ESXTOP in The Hands On Labs At VMworld 2013

I'm one of the captains for the performance module of the Hands on Labs at VMworld this year.  This means that I got to really geek out and create a new module that focuses on using esxtop.  For really in depth performance analysis on ESXi - esxtop is my favorite.  Come by the Hands On Labs in Moscone South this week take SDC-1304 Optimizing for Performance.  All of the modules are great - but my new esxtop module is number six.  Skip straight to it by using the table of contents once the lab has started.

The labs are currently only available onsite at VMworld, but will be made available through the public Hands on Labs portal at some point after the conference ends.  So if you couldn't make it to VMworld this year - don't despair, you will be able to get to the new labs in the future.

Software Defined Is Everywhere

Kong and I returned to So Say SMEs with this new episode about Software Defined EVERYTHING.  While the term is definitely a bit over-used right now, we talk about it anyway and use it a bit more, making it  even more over-used. Hopefully we also get the heart of what it actually means.



Kong did not send me the memo on wearing a cool Hawaiian shirt.  Maybe next time.

Do You Know Who I Am?

Just how long will it be before we get the mug shot photo?  We've all seen the celebrity mug shot after they are arrested for late night hijinx.

Once you hit the really big time your every move is followed closely.  There are twitter storms and blogs and even official news reports.  Unfortunately, it inevitably leads to an attempt to use fame to get around the norms and rules of society.

Imagine the scenario....

After a late night of hanging out at the Hands On Labs at a local VMUG, our celebrity guru blogger and author will get stopped on his way into the backstage area of the labs.  He just wants to grab a slice of the free pizza for the lab techs.  The security guy wants to see his badge.  The badge doesn't have the right color dot.

"Do You Know Who I Am?"

Unfortunately, this security guy has never installed ESX or vCenter or vCD.  He's never read about resource pools or pondered the best SRM strategy.  He just wants to see the red dot on the badge.

......

It even made this week's episode of So Say SMEs in Virtualization and Cloud!

Vote for Half of The Tong Show

In this week's So Say SMEs aka the Tong Show, we talked about VMworld 2013 Session Public Voting.



My sessions up for vote this year are 5591 Big Data: Virtualized SAP HANA Performance, Scalability and Best Practices and 5517 Performance In The Cloud Doesn't Matter.  Easiest way to find them is to just go to the voting site and filter on my last name - Muirhead.

Cloud Bracket Busters AWS and Hybrid Cloud

On this week's episode of So Say SMEs, Kong and I discuss the new announcement from VMware of a Hybrid Cloud service in the spirit of March Madness.


Notice the cool circuit board design on the wall behind us - anybody know where we filmed this episode?

Performance Perception In The Cloud

A funny thing seems to happen when applications are run in the "cloud" instead of just "virtual" in your local datacenter.  The perception of performance is changed.

As a part of my job, we look almost everyday at the performance of applications running in Virtual Machines.  We sometimes compare this performance against applications running natively on hardware and sometimes we are just measuring response time or looking for lost cycles.  Even small differences of less than a percent are important and improvements of whole percentages are celebrated.

Customers like to get into detailed discussions about how much "overhead" virtualization brings.  Settings and configuration options in vSphere that they can use to squeeze out every last drop are given in whitepapers, presentations, and blogs.  This is the kind of stuff that I consider fun and interesting.

But when we discuss running applications in the "cloud" the aspects of performance that are important change.  Even though all clouds are enabled by a virtualizaiton layer with virtual machines running around on top, the performance concern is almost always only about scaling.  Can additional instances be spun up to meet customer demand in real time?  Can storage capacity be expanded infinitely into the future?  There is absolutely no discussion about virtualization "overhead".

I believe that there are many reasons for this difference in perception.  Some of these reasons even make logical sense, but I don't think that the logical aspect is what is driving this difference in view.

It is primarily driven by the completely different approach that true "cloud" computing brings.  The underlying infrastructure is being turned over to somebody else, and the customer is simply purchasing a service.  While in the virtualization world, the underlying infrastructure is still under the control of the person making the decisions.  Even though both a cloud and a virtualized data center will be using the same virtualization approach, it is only the virtualized data center that is questioned about "overhead".

Interesting to me that the evaluation of performance is so different between these two.

Database Evolution Revolution

An excellent blog by Chuck Hollis today really got me thinking about databases.  In Chuck's post (on Chucks's Blog) he relates a presentation by Charles Fan that was recently given.  From Databases to Dataclouds is the title and a good overall summary of the blog / presentation.

After reading it my initial reaction is that this seems like a total revolution in how data is used and harnessed.  We are now talking about being able to use new database technologies and techniques to mange, control, and analyze data in near real-time.  Time-to-decision in seconds.  Data literally flowing all around us and yet captured, analyzed, and understood in real-time.

We would all like to see the world move on from relational databases to a totally new approach - a revolutionary approach.  But the reality is that the relational database will continue to be the key core aspect of just about any data intensive effort.  Additional features and optimization will continue to be added.  Entirely new ways to deal with and manage data can be used in conjunction.  But the core strengths of relational databases (transactions come to mind) will continue to make them indispensable.

I believe that what we are seeing is an evolution in database software combined with an evolution in hardware performance which adds up to a revolution when seen together.

When you take this and use it on top of the revolution that virtualization has created, you end up with a paradigm shifting view of the world.  Even though Chuck's blog is kinda long, I recommend that you read it through and see if it makes you start thinking too.