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Tag Archives: memory

Dynamic Memory Management of vFabric Postgres

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In a nutshell, dynamic memory management in vFabric Postgres is conceptually like Elastic Memory for Java (EM4J), but for a virtualized, enterprise-class, open source database instead of an application server.

Compared to a normal PostgreSQL server, vFabric Postgres brings two additions necessary for flexible virtualization of the database server. These two features can help companies realize the benefits of virtualizing the database and the associated cost savings from running an open source database on an extremely cost-effective infrastructure.

  1. Elastic shared memory management
  2. Automatic memory configuration

Elastic Shared Memory Management

Directly embedded with PostgreSQL core, the elastic shared memory management is a new feature of vFabric Postgres. This capability allows memory to be released or obtained according to the other virtual machine needs on the same server. Continue reading →

The Best VMware vFabric Stories of 2012 & What’s In Store for 2013

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As this year comes to a close, it’s time to be reflective of what happened in the past and start planning for a new year. The vFabric team has had some major achievements this year, introducing several new products to the market including the innovative vFabric Application Director, the widely anticipated Project Serengeti to enable rapid cloud deployments for Hadoop, and a new tool to the vFabric Suite users called vFabric Administration Server (VAS).  We announced a new VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace to help further accelerate application development with a professionally moderated library of enterprise grade, ready-to-use application components that can be run on any cloud.

Next year is going to be even bigger with the Pivotal Initiative where several of the products covered on this blog will be following the new venture. This is still in the planning stages, so we will be expecting to share with you the plans for our products alongside the formal communications from each of the companies involved. (Sorry — no extra information is available right now)

One thing that we are going to be doing in early 2013 is to move the conversation of how you manage applications to be with the conversations of how you manage virtual infrastructure. To that end, we will be moving all topics of Application Performance Manager, AppInsight, Application Director, Hyperic, and Spring Insight to the VMware Management Blog as of January 1st. To make sure you keep up with the management topics, please be sure to follow us @vmwareappmgmt and @vmwaremgmt.

In the meantime, we’d like to reshare with you the top 20 stories we had for 2012, and invite you to comment here on what stories you would like to see us cover on either blog for 2013.

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Announcing the Availability of vFabric Data Director 2.5, GemFire 7, EM4J 1.2, and More

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Application developers and data management teams continue to look for ways to modernize legacy apps, manage costs more effectively, build new apps on robust application platforms, and solve big data problems. These are some of the key reasons why vFabric is on the CIO (or CTO) agenda. With several new product releases in the vFabric Suite, VMware continues to provide a best-in-class application platform and help customers solve their top application development and data management problems.

vFabric Data Director 2.5

Database as a Service (DBaaS) helps companies virtualize data engines and automate management while getting a handle on the costs and compliance issues related to data sprawl. In the newest version of Data Director, several new data engines are supported (in addition to Oracle and Postgres) along with other new capabilities:

  • Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012
  • Support for Hadoop deployment, management, and monitoring across all major distributions through Project Serengeti
  • Enhanced automation of Oracle and SQL Server template creation
  • Broad support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Oracle Linux
  • Enhanced Oracle database ingestion, including ingestion to a point-in-time and more
  • Support for static IP database virtual machines (DBVMs)
  • Express set-up for development or experimentation

Continue reading →

Upcoming Webinar: Going In-Memory with VMware vFabric GemFire 7.0 and Spring

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Social media, mobile devices, and an ever-expanding commercial world wide web have transformed our culture to an always-on, always-connected, and increasingly impatient creatures. As a result, how applications deal with data management is probably the area of computing that has undergone the most change in recent years. It’s undergoing a renaissance, if you will.

Traditional relational database management systems (RDBMs) are being replaced by new, in-memory data systems that deliver high performance and can scale-out horizontally quickly to meet the needs of the next Facebook, Netflix, or Pinterest application that shines in the market.

In an upcoming webinar, VMware will show you how you can use vFabric GemFire  to transform your data management strategy to achieve the speed, scale and reliability that internet pioneers have been trusting us to do for years.  We’ll also cover some of the recent advancements, including how GemFire 7 makes managing and monitoring your GemFire data much easier, and how Spring Data GemFire project makes writing new modern applications easier than ever before.

Join VMware on Thursday, December 6, 2012 at 10:00AM PDT/1:00PM EDT for the webinar titled, The Data Renaissance; Going in-memory with VMware vFabric GemFire 7.0 and Spring.

>> Register for Webinar here

Why is vFabric on the CIO Agenda? Trends and Economics

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So, why is vFabric on the CIO Agenda? In short, technology trends and basic economics.

In this article, we outline, provide key highlights, share the slides, and link to an on-demand, CIO.com webinar titled, “Your business is now a software business. Now what?” In the recording, Tom Schmidt, Managing Editor at CIO.com, targets several questions to Al Sargent, Group Manager, VMware Cloud and Application Services, about how vFabric fits into the CIO agenda.

The webinar covers the following four topics, and a short summary is below:

  1. Why every business is a software business
  2. The clear trends with VMware vFabric customers and prospects
  3. Cloud Scale and Economics
  4. Pricing Comparisons of vFabric to Competitors Continue reading →

3 Signs Your Relational Database Must Go

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Application and operations teams sometimes reach a point where they must upgrade the database. Whether it’s due to data growth, lack of throughput, too much downtime, the need to share data globally, adding ETLs, or otherwise, it’s never a small project. Since these projects are expensive, any recommendation requires a solid justification.  This article a) characterizes 3 signs where traditional databases hit a wall, b) explains how vFabric SQLFire provides an advantage over traditional databases in each case, and c) should help you make a case for moving towards an in-memory, distributed data grid based on SQL.

For those of us tasked with upgrading (or architecting) the data layer, we all go through similar steps. We build a project plan, make projections and sizing estimates, perform architecture and code reviews, create configuration checklists, provide hardware budgets and plans, talk to vendors about options, and more.  Then, we work to plan the deployment with the least downtime, procure hardware and software, test different data load times, evaluate project risks, develop back-up plans, prepare communications to users about downtime, etc. You know the drill. These projects can take months and consume a fair amount of internal resources or consulting dollars. If you are starting or working on one of these types of projects with a traditional database architecture in mind, are you considering these 3 signs as you consider your options? Continue reading →

Updated vFabric GemFire 7 Delivers Fast, Reliable Data at Cloud-Scale

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Doubling-down on in-memory data

Download GemFire 7Memory is faster than disk. People realize that when they need to support high performance on-line applications. Recently many traditional database providers latched onto this and started “washing” their offerings with in-memory variations. At the same time, new companies are jumping into the In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) space with unproven offerings. However, enterprise data is not something many are willing to experiment on.

VMware has virtually pioneered the IMDG, even before it was a category. Its vFabric GemFire team has been at this for a while now with a proven, production-grade offering called vFabric GemFire. In its latest release, vFabric GemFire 7.0 brings a couple of key enhancements for developers and IT pros alike:

  • Improving developer productivity
  • Increasing operational efficiencies

These improvements are in addition to the already proven data consistency and reliability that many have come to expect form vFabric GemFire in their scale-out data architectures. Once more, VMware has shown, both the technical knowhow and the necessary experience in enterprise-grade in-memory data to support on Cloud-scale.
Continue reading →

Sizing vFabric GemFire – VMware’s Java-based, Spring-Enabled, In-Memory Data Platform

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Capacity planning in the enterprise is no easy task. In this post, we provide an overview for sizing VMware’s elastic, in-memory data management product, vFabric GemFire and a link to an in-depth, technical article.

Setting the Stage for Memory Sizing

Enterprise applications today are distributed systems that have to satisfy increasingly more complex business requirements. When the ever growing demand for managing more data is added, the task keeps getting harder.

One of the key factors in capacity planning for memory intensive systems, such as in- memory data stores, is memory capacity. Even though the price of memory keeps going down, data capacity requirements keep going up, and this makes memory as precious a resource as ever. As large systems become even larger, it becomes more important to manage this resource efficiently. In addition to obvious reasons, such as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), there are technical challenges that come with large memory pools. For one, garbage collection (GC) takes more time, which can affect both latency and throughput. Determining memory requirements correctly is both crucial and difficult.

That is why this post and the related technical article focus on memory sizing and provide concrete guidelines for determining required memory for optimal performance, especially in large scale vFabric GemFire deployments. GemFire has facilities that can be very useful for memory sizing. The article not only explains the facilities, but also describes a method and guidelines to take the guesswork out of memory sizing process. Continue reading →

vFabric VMworld Sessions available On Demand

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For anyone that attended VMworld 2012, you can access content for all VMware sessions here.

If you did not attend, you can purchase a subscription to access the content online. Content from all previous years is free for all community members along with the 2012 General Session Keynotes.

For your convenience, we’ve provided a list and links to all the vFabric-related sessions below:
Continue reading →

Using Visual Statistics Display to Analyze GemFire Runtime Configuration, Resources, and Performance

22 Replies

vFabric GemFire is a sophisticated product in a complex problem space: data management in distributed systems. In order to help our users get the most out of GemFire, we are starting a “cookbook” series, which will provide tried and tested recipes that we hope every GemFire user will find useful.

Our first topic is the Visual Statistics Display (VSD). VSD is a visual tool for analyzing GemFire statistics. It reads GemFire statistics from special statistics archive files created by GemFire, and renders their graphs for analysis. It is not a real-time online monitoring tool, such as vFabric Hyperic, so it does not have the real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities that they have. On the other hand, it is the most powerful tool for examining the state of a vFabric GemFire system, as it provides access to all the statistics collected by GemFire. No real-time monitoring tool can do that, as the amount of statistics that GemFire collects is prohibitive for real-time collection in a distributed system.

Continue reading →