vSphere Transparent Page Sharing and Oracle DB Discussion

In So Say SMEs last week Kong and I discussed the recent Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) enable or disable debate for Oracle databases.  There is some background reading that you can do if you want the full details.  There is a white paper by EMC, a blog by Michael Webster, and a blog by Scott Drummonds.  I think that we covered it all in the video at a high level, but I do recommend the blogs and white paper for the real geeks.

Overall, I think it is great discussion to have and it gives everybody who is interested a bit more insight into some of the specifics of how TPS works.  I agree with Scott - "Sibling bicker. But family is family."

Lone Ranger Perfmon Art

Here is a new Perfmon Art - The Lone Ranger.  

This is CPU utilization from a 30 vCPU virtual machine.  Each of the individual vCPU utilization levels is graphed. One CPU is much more heavily utilized than the others.

Sybase Has The Right Approach for Virtualization

Yesterday at Sapphire, SAP and VMware issued a joint press release that shows how two companies can work to together.  In this case, SAP and VMware announced a deeper and stronger relationship in a few different ways that results in customers being able to more easily run, license, and get support for Sybase databases running on VMware vSphere.

There are three major components of the announcement: Performance, Support, and Licensing.

We did some joint testing to measure performance and verify compatibility.  We had no issues with compatibility and the performance was excellent.  The performance difference between virtual and physical for a Sybase ASE database was within a small percentage on average.

Sybase does not require that problems be reproduced on a non-virtualized setup to get support.  They will support their databases running on vSphere.

There is also the ability to license Sybase based on the number of virtual CPUs being used by the VM instead of having to license for all of the processors in the physical host.  This is referred to as sub-capacity licensing.

Submitting Talks for VMworld

The deadline for submitting a presentation for VMworld this year is one week from today.  I have been fortunate over to get talks accepted in the past and I'm submitting a few this year and hope to be back again.  It is a great experience to get to talk about some of the things that I work on, get to meet lots of other geeks, and learn new things throughout the week.

The last few years there have been thousands of submissions for only a small number of speaking slots.  The committee that picks which are accepted has a more difficult job each year.  Kong and I discussed some of the strategies and things to consider when submitting your abstract for VMworld in this episode of So Say SMEs -

Only thing is certain - If you don't submit an idea, it won't be accepted.  If you do submit an idea, you have a chance.

Exciting NUMA Performance Information

I got the opportunity to speak at the Dell Tech Center Users Group today.  They even let me pick the topic.  So I wanted something that would be really interesting and exciting.  I ended up picking a topic that I love to talk about - NUMA Performance.

The only problem was that I needed a way to make it exciting.  I basically covered a lot the same information that I covered in my earlier blog post on this topic.  This included how effective vSphere is with managing VMs with respect to NUMA and how vSphere 5 has vNUMA so that even large monster VMs can benefit from NUMA.

While that was pretty exciting, I added a section at the end where I covered two specific case studies.  These were examples of how I had used NUMA and vNUMA to reach excellent performance with an SAP workload and a large Oracle RAC workload.

Again, I felt that this was pretty exciting stuff.  But something was missing.  And then I had it.  Just say it in the title of the talk - Exciting NUMA Performance Information: TechTalk and Discussion.

It was a fun talk and I even got a few questions along the way. Thanks to everybody who came out.

Todd

Globe Spanning Virtual Teams

Over the past couple of years, several of the projects that I have worked on involved me working directly with people all over the world in a real-time basis.  One project from last year involved some testing with SAP and we would have Germany, India, and Texas (me) all working directly together.

The technology that makes this possible is the same technology that allows me to work from home occasionally. The key is the Internet (Thanks Al!) that provides the backbone for worldwide high speed data network we all use.  On top of this we have email, inexpensive VOIP based communication, and secure VPN based access to internal networks.  We also have webex, live meeting, adobe connect, virtual rooms, and many other virtual conferencing / online meeting software solutions to enable sharing and collaboration.  The final piece is the ability to remote desktop into windows and of course ssh into Linux systems.

One aspect that I feel very fortunate about, is the common language of English.  At least in the technology world it seems that English is the default common language.  It's a good thing that Texan is so close to English that most people can still understand me.

The only difficulty is being able to keep all of the time zones straight.  I've found that the easiest way to do this is simply ask Google "what time is in it <insert place of interest here>".

I think that these occasional projects will become more of the norm, where people are wherever the people want to be, and work gets done by bringing them together in these globe spanning virtual teams.

When Worlds Collide

My oldest son has Type-1 Diabetes.  It's an honor to  have become an expert in Diabetes over the past two years.  I spend a lot of time learning how to better care for him, what new products are going to be released soon, and what the most current research is finding.  I'm also active in our local JDRF chapter, whose mission is to find a cure for Type-1 diabetes.

I'm also a virtualization geek who works at VMware and thinks about clouds most of the day.  Which is what this blog is mostly about.

So it was very cool to see these two worlds come together recently when the JDRF moved it's donor management system into the cloud.  They see a compelling value of having applications cloud based and so have moved this aspect of their business onto a salesforce.com cloud based application.

I'm personally excited to see that the JDRF will be able to spend more of it's time and resources on it mission and less time on managing their IT infrastructure.