It’s Pass 2015 this week and I’m attending (seriously I’m unbelievably chuffed)! As they’ll be a shedload of blogs about it this week I thought I’d shamelessly jump on the bandwagon.

I flew out to Seattle from Dublin on Friday (god that was a long day) so I’ve had a couple of days knocking around town doing the usual touristy things. Went up the Space Needle and did the underground tour on Saturday, both of which were pretty cool. Fantastic views from the Needle and the underground tour was a really interesting delve into the history of the area. Then yesterday I went to Pike Street Market and then went wandering around. Ended up by the Seattle stadium, saw that there was a Sounders game on so ended up going to that. Cracking day out.

But I’m not here to do sight seeing really, I’m here for SQL Pass 2015 and it kicked off this morning with the first set of pre-con sessions. Have to say, first impression is how big is this place?? The Washington State Convention Centre is absolutely huge! It completely blows any other conference I’ve attended out of the water. I’ve signed up for the first timers reception and the welcome sessions but today was Allan Hirt’s (b|t) session on high availability.

I really enjoyed the session, Allan is a great presenter with a seemingly limitless knowledge of windows clustering. He talked us through many different configuration options and what we should be considering when setting up a windows failover cluster. My favourite parts of the session though was when Allan talked about what’s up and coming in SQL Server and Windows 2016, lots of new functionality which I’ll be playing with in my lab at home. He also showed us a cluster he’d setup with one node in Amazon AWS and one node in Azure! I dread to think how long that took to configure and setup…

Anyway not going to give too much information about the pre-con (I don’t think that would be appreciated). What I will do is post some notes I took. They’re just a bunch of links for subjects that I want to do further research in, hopefully a couple of blogs posts in there somewhere:-

SQL and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)
https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Regular-IT-Guy/Behind-the-Scenes-with-Storage-Replica-and-RDMA
Converged and Hyper-converged networking
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/hyper-converged-systems-what-you-need-to-know-about-this-hot-virtualization-topic/
Scale out file server (SOFS) for application data
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831349.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/
Microsoft Storage Spaces
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15198.storage-spaces-overview.aspx
Install SQL Server with SMB fileshares
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh759341.aspx
Windows 2016 Site Aware Clustering
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2015/08/19/10636304.aspx
Windows 2016 Cloud Witness
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2014/11/14/10572766.aspx

I’m really going to enjoy the rest of this week.