The SQL PASS Summit 2014 community sessions were recently released. I’m very pleased and honored to announce that I will be presenting a 75-minute session entitled “Right Sizing Your Virtual Machine” at the Summit this November. It’s a topic that I spend many hours a week on in my professional duties with my company, and I am very excited about sharing the fundamentals of the topic and the methodology that I use to perform a right-sizing analysis on a SQL Server virtual machine. If you have a virtualized SQL Server anywhere in your environment – this topic will matter to you.

Abstract: Virtualizing your top-tier production SQL Servers is not as easy as P2V’ing it. Sometimes allocating more resources to the VM (Virtual Machine) is the wrong approach, and getting it wrong will silently hurt performance. What is the most effective method for determining the “right” amount of resources to allocate? What happens if the workload changes a month from now? Join this session and find out!

The methods for understanding the performance of your mission-critical SQL Servers gathered over the past ten years of SQL Server virtualization will be addressed, and valuable processes for performance statistic collection and analysis will be displayed. Come learn how to properly “right-size” the resources allocated to a VM, improve the performance of your SQL Servers, and keep it maximized well into the future.

If you did not get selected for the Summit this year, don’t fret. Keep up the great work in the community and keep submitting. Refine your topics and speaking style at various events, like SQL Saturdays, PASS Virtual Chapter presentations, or SQL Server user group sessions. All of the experience adds up, and with the right presentation background, topic, and some luck, we’ll all be speaking there next year.

I really hope that you are able to attend the Summit this year – and every year after. I consider it the most professionally important conference of the year for any SQL Server professional. Attending the conference over the last three years has changed my career and my life in a number of fantastic ways, and it can do the same for you.