If you are attending this year’s SQL Saturday in Atlanta, GA, on July 15, I urge you to attend my preconference training session – “The Complete Primer to SQL Server Virtualization & Cloud“. The architecture of the infrastructure underneath your mission-critical SQL Servers is vital to the well-being of your databases, and if any little component underneath is not running at its peak potential, your SQL Servers are artificially bottlenecked and your performance suffers. For any DBA out there who claims the infrastructure underneath the data, no matter if it’s in the cloud or your own datacenter, is someone else’s job, this session is going to show you just how important a working knowledge of these layers is to your livelihood.

This event is almost a homecoming, as I grew up not far from the event!

Session Details
Microsoft MVP and VMware vExpert David Klee leads this full-day introduction to enabling and managing a virtualized SQL Server environment. The focus of the course is to help those new to virtualization and/or infrastructure concepts to become familiar with the concept and purposes of virtualization and how it can benefit them as data professionals. Participants will gain exposure to all layers of virtualization underneath SQL Server, from storage to hypervisor to the SQL Server instance, and will learn how to construct the entire stack with a strong emphasis on SQL Server performance.

Intended Audience. The intended audience of this course is information workers (both business and IT-centric) involved with architecting a virtualization strategy for SQL Server, or managing business-critical SQL Servers that have already been virtualized.

Course Topics
The following topics will be addressed during the course:

• The Physical Infrastructure Underneath the VM
• Virtualization and Infrastructure Fundamentals
• The SQL Server Virtual Machine
• Networking, Support, and Licensing
• Performance Investigation and Tuning of the Entire Stack
• Similarities and Differences with Cloud versus On-Prem

Course Objectives
Upon completion of this course, attendees will be able to:

• Understand key virtualization and cloud concepts
• Determine the optimal infrastructure configuration for best performance
• Construct a SQL Server virtual machine template with best practices for agility and performance
• Understand how and what stack metrics to benchmark and baseline to ensure proper objective performance measurement
• Identify and remediate common virtualized SQL Server performance killers
• Understand proper virtualized capacity management techniques for long term management

Prerequisites
Attendees with the following experiences will benefit the most from this course:

• Basic familiarity with the core components of a server
• SQL Server installation and configuration
• Exposure to SQL Server performance metric measurement and identification

A working set of the screens and configuration settings referenced in the session, together with the reference slides and documentation, will be provided to attendees, for strategic reference in working with virtualized SQL Server in your own environments.

I look forward to seeing you all there! Registration for this event is located at EventBrite.