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.