However VMworld hits the bottom rung of the ladder.  The VMworld content team simply provides this feedback.

Here is a list of the most common reasons why sessions were declined:

• There were too many submissions with similar topics.
• The submission was too basic, not enough information was provided in the abstract.
• The session was too single vendor product focused and likely to have a commercial nature.

Having the most common reasons why sessions weren’t picked isn’t exactly helpful.  Given that my abstracts have been accepted at conferences like TechEd and the SQL PASS Summit I can assume that the submission wasn’t too basic.  While my sessions are SQL Server specific, virtualizing SQL Server is a major push for VMware so I’m assuming that I don’t fall into the last bucket.  That leaves that there were just too many submissions, which I can’t believe as currently there are only three sessions on the schedule that talks about SQL Server (as of my writing this).  The first is about virtualizing SQL Server, and the second is how General Mills succeed in virtualizing SQL Server using VMware, and the third appears to be a repeat of a SQL Virtualization session from last year.

The first session is called “Virtualizing SQL High Availability” but the abstract doesn’t talk about SQL Server High Availability, it only talks about SQL Server Performance Tuning within a virtual machine which let’s be honest from a SQL Server perspective is identical to tuning SQL Server on a physical machine.  Make sure the disks are fast enough, that you have enough memory and CPU then do the normal SQL performance tuning.  Looking at the external speakers companies website he appears to be knowledgeable on databases in general, but he doesn’t list anything more current than SQL Server 7 in his publications list for SQL Server, and most of his publications are for Oracle.

The second session called “Virtualizing SQL 2012 at General Mills” looks basically like a fluff piece being led by a Technical Account Manager from VMware (Sales) and a VMware Architect. In other words, they’ll have no one around who can actually answer any SQL Server questions, or talk about SQL Server in depth.

The third session is called “Virtualizing SQL Best Practices” which I’m pretty sure I saw at VMworld last year, and if it is the same session as last year I really hope that it is better than the session last year.  When I saw the session by this same presenter last year the session was full of incorrect and very outdated information, much of which was based on SQL Server 2000 but was being presented for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2.  If this is an updated version of last years session, I REALLY hope for the attendees sake that the session is updated and the incorrect information is updated.

Now am I writing this because I think I should have been handed a speaking slot at VMworld?  No.  I’m writing this because I think that VMworld needs to do a better service to their potential speakers so that the speakers can improve their abstracts based on VMworld’s requirements (as every conference has different criteria that they use when evaluating session abstracts).  I also feel that VMworld needs to do a better job providing SQL Server specific content to their attendees.  VMworld has 9 Oracle sessions listed (granted I think that only 7 of them are actually Oracle specific).

Hopefully this blog post won’t fall on deaf ears at VMworld and they will do something about their lack of SQL Server content as out of the three sessions listed, I personally don’t have much hope for any of them being very useful to the general VMworld attendee.

Before writing this blog post I emailed VMware asking for more information about why my sessions weren’t selected.  I got a pretty generic response back which doesn’t specify anything about why my specific sessions weren’t selected.

• Take the time to specify some of the details in your session description.  The title, abstract, outline, and session takeaways are key factors in determining whether your session is selected and can affect session attendance.

• Be sure your perspective or story is unique.

• Attendees are there to learn, so educate rather than pitch your product.  Your proposal submission should clearly reflect your intention.

• Make sure your topic is relevant to the audience you’re targeting. Review the content topics before submitting a session.

• Session selections are based on the content described in the submission, and the speaker(s). Speakers should have extensive experience presenting at conferences of a similar nature. If a speaker has presented at VMworld in the past, we will look at speaker scores and take them into consideration during selection.

Again not exactly the more useful information for me as an abstract writer to improve.

Denny

You’ll need to register in order to vote, so create an account and get signed in and vote for the sessions that you would like to see.  Now don’t worry, you don’t need to register for the conference to vote (it looks like you do on the site), you only have to create an account on the website in order to get your votes in.

There are a lot of really good looking sessions up on the list, including three of mine, so hopefully I can count on your votes for my sessions.  The three sessions that I have up for vote are:

1331 Optimizing SQL Server Performance in a Virtual Environment

In this session we’ll look over some of the things which you should be looking at within your virtual environment to ensure that you are getting the performance out of it that you should be. This will include how to look for CPU performance issues at the host level. We will also be discussing the Memory Balloon drivers and what they actually do, and how you should be configuring them, and why. We’ll discuss some of the memory sharing technologies which are built into vSphere and Hyper-V and how they relate to SQL Server. Then we will finish up with some storage configuration options to look at.

1332 SQL Server for the VMware Admin

One of the biggest issues in database performance is the storage, and one of the largest consumers of storage is databases. Because of an unfortunate disconnect that often occurs between database administrators and storage engineers troubleshooting performance problems tricky at best. In this session we’ll work to demystify the database so it can run at the best possible speed.

During this session we’ll look at how databases work from the database side, how the DBA should be laying out the database on the storage, what questions the DBA should be asking the storage admin, and most importantly what questions the storage admin should be asking your DBA when allocating storage for a new database server.

1717 SQL Server 2012 High Availability Without Shared Storage

In this session we will look at the features which are provided with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 as part of the “Always On” features including site to site configurations to allow of a large scale high availability solution without the need for any high end SAN storage solution.

Additionally we will be looking at the ability to have redundant servers which can be used for reporting or for taking your backups reducing the load from the production database. We will also look a unique use case using SQL Server 2012′s Always On feature to scale out the reads to synchronous read only copies.

I hope that I can count on your votes so that my sessions get picked for vmworld 2012.

Denny

Today was an interesting (and short) day.  On the final day of VMworld, VMware has decided that they won’t give a product related keynote.  Instead they will have a keynote that is pretty much unrelated to VMware and their technologies.  So today’s keynote was all about the human brain.  There were three PHDs who were speaking at the keynote, about 20 minutes per.  The first (and the best) was Dr. David Eagleman (website | @davideagleman) who is a neuroscientist from Baylor College of Medicine.  He gave a very interesting presentation why people think that time slows down during traumatic events such as falling from a tree or bike.  He and his team came up with an experiment where they basically threw a person off a building (it was actually a big scaffolding looking thing) into a net so they could test if their brain actually thought time was slowing down, if it just felt like it after the fact.

The second Dr. V.S. Ramachandran (website) and third speakers Dr. Deb Roy (website | @dkroy) while good speakers, simply weren’t as good as Dr. Eagleman as he was a very hard act to follow.  Unfortunately I don’t actually remember what Dr. Ramachandran spoke about.  Dr. Roy talked to us about the interactions between people and the way that those interactions can be tracked at the micro level (within the home) and at the macro level (worldwide).

At the micro level he installed camera and microphones in his home and recorded everything for 36 months starting shortly after his first child was born.  His research team then developed some software that tracked movement through the house and matched it to his child’s learning to speak and they were able to visually map on a diagram of the house in what parts of the house different words were learned.  For example the word “water” was learned in and near the kitchen and bathroom while the work “bye” was learned near the front door.

At the macro level he founded a company which tracks just about every TV show in the TV and analyses Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc. traffic to see what people are talking about online so that studios and marketing companies can see how people are reacting to specific items online when they see them on TV.  It was interesting (all be it a little creepy) to see.

As far as sessions went today, there were only three slots, and I only had two sessions scheduled.  The first that I attended was a Resource Management Deep Dive into vSphere 4.1 and 5.0.  During this session they really went into how vSphere allocates resources (CPU, Memory and IO) to various VMs on the host depending on how reservations, guarantees, resource pools, etc. are all configured.  I’m not going to try to talk too much about this at the moment.  It’s going to take me a couple of times listening to the recording online to catch everything.

One thing that I did want to share that I didn’t know was how much data the DPM (Distributed Power Management) uses when it’s deciding to power down hosts at night and bring them back up in the morning.  When vCenter is deciding to power down a host is looks at the last 40 minutes of data to decide if there is little enough load to bring down a host.  As for bringing a host back online it only looks at the last 5 minutes. vCenter will never power a host down if it will lead to a performance problem.  When deciding to power hosts down performance is considered first with the after effect being that power is saved.  Power will always be used to get performance.

The second session was one on performance tuning of the vCenter database itself, which I figured would be pretty interesting.  It was interesting, but also frustrating as the speaker didn’t really know much about SQL Server (the default database to host the vCenter database).  Some of the information presented was pretty interesting about how the tables are laid out and what is stored in which table, and I’ve got a much better understanding about how the performance data gets loaded into the database and how the rollups are done now.  I also now know that I need to put together some scripts to jump start the process if it gets backed up as well as put together a best practices document for DBAs (and VMware folks that don’t know SQL at all) so that they can get better performance on their vCenter databases.

If you need to find the historical performance data within your vCenter database look into the tables which start with vpx_hist_stat.  There are 4 of these tables vpx_hist_stat1, vpx_hist_stat2, vpx_hist_stat3 and vpx_hist_stat4.  The historical data is rolled up by daily, weekly, monthly and annually into those four tables respectively.  You’ll also want to look into the vpx_sample_time tables of which there are also 4 tables vpx_sample_time1, vpx_sample_time2, vpx_sample_time3 and vpx_sample_time4.

Apparently vCenter 4.0 and below has a habit of causing deadlocks when loading data, especially in larger environments.  The fixes that were provided are pretty much all hit or miss when it comes to if they will work, and his description of the cause of the problem was pretty vague.  The jest of what I got was that the data loading is deadlocking with the code which handles the rollups and causing problems.  Something which could be tried to fix this would be to enable snapshot isolation mode for the database.  Personally I think this would have a better chance of fixing the problem then the crappy work around which he provided (which I’m not listing here on purpose).

The work around which VMware came up with for this problem, introduced in vCenter 4.0 can have its own problem is large environments. This problem is that data is missing for servers at random intervals.  This is because VMware came up with the idea of creating three staging tables and using each staging table for 5 minutes, then processing the data from that staging table into the vpx_hist_stat and vpx_sample_time tables while then moving on to the next staging table.  However if it takes too long to process the data from the first table, and the third table has been used it is now time to move back to the first table and data is now lost as it can’t write the data into the first table.  VMware needs to do some major redesign of this entire process for the next release to come up with a better solution that won’t allow for data loss.  There are plenty of was to do it that won’t cause problems.  Don’t you love it when developers that don’t know databases very well try and come up with screwy solutions to problems?

Based on what was talked about in this session there are a lot of SQL Scripts that need to be written to help people improve performance of their vCenter databases.  Guess I’ve got a lot of script writing to do.

Denny

The big event of tonight was the attendee party with a performance by The Killers which was opened by Recycled Percussion.  It was a great concert especially as I’m not a mega fan of The Killers, and hadn’t head of Recycled Percussion before tonight.  After the show and party VMware had after parties at the hotel pools which was a blast.  I meet and had some great conversations with some great guys from a variety of places and companies.

While today doesn’t make a great blog post, it was another amazing day at VMworld 2011 and I can’t wait for tomorrow.

Denny

The first thing I was was a project called Project Octopus.  This allows your users to access the same files via Windows, Mac or Linux PCs, phones, tablets, etc.  It also allows users to edit any files which they have access to on any device.  This is done via HTML 5 so as long as the device supports HTML 5 (which most everything new does) you can access full Windows applications on the machine.  In the demo the user was sent an Excel file via IM which they then opened on an iPad and they were able to edit it in a fully functional copy of Excel 2010.  There was a small application installed on the iPad which then connected to the server via the web browser, uploaded the file to the server (or opened the file from the server, not really sure here, but either way) then the user was able to edit the Excel sheet and save it back to the server.

The next product which we were shown was called VMware Go.  Go is a software as a service offering where the user signs into the site and then they are able to via the webpage scan an IP subnet looking for servers which are capable of running vSphere 5.0 on them.  The user can then select which Windows servers they would like to deploy vSphere 5.0 to.  vSphere 5.0 is then deployed to the servers.  I’m not sure what happens to the Windows OS and services which are already installed on the servers, so this could be very dangerous if pushed to the wrong server by accident.

A new product which I’m really excited about is aimed directly at the small / medium business (SMB) market and will allow you to take two servers with only local storage and configure them in a highly available vSphere 5.0 cluster.  This new product is called Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA).  The way this is done is that the VSA which is a virtual appliance which is installed on all the hosts (it supports two and three node clusters only).  When installed and configured it will take the local storage and present it to the cluster as shared storage.  Redundancy for this solution is done by using software based replication and setting up each VM to be replicated to another host in the cluster.  This way the cluster can always survive a single node failure without loosing the ability to run any guest on the cluster.

There are some big changes coming to vSphere Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 which is no longer called VMware vSphere SRM.  One of the biggest is the ability to automatically fail back after a site has failed and restored automatically.  In prior versions of SRM failover was a one way operation, in order to fail back to the first site you would have to totally reconfigure SRM and then trigger failover.  With the new 5.0 version of SRM you simply configure the failback as part of the policies then when the second site comes back online SRM will failback as configured.

Another cool thing you can do with SRM 5.0 now is the ability to DR your site to a cloud provider instead of to your own backup data center.  This allows you to run your primary site on your hardware, but rent your DR systems from a cloud service provider that is certified as a SRM site.  Currently there are only a couple of options, but as time goes on there will be more options available.

I went to a couple of sessions today, the most informative of which was about the new features of vSphere 5.0.  VMware is upgrading the VMFS version from 3 to 5, but this time it is a non-distruptive upgrade unlike the upgrade from VMFS 2 to 3.  The new version of ESXi is much thinner than the prior 4.1 version leaving more resources available for the guest machines.

vSphere will only officially supports 32 hosts in a cluster, however there was been clusters tested with over 100 nodes, but still only 32 are supported.  Something which will make a lot of Linux shops happy is vCenter no longer requires Windows as the OS for the vCenter server.  It can now be installed on a Linux OS (they didn’t specify which Linux flavor).  There is an embedded database which supports up to 5 hosts and 50 VMs.  For installs which are larger than this you’ll need to install an instance of Oracle.  Currently only Oracle is supported and eventually other databases will be supported.  Another limitation of running vCenter on Linux is that you can’t run the vCenter in linked mode.  Linked mode is where you have a vCenter server one at each site and they are linked so that you have redundancy at the vCenter level.

There is a new web based client which will be included with vSphere 5.0.  This won’t be a fully featured featured UI, but it will support most of the features.  The nice thing about this new web client is that it will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Eventually the web client will become the default client for vSphere and vCenter but this isn’t the case yet.

The last change I want to talk about today is the fact that vMotion now supports slower links.  In vSphere 4.1 and below using vMotion required using a network which had a 5ms or lower network latency.  In vSphere 5.0 this limit is increased to 10ms latency which allows you to vMotion over city wide networks.

See you tomorrow for VMware Day 3.

Denny

The keynote was interesting, but didn’t provide a whole lot of new information.  Paul officially announced that vSphere 5.0 was released along with VMware View 5.0.

vSphere 5.0 is the third new major annual release of the vSphere product.  2009 had vSphere 4.0, 2010 had vSphere 4.1 giving 2011 vSphere 5.0.  vSphere 5.0 has 200 new features (which weren’t listed).  VMware has put 1 million man hours into building the new vSphere 5.0 platform and another 2 million man hours into testing the new version.

There were a few pieces of information which were talked about as far as new features which were basically boiled down to a few key points.  The first is probably the most important as with vSphere 5.0 VMware expects that they will be able to run almost every production workload.  Virtual machines running under vSphere 5.0 can now have up to 32 vCPUs and 1 TB of RAM each.  VMware has added in some storage load balancing features that I’m really hoping that I can learn more about as the week continues as well as the automatic storage tiering which looks very interesting.  There is also a storage load balancing feature which I’m quite interested to learn more about.

There were some interesting stats which Paul talked about as well.  There were 19000 attendees which actually made it to the conference.  There were over 20000 people registered but some people got stuck on the east coast thanks to the weather.  Some additional stats include that analysts currently estimate that worldwide there 50% of production workloads are running under a hypervisor today.  This means that every 6 seconds a new VM is built (which is faster than people are being born).    It is estimated that there are over 20 million virtual machines running under VMware’s hypervisor platform.  If these hosts were put end to end they would be twice the length of the Great Wall Of China.  More machines are being moved from host to host via vMotion than there are airplanes in the sky.

Needless to say there is a lot of great information which I’m hoping to learn and share with you.

Denny