This year at VMworld I have three sessions that will be brining you some Business Critical Apps, Monster VM and Database in Software Defined Datacenter performance best practices, trends, design considerations and much more. Places in theses sessions are strictly limited and are filling fast. If you have interest in any of these topics I would recommend that you sign up for the sessions before they are full. There is likely to be a wait list when the sessions sell out. There are also many other quality breakout sessions and panel discussions at VMworld and the VMware booth is also a fantastic place to connect with all areas of VMware. Below I’ll give you links through to the scheduling page for the sessions and also recommendations for other sessions you might like to check out.

VAPP1004-GD – Oracle/General – Group Discussions are a good way to join together with peers, guided by a VMware expert, and discuss a VMware key topic as selected by the group. Come to this session prepared to dive-in, engage, and share best practices.  

VAPP4679 – Software-Defined Datacenter Design Panel for Monster VM’s: Taking the Technology to the Limits for High Utilisation, High Performance Workloads – Designing and architecting an environment that will host many Monster VM’s requires a different approach and different considerations to smaller VM’s to ensure you get the best benefits from the platform. Mostafa Khalil (VCDX-002), Frank Denneman (VCDX-029), Andrew Mitchell (VCDX-030), Mark Achtemichuk (VCDX-050) and Michael Webster (VCDX-066) will lead a panel discussion on the design and architecture best practices and design guidance that applies when you are virtualizing many high utilization, high performance Monster VM’s. The panel will answer your questions on topics such as host and cluster design and sizing, VM sizing, performance tuning, CPU scheduling, memory management, resource management, storage design and much more. Avoid the common traps that could derail your Monster VM virtualization project.

VAPP4683 – Maximize Database Performance in Your Software-Defined Datacenter – Mark Achtemichuk (VCDX-050) and Michael Webster (VCDX-066), two leading experts on Performance and Business Critical Apps take you through a power packed session of architecture design considerations to help you get the most performance out of the Software Defined Datacenter and your Cloud for your database servers. More customers are considering how to design and deploy their largest critical database servers in their Software Defined Datacenter and with VMware vCloud Director. These scenarios have many benefits for Business Critical Applications, such as Database systems, including reduced time to market, increased agility, reduced management overheads and a declarative architecture that can make meeting certain SLA’s much simpler. This session will take you through a performance deep dive when using a software defined datacenter for your database workloads and introduce the architectural and design implications for performance when using new flash technologies. You’ll also learn how to avoid some of the common performance traps. Whether you are deploying databases on vSphere or in your cloud with vCloud Director this session will cover the critical performance considerations relevant to Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase and other mission critical database platforms.

My recommendations are aligned with many of the other session recommendation lists that have been published such as:

Duncan Epping’s VMworld San Francisco Session Recommendations

Trainsignal’s Top 10 VMworld 2013 Sessions for Active Learners

Final Word

There are many great sessions scheduled for VMworld and it’s often quite frantic when you’re there. I’d suggest that you schedule in early for the sessions you’re most interested in and if you miss out on them you can always try and get into a repeat.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.