New Blog by Michael Corey, Founder & CEO, Ntirety, from VMware Partner Exchange 2012; 8:30 AM Sunday Morning Las Vegas Time

It’s 8:30 in the morning Las Vegas time and I am sitting in the VMware Virtualizing Oracle databases boot camp. If anyone ever told you I would be up early for the second day in a row in Vegas on a Sunday morning, the people who know me would say they are crazy. I love the challenge of the casino. I love the shows. Vegas is just so alive with activity. It’s a great place to visit. Yet, here I am early Sunday morning doing another deep dive. For the record, I am excited to be here. I am surrounded by a number of Ntirety database administrators.

At Ntirety, our tag line is “The Database Experts.” To earn the right to say that means that we do what it takes to stay on top of the changes in database technology. In my opinion, the most important change to hit the technology field in the last 20 years is virtualization. It’s a true game changer.

Once again, VMware has done an awesome job of providing us with a dream team of speakers. I have been in the Oracle world since version 3.0. I am a true Oracle old-timer. I know who’s good and who is not. The VMware speakers included Don Sullivan, Kannan Mani and George Trujillo. They all have excellent Oracle pedigrees and also have a wonderful way about presenting very deep technical material. The master of ceremonies was Don Sullivan. As a side note, Don is not only an Oracle expert he is also one of the most knowledgeable people I ever met on baseball. I have come to respect his technical expertise and his knowledge of the game. Being a Boston Red Sox fan, I am giving Don a huge compliment. It’s a shame he is a New York Yankees fan.

In addition, VMware also invited some customers to speak. The customers included Dave Welch from House of Brick (second best Database experts in the word next to my company Ntirety. I do have a right to be biased, don’t I?). They also invited Chris Williams from Cognizant. They are both individuals who recognized what game-changing technology VMware had early on and became very early adopters of the technology. During the boot camp both shared numerous real-life stories and experiences with everyone. They were also both quite approachable during the breaks.

One of the things I really have come to appreciate from VMware is honesty. It’s clear that as a company they value their partners and are willing to share the truth. Not the normal marketing spin we have all become used to getting.

David Welch taught a good portion of the agenda. He has a really nice way of presenting.

Drinking Out of the Fire hose

The one complaint I have to share with you about the Virtualizing Oracle boot camp is there was too much material and too little time to go over it all. It was also clear to me that VMware takes there certifications and competency very seriously. Too many vendors who shall remain nameless look at certifications as revenue opportunities. That is not the case with VMware. Earning a VCP (VMware Certified Professional) or a VACP (VMware Advanced Certified Professional) is a lot of work and not easy. VMware certifications mean something. So do VMware competencies.

Business Critical Applications is the newest VMware competency in 3 years. It includes Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server. VMware is taking it very seriously.

The high-level agenda consisted of:

• An introduction to Tier-1 Oracle Database Virtualization
• Physical Stack Fundamentals
• Virtual machine-layer fund
• The core prototype project
• Beyond the prototype implementation

We had numerous deep dives on the technology. One of my favorites was a demonstration of Oracle RAC and vMotion in action. We saw a three physical node Oracle Rac cluster. Then one of the Oracle instances was moved onto another node while in use. We got to see it vMotion working and the impact it was having on a real live working Oracle RAC database. We also had a great deep dive on the pros and cons around being able to move Oracle RAC instances from physical node to physical node.

Here is a YouTube video you can watch seeing this happen:

I have asked that VMware update it with a voice annotation. As a DBA, I think you will find this very interesting.

VMware Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Bundle

VMware has created a new bundle for Virtualizing Business Critical Applications which consists of:

VMware vSphere
VM Site Recovery Manager
VM vShield Apps
VMware vCenter Operations Advanced

VMware has put together a pretty powerful bundle of software for companies that are serious about virtualizing business-critical applications.

Michael Corey
Founder & CEO, Ntirety
My Personal Twitter Account: @Michael_Corey

As the CEO of an entrepreneurial company, I have to make every dollar we spend count. Money is one of our most valuable resources. It’s my number-one job to make sure my company never runs out of cash. At the same time, I know I need to spend money to make money, and that if I want to keep our growth happening, I need to make good solid bets.

Today, I am sitting in Las Vegas at VMware Partner Exchange with 20% of my company here. You might think to yourself: what would ever possess me to send so many people to any event. Well VMware has put together an event that is big on value. Today is Saturday, the official event has not happened. Yet, I am sitting in a boot camp with five of my SQL Server DBAs and feeling really good about the bet I just made.

VMware has created its newest competency in three years – the Virtualization of Business Critical Applications. That includes Oracle, SAP, Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. They recognize that the marketplace is shifting fast, and that more and more companies are expanding their virtualization footprint to include their Tier 1 applications. They also recognize that the strains these Tier 1 applications put on an infrastructure require a different set of skills, and that database administrators now need to talk and understand virtualization.

Well, my company is a company full of DBA experts – this is our sweet spot. This new VMware competency was a no-brainer for my company. I also feel that virtualizing the business is something companies should be looking at if they have not already. There are just so many benefits to the business.

As I sit in the boot camp, VMware has put together a really strong team of experts. The list includes Jeff Szastak, Wanda He, Justin Hakimi, Alex Fontana and Deji Akamolafe – to name a few. The best part is that they are telling it like it is. They are sharing real lessons learned the hard way. A team of Microsoft Experts surrounds me and we are all glad we attended.

They did a great job in talking about Virtualization Best Practices for Tier 1 applications. For example:

• For performance-critical Exchange and SQL virtual machines, try to ensure the total number of vCPUs assigned to all virtual machines is equal to or less that the total number of physical cores.
• It is important to understand how NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) affects your VMs.
• Microsoft Exchange is not NUMA-aware.

Michael Corey
Founder & CEO, Ntirety
My Personal Twitter Account: @Michael_Corey

In October last year, Unisphere Research released “Privatizing the Cloud: 2010 IOUG Survey on Cloud Computing”. In light of this past weekend’s Amazon public cloud service interruption, its worth citing one of the study’s key findings:

“Adoption of private cloud solutions for IT workload processing or infrastructure is outpacing use of public platform service providers. About 14 percent use the services of public cloud platform providers, compared with 37 percent using private cloud for parts of their operations. Adoption of software as a service (SaaS) applications is more common, used by close to one out of four respondents. However, security issues continue to be a concern with use of public cloud and online application services, making private clouds a more attractive option to enterprises. IT departments also play a leading role in identifying and managing public cloud and SaaS.”

Add “availability” to the list of concerns with public cloud provision now. Enterprises typically look at three core values when evaluating a solution for mission-critical enterprise computing deployment: Availability, Scalabililty and Security. By this measure we now see external cloud provision raising concerns on availability, as well as the already-present concerns over security. That is two-out-of-three in the “questionable” column in the enterprise-readiness trifecta. And for the old dogs in the market, its starting to feel a little like the state of client-server computing in 1996. Amazon has some serious work ahead of it to get beyond these concerns – not impossible, but its going to need to be demonstrable and definitive.

This will be a defining, limiting moment for external cloud provision – reinforcing a strong trend toward internal cloud deployment.