The Thursday keynote at VMworld generally highlights some inspirational technologies and their creators, generally not at all related to virtualization. In the 2012 Thursday keynote, Genius Machines, the speakers talked about autonomous algorithms that run the world, humanoid robots, and self-driving cars… In short, we are closer to the robot wars than ever.
Kevin Slavin gave a talk about how algorithms run our world. It was very similar to the Ted Talk he gave July of 2011. Check it out, it’ll terrify you.
Dr. Dennis Hong, Director, RoMeLa (Robotics and Mechanisms Lab), Virginia Tech University, talked about the why of creating humanoid robots… and why make them play soccer. Chris Ormson of the Google self-driving car project also talked about making driving safer, more efficient, and more productive… and also making it accessible for people with disabilities like the blind. Check out this video to see what I mean:
The one session I attended apart from the keynote was Virtualizing SQL 2012: Doing It Right, important for our organization. Here are the take aways:
You can do it, because you can create monster VMs that give you all the resources you will need.
Yes, do it in tier 2 first.
Collaborate, don’t keep it a secret.
Do basic throughput testing, SQLIO/IOMETER, prior to deployment
Unattended installs, SQL sysprep
The OS and databases don’t know they are virtualized
Architecting for Performance
Design for workload types or mix workloads
Pay attention to storage types
Understand your physical infrastructure’s limitations
Use VMFS and NOT RDM. The performance difference is statistically insignificant but you get more features with VMFS.
Use Thick Provisioned, Eager Zeroed disks for best performance.
>80% of problems with virtualization happen at the storage layer
Avoid over-committing CPU resources. Use one vCPU per core. Do not count a hyperthread as a full CPU core.
Some important memory stuff. Check the slides. Sounded like there were a bunch of important memory considerations and settings on both the server and host.
Mike says, “Avoid shares and reservations.”
Jeff says, “Don’t use limits.”
Don’t turn off ballooning.
Enable jumbo frames.
SQL best practice analyzer
Here’s the slide deck. (But you’ll need to sign in.) A lot of slides. A lot of info. Good stuff.
I took the VCP exam at VMworld. I recommend doing this because it is half price. I don’t recommend doing this because when will you study? It worked out for me. I passed.
