The VMware BCA team successfully conducted the second batch for SQL Server MVPs April 21st-23rd. The attendee list includes. Steve Jones, Tim Ford, Arnie Rowland, Wendy Pastrick, Eddie Wurech, Robert Davis, Sean McCown, Allan Hirt, Geoff Hiten, Randy Knight, Chris Shaw, Jason Strate, Brandon Leach, Shawn Meyers, Melissa Connors. Alumni guests include David Klee, Mike Corey and Denny Cherry.
The agenda included presentations from luminaries, subject matter experts and executives from VMware and Tintri combined with a hands on SQL 2014 performance lab on VMware. The attendees were given access to dedicated clusters with high performance T880 storage from Tintri backing the virtual machines.
During the three day workshop attendees were provided the SQL 2014 virtual machines with labs that included HammerDB, In Memory OLTP, SQL Always on Availability and performance troubleshooting. The lab helped showcase vSphere as a very effective platform to run Microsoft SQL. The lab environment was hosted on 18 physical servers running vSphere 6 and managed by a vCenter 6 Virtual Appliance. The lab environment was stable throughout the three day session even during intense performance testing exercises. The Tintri platform provided great visibility into the storage performance during the tests with ability to drill down at the virtual machine level and traverse time periods for analysis. We were able to quickly recover from an instance where one of the SQL teams had accidentally crashed the storage on their machine making it un-bootable. Tintri point in time snapshots were leveraged to go back in time and the machine was restored successfully to its state just prior to the crash in a matter of minutes.
The combination of the technical presentation with intense feedback from the SQL MVPs and the hands on exercises made this event very memorable and a win-win for both the attendees, VMware & Tintri.
