundreds of questions on all topics from ‘What is Virtualization?’ to advanced questions such as ‘Is the PVSCSI controller really better than the LSI SAS controller?’ I spent quite a bit of time talking about VMware’s latest offering in the database space, the next version of vFabric Data Director. This product rev was announced at the show, and as soon as it is released GA it will support truly private-cloud-based SQL Server databases in addition to the previous versions, which supported Oracle and vPostgres database platforms.

By far, House of Brick’s most exposure of the week came with the opportunity I had to co-present a session with the infamous Kevin Kline in a session called ‘Managing SQL Server in a Virtual World’. To speak with Kevin in this setting — a presentation room filled almost to capacity, and a terrific array of questions and comments from attendees — was one of the best professional moments of the year for me.

(Image Source: Kevin Kline)

After this event, we are actively planning our 2013 SQL Server community involvement avenues, and simply cannot wait to get started!