PASS Summit Archives - Page 2 of 5

October 27, 2015

Aftermath of a PASS Summit Preconference Session

It’s currently the Tuesday morning after my PASS Summit 2015 preconference session “Advanced SQL Server Availability Architectures and Deployments“. Before I say anything, I wanted to thank all of the attendees for taking the time out of their schedules to spend a day with lil’ ol’ me and using their training budget for my session. I really do appreciate it. I know they have a choice, and it’s why I do things like stay for an hour after the session to answer questions. Needless to say, I was a bit fried by the time I was done. I grabbed dinner with my business partner Max Myrick, and as soon as I got back to the hotel, it was time for la la land.

The early buzz on Twitter so far has been very good. I am both humbled and pleased since I never make any assumptions going into things. When you put an event like this together, you sometimes have no idea how it’ll go. There were more, but below is a sampling of some of the comments posted (with their relevant links … I don’t make this stuff up).

“RDMA? RDMA! Happy as a pig in poop at @SQLHA presentation …”

“Geek heaven, lots of hardware discussions because guess what SQL runs on…:D”
@Ms_Alaina

“Best session ever! Addressed many pain points in design and implementation! Thanks!”
@mssqlranger

Thanks for the great session today @SQLHA lots of stuff I can use when I get back to work
@RutherfordTX

Lab creation setup for @SQLHA #PASS #Summit15 precon is *really* cool. I’d like to see something like that for training/sandbox inhouse 🙂

great class material, great class vibe 🙂

– @sqL_handLe

I will admit – it’s always fun to see 100 people doing labs simultaneously which are all hosted in the cloud (and no, not Azure or Amazon). This is the second year in a row I’ve done had labs at a PASS precon, and it’s gratifying to see months of hard work come together. Last year was the grand experiment. I remember many people thinking I was insane for even attempting it. And yes, the rumors are true – I demoed an Availability Group that spanned both Azure IaaS and Amazon EC2. Maybe I’ll blog about that configuration at some point.

Labs are fun …

You don’t just show up in October and do a precon with labs at a major event. The process begins much earlier in the year when the call for speakers happens. In my “go big or go home” philosophy, as if doing what did last year was not hard enough, I decided to one up myself and submit a higher level session that was more advanced. Why? Taking the challenge aspect out for me (I love a good one …), there’s a lot of people who have been asking for more than “What is clustering?” type of content. There’s always a risk in submitting something more advanced because one person’s 200 level is another’s 500 level. But what the heck, you only live once, right?

Before I even submitted another precon abstract with labs, I asked PASS if they would let me do it if it was selected. There’s a practical reason for this: cost. There are some very tangible things that are not free when it comes to doing a precon with labs. They said yes, so abstract submitted, and thankfully, accepted a few months later. Away we go – the real work now begins.

I truly believe that everyone learns differently, but for what I do, hands on experience is pretty essential. My labs are not some canned thing someone else does and I’m reusing; I spend time doing instructional design so it fits the content I will be presenting. I try to add a hands on component where I can in all that I do. It’s not always possible. For the lab portion, each student gets their own lab environment. The labs for this one had two main lab exercises which encompassed 10 VMs (six for Lab 1, four for Lab 2). That’s just under 200 GB of VMs for every student.

While doing my four day Mission Critical SQL Server class is one thing, making sure 100 people can all do labs at the same time is another. There’s a lot of back and forth making sure that not only the venue has enough bandwidth, but the company that I use for the labs will have enough horsepower reserved to ensure all of the attendees can use up to 1000 VMs simultaneously. There’s also the fact that all of this, again, costs money so it has to be practical. This is why PASS and I agreed both years to cap the attendees to a maximum of 100 people.

When labs start in a session of this size, there are always some issues to deal with (for example, resetting login or password information, various connectivity issues), but time in and time out, things have worked with only minor things to deal with. I want to give a quick shout out to the Washington State Convention Center folks. They handled a few issues with the wired connections as well as power pretty quickly yesterday. They’re also very nice to deal with (they even remembered the requirements from last year). I also need proctors – it’s nearly impossible in a class of that size to answer everyone’s questions on my own. A special thanks to Max as well as Nic Cain (blog | Twitter) for helping out yesterday. I also have to thank the folks back at PASS HQ, especially Leeza Zelmer. None of this is possible without them, but Leeza really was my main contact and helped facilitate quite a bit behind the scenes.

Will there be another precon at PASS Summit with labs in my future? Who knows … let’s see what 2016 brings. At the moment, I need a bit of time not to be worrying about VMs, connectivity, or labs for a few weeks, but chances are high I’ll be having the same “Will you allow me to do this?” conversation with PASS in the spring again. All the effort and time is worth it when students have comments like the above because the day really isn’t about me; it’s all about them and for them.

I’m looking forward to the formal start of PASS Summit tomorrow morning. See you at the keynote!

July 23, 2015

Lots Of Upcoming Training and Speaking – Come See Me!

Happy Thursday, everyone! If you haven’t noticed, I have been pretty silent on the blog front. I am heads down writing the book (which is coming along nicely) as well as doing customer work. Fingers crossed, the book will be done before Summit. I will get back to a more normal blogging schedule when the book is done. Also, be sure to check out Max’s blog posts as he is now also regularly blogging here on the site.

It hasn’t been all book writing and customer work, though. Today I updated our Training and Events section with lots of new stuff. I am pretty excited, but it also means that I will be on the road from late September until early December. The things I do for you guys 🙂

First up is my 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server class in London via Technitrain from September 28 – October 1. As with all my 4-day deliveries, there are lots of hands on labs (bring your own device, though!). This has been on the books for quite some time. I love London, and my class in 2014 was a blast. I expect this delivery and the students to be the same. I may also be doing something else that week … stay tuned!

I will only be home a few days before heading down to Orlando (a place I *clearly* hate if you know me at all – Disney here I come!) for SQL Saturday 442. On Thursday, October 8, I will be doing a brand new preconference session entitled “Planning Highly Available SQL Server Deployments in a Cloudy, Virtualized World“. This is a “normal” precon, meaning there are no labs like some of my other precons. This helps to keep the price down while I get to deliver a really fun – and timely – topic. On the Saturday of the event, I will be delivering the talk What’s New for High Availability in SQL Server 2016 and Windows Server 2016 – another new one I am putting together.

The next thing on the books is the big kahuna – PASS Summit 2015. I am honored to once again be doing a preconference before Summit. This year I will be delivering “Advanced SQL Server Availability Architectures and Deployments“. I could have done the safe thing and just submitted an updated version of what I did last year. Why rest on your laurels? Don’t get me wrong – having 100 people doing labs at the same time was amazing, but been, there, done that. How could I kick it up a notch? Do something more difficult! Everyone gets their own lab environment (i.e. multiple VMs) that they connect to via a browser pm a device they bring with them. I am finalizing what the labs look like right now and will be building the VMs in the next month. I truly believe for topics like this you need to touch and feel. No hands on makes advanced topics more difficult to learn. Space is limited and I expect another sold out session, so register early. Don’t miss the PASS Summit 2015 Speaker Q&A I did for the precon posted up at the Summit site.

During Summit, I was asked to participate in the panel discussion “Will the DBA Job of the Future Still Involve DBAs?“. That should be a lively panel. For the third year in a row, SQLHA will have a booth (this year once again with Denny Cherry & Associates) called Consultant’s Corner. Drop by to say hello to Max or myself – we’ll both be there. Unlike last year where I was juggling speaking as well as the MVP Summit over in Redmond, I will be in the booth quite a bit this year.

Finally, I am very excited to be returning to Australia for two weeks. The last time I was there was 2013. WardyIT is once again bringing me back as part of their Platinum Training series. I will be delivering my 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server Workshop in Brisbane (November 24 – 27) and Canberra (November 30 – December 3). Every time I go to Australia it is two different cities; the last time I did this combination was in 2012. The last time I was in Brisbane I also spoke at the user group, so we’ll see what happens.

As an aside, both the London and Australia deliveries of the Mission Critical SQL Server class will also be the first time that I will be rolling in some 2016 (both SQL Server and Windows Server) content formally into the curriculm where it is appropriate. My classes are always evolving.

Whew! Are you tired from looking at my schedule yet? I know I’ll be hitting at least Platinum on American with all of those miles in the air. And if all of this was not enough, there are a few other things in the works which are not quite ready to be announced yet. As soon as they are, they will be on the events page.

November 17, 2014

Taking Training to the Next Level

It’s just about two weeks since my preconference session “The A to Z of Availability Groups” at PASS Summit 2014. Although the event was just one day, it was nearly nine months in the making and almost didn’t happen as it ultimately turned out. But what was the journey to get there and why is there so much buzz around what I’m doing right now?

Turn your way back machine to a few years ago, because that’s where this tale starts. When I first put together my Mission Critical SQL Server class for public delivery, it had no labs. I had done private training classes for corporate customers with labs, but they were one offs and very painful. By the end of that initial three day class, I quickly realized that without any kinds of hands on experience, learning features like clustered instances of SQL Server (FCIs) and availability groups (AGs) would be useless. By the end of day two, no matter how much demo, no matter how many breaks, you just don’t always get it by staring at a screen.

One immediate problem was this: I wanted to keep it a three day class, but that was impossible with labs, so I expanded Mission Critical SQL Server to four days. What content would come out to put labs in? That was my next challenge. It could easily be a five day class, but I find people’s learning really starts to wane by the end of day three no matter how good of an instructor your are or how good the material is. I hate death by PowerPoint myself, so finding that balance of talk/demo to hands on would be crucial. I am a big believer in people learning by doing not just seeing and hearing.

Reality set in. Instructional design done right is hard work. It took me nearly six months to figure out how to incorporate labs before my next delivery. This caused me two major fits of pain from the start.

I realized that there would be people at all ends of the spectrum in the class. It is inevitable. How do you keep more advanced students engaged while at the same time, the people who might be novices can still get something out of it? I know I have been in classes with labs that were, to be kind, useless. Great for beginners, but nothing for me. I wanted to try to somehow cater to
How the hell would this be portable and feasible? I would need somewhat beefy machines with decent amounts of disk storage (and preferably fast – VMs hate slow machines). This immediately set off the alarm bells. My normal VM boxes were 16GB with at least 1TB of storage. That configuration would be, to put it mildly, a stretch. File this under “figure it out”, but it needed to go hand in hand with #1.

I then set out and did arguably the stupidest thing anyone can do: I decided to do three levels of labs. Yes, three – beginner, intermediate, and advanced. All would get to the same spot, just take different paths to get there. And it would be done all on the same set of VMs (within reason). Way to go Allan – create more work for yourself! With this in mind, I created the real v1.0 of the class with labs. Ultimately the VMs took between 200 and 300GB of drive space and I got everything working with an 8GB machine. The VMs were all Hyper-V, and that is the way the class has stayed, actually. I use VMware quite a bit, but not in this case.

The next challenge was hardware: how could I ensure that where I would put the class on would have machines with the specs to run the labs? One word sums that up: oy. I delivered the class that way for the better part of a year before I said enough was enough. Sending drives all around the world, different hardware in each location giving a good or bad experience to the students, problems with configurations … you name it, I experienced it. While in the end everyone still loved the class, I tore my proverbial hair out each time trying to ensure the damn labs worked.

Through all of this, I kept thinking “There has to be a better way.” There was. For my December 2013 class, I moved the VMs online, thus creating class v2.0. The students would now access them via a browser. The computers essentially just needed a decent internet connection and some ports open. That delivery was a revelation. Not only was the speed consistent and good for the VMs themselves, the students loved the expeience. On top of it, they could access them in the hotel at night or wherever. No need to stay late or feel pressure to get things done because things go away. Since last December, the labs keep evolving and changing. I add new stuff and refine with each delivery. They have pretty much stabilized, but I’m about to overhaul them to deliver what I would deem v3.0 of the class starting in 2015 with the Dallas delivery in January (have you signed up? Go do it!).

There are other advantages to the platform I’m using like the ability to give people access post-class. This would be like your own private lab in a way. It isn’t free, but I also know many people don’t have the time, inclination, or other means to set up some of this advanced stuff on their own.

One thing that I haven’t talked about is cost, and I’m not really going to but it’s not necessarily cheap to do all of this, but nothing done right is ever cheap, right?

That’s when I got crazier: what if I did a precon with labs? I did not want to duplicate my 4-day class; I wanted a unique experience in its own way. It would also mean a much more focused topic that could get done in a day. Enter my A to Z of Availability Groups precon. Now, this was different in other ways, too. In a standard class the number of students can range, but you’re not necessarily talking a ton of people. I’ve done precons of 50 – 150 people over the years. That is a WHOLE different level of scale. Clearly I had to start small, so I did it for a handful of folks at the Silicon Valley SQL Saturday in early 2014. I had some MCMs in there and even they loved it! I got bold and submitted it to SQLBits to be held in July of 2014, and did it there for 32 people. Before that, I actually did it at the SQL Saturday in Philadelphia in June for about 25 people. Every delivery people really liked. I was pushing the envelope a bit each more. I was working up to the big kahuna: PASS Summit.

The delivery of the full class in London in early 2014 also brought a new dimension to the class: bring your own device. Since the labs were browser-based, it was possible but that brought a whole new round of issues: would differing devices work? The answer was a resounding yes. Only one student’s laptop had an issue, and it was a corporate laptop with ports locked down that got fixed. There were Macs and PCs – it all just worked. It’s very expensive to rent PCs and with the portability here, BYOD makes sense. It also helps lower the cost of the class to students. This got scaled up majorly in the Philadelphia SQL Saturday precon – but again, it all just worked. The experience was fantastic for all involved. But would it work for up to 100 people?

When I submitted the precon at the call for speakers, it was iffy if PASS would do labs. Thomas LaRock (Twitter | Blog) is a fan of hands on learning, and I think championed this behind the scenes. PASS and I went back and forth for awhile until finally PASS said yes to labs. Cost was certainly a factor, but to provide a hands on experience for lots of people at the same time was unheard of. I must be crazy! We had to arrange enough internet bandwidth with a wired, dedicated connection, ensure 100 people (it was sold out) had machines with the right specs and could access the labs, proctors approved, etc. Even on the backend enough reserve capacity had to be in place to have roughly 300 VMs running at the same time. Even worse, I kept the three levels of labs. I really needed to have my head examined.

To a person in the days leading up to it, people said I was incredibly brave to do what I was doing, even in my four day class with the multiple levels – let alone 100 people in a precon. I am a big believer in go big or go home. The precon for 100 people would either go well or be a disaster from at least a lab perspective. I had no idea. To say the least, I was stressed out. Knock on wood, it all was fine. In fact, I think people really liked it. I got a lot of people coming up to me after and that night congratulating me for pulling it off. Many of these people were not there and people I considered friends and peers. I was still in the “I can’t believe it’s over” phase, so I couldn’t really process things. I was tired. I still had a session Friday and my MVP Summit to deal with.

Now that it is in the rear view mirror, I’m a bit amazed I pulled it all off. Everything magically came together and … wait for it … it all just worked. 100 people simultaneously doing labs. I did that. Looking back, it was a long journey from hand built machines with heavens knows what specs to having 100+ people simultaneously doing labs on their own machines.

100 people doing labs at PASS Summit 2014

If you want to hear a student’s take on the precon, see Steve Jones’ post for T-SQL Tuesday entitled “Something New Learned” here. I have known Steve a long time and I am humbled by his comments. I am glad he learned new things, and more importantly, he took away more from the class than just AGs. In chatting with him offline, I know it’s made him think about how to approach and do his events. UPDATE: Steve just wrote another blog post called “Continuous Learning” on the precon. Thanks, Steve!

What’s amazing about all of my classes – precon or 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server (either public or private deliveries) – is that I’ve had everyone from DBAs and devs to sysadmins, normal folks to MVPs and MCMs. All seem to walk away happy. I can tell you sysadmins love the advanced stuff since it’s largely scrpting only. And what is nice to see, and something that Steve points out in his blog post, is the intereaction. DBAs may struggle with some of the Windows stuff, but the sysadmins sometimes struggle with the SQL stuff. Nice to see people help each other. Isn’t that what it’s all about? I also, even in the beginner stuff, make people think. I give people enough rope to hang themselves, but in a good way. I know I learn more from mistakes than if things go well all the time.

I’ve got big plans for training in 2015. I’ve been asked if I will do Pluralsight and deliver my class that way. The answer is no; I’ll be doing something else through our own SQLHA University. But make no mistake – there will be some online stuff, and possibly with labs. We’ll see … 🙂

There will also be the standard public deliveries anyone can attend (both 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server and precons) as well as private classes (which I do a lot for companies – inquire if interested). Right now for the 4-day Mission Critical SQL Server class is scehduled for Dallas (January 26 – 29, 2015), Philadelphia (March 30 – April 2, 2015), and London (September 28 – October 1, 2015). As of today, the Dallas and Philadelphia classes have nice discounts, so grab your spot today to experience hands on training you can’t get anywhere else.

October 30, 2014

SQLHA Has Given Birth

Successful companies grow in different ways. Last year, we brought Max into the SQLHA fold. That allowed us to develop much broader customer outreach, work on some of the world’s biggest and most complex architectures, and at the same time, expand our network of partnerships. This past year has been one of our best to date, and we have seen lots of opportunities out there. To fill this gap in the marketplace, we are spinning off a separate, independent company named Fortified Data that Ben will be leading. Ben is really excited about this opportunity to provide a wide range of higher end consulting services using an array of different resources. SQLHA may still do some of this work, but it is Fortified Data’s complete focus.

While both Max and I will miss working with Ben day-to-day as a partner, and I’m sure we’ll do joint opportunities from time to time, we will continue with SQLHA’s core mission and are as strong as ever. We will be delivering mission critical consulting and all that it encompasses (including the usual suspects – service monitoring, availability, architecture, private cloud, virtualization, etc.). We work with some of the best companies in the world to make sure that their SQL Server environments are the best they can be, and we’ve already got a busy year shaping up for 2015. SQLHA University will also grow in 2015 (stay tuned), and I’ll even even finish that mission critical book before 2015!

While spinning off Fortified Data was not planned when Ben and I started SQLHA three years ago, I am proud of everything that we have accomplished together. The best is yet to come for SQLHA and Max and I are excited to see what Ben does with Fortified Data. I know Ben and Fortified will be a success if the past three years are any indication.

You can also drop by the “Consultant’s Corner” booth at PASS Summit next week to find out more, where SQLHA and Fortified Data will be sharing space with our friends Heraflux Technologies and Denny Cherry & Associates .

October 27, 2014

What’s New in Windows Server vNext for SQL Server: Cloud Witness

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should have heard by now that Windows 10 was announced in late September and is due sometime in 2015. A new version of the Windows client always means another version of Windows Server. At the same time the Windows 10 Technical Preview was made available, so too was its Windows Server counterpart. If you have a MSDN subscription, it’s there. More info and where else to get it can be found here. The release will most likely not be called Windows Server 10, so we’ll have to speculate on what they will call it.

With a new version of Windows Server comes changes – usually for the better. I love what both Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 brought to the table for clustering especially with things like dynamic quorum and witness, last man standing, the tie breaker, and more. Until now, I’ve been under NDA not to talk about some topics related to vNext, but today I got the thumbs up on the one I care about the most which would impact things like AG deployments.

One problem with multi-site (or even hybrid) scenarios for AGs or FCIs is that if you need to use a witness resource, where do you put it? There’s a lot to say on that topic which I put into one of the two quorum chapters in the book, but the bottom line is that you basically have two options: have a witness at one of the sites (known as asymmetric witness) or stick it somewhere that all sites can see such as another data center or somewhere in the cloud if you have the right networking. Today’s version of putting a witness in the cloud is the traditional file share witness (FSW). In vNext, you have a new tool in the drawer: cloud witness. It is early days, so there is always a chance this feature may not make the final cut but I sure hope it stays!

This option can easily be seen in Figure 1 in the Configure Cluster Quorum Wizard. It was hiding in plain sight, but like I said, I couldn’t talk about it until today.

Cloud witness option in the quorum configuration wizard

Figure 1. Cloud witness option

This is not a FSW – let me be clear. On the next dialog shown in Figure 2, you have to enter your credentials for Azure storage. Yes, it’s Azure only – sorry Amazon or Google lovers. What this also means is that you need to have the cluster nodes connected to the Internet (not always possible), but this does NOT require the special hybrid networking you would need to normally bridge Azure to on premise deployments. That alone reduces many complexities intruduced with standard hybrid or disaster recovery solutions for SQL Server.

Figure 2. Entering the account information for the cloud witness

After the cloud witness is created, Figure 3 shows what you will see in Failover Cluster Manager (you can also see things in PowerShell, but this looks nicer in a blog post!). The cloud witness is a resource in the WSFC’s cluster group just like a disk or file share witness would be.

Figure 3. Cloud witness and how it looks in Failover Cluster manager

Finally, on the backend in Azure, it creates a GUID associated with the WSFC similar to that of a FSW. Figure 4 shows what this would appear like.

Figure 4. What the cloud witness looks like in Azure

Want to know more about quorum and witness? It’ll be in the book, but if you’ll be at PASS Summit next week, come see my session “Did You Vote Today? A DBA’s Guide to Cluster Quorum” (DBA-311) on Friday, November 7, at 8:15 AM in room 6E. It is a 75 minute session. “Did You Vote Today?” was also selected to be broadcast on PASStv, so even if you’re not at Summit, you can watch it live on the Web. No pressure, right? I may take questions live from Twitter – that has yet to be determined.

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