VROOM!

I’m starting a new tutorial this year at Usenix — all about performance and tuning of VMware ESX server. The session is on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 in Boston, and is an all-day class.

Who should attend: Anyone who is involved in planning or deploying virtualization on VMware ESX and wants to understand the performance characteristics of applications in a virtualized environment.

We will walk through the implications to performance and capacity planning in a virtualized world to learn about how to achieve best performance in a VMware ESX enviroment.

Take back to work: How to plan, understand, characterize, diagnose, and tune for best application performance on  VMware ESX.

Topics include:

• • Introduction to virtualization
  • Understanding different hardware acceleration techniques for virtualization
  • Diagnosing performance using VMware performance tools, including esxtop
  • Diagnosing performance using guest OS tools in a virtual environment
  • Practical limits and overheads for virtualization
  • Storage performance
  • Network throughput and options
  • Using Virtual-SMP
  • Guest Operating System Types
  • Understanding the characteristics of key applications, including Oracle, MS SQLserver, and MS Exchange
  • Capacity planning techniques

The cost for the class is $695, and there is an early bird registration discount price of $645. Sign-up is via the Usenix registration site.

Please comment if you have additional ideas and topics that you want to have covered, and I'll do my best to incorporate them into the content.

I'll post further updates in my blog

Richard