Meeting Agenda

Time

Title

Presenter(s)

8:30 -9:00

Registration, Continental Breakfast, and Networking

9:00 - 9:15

Welcome and Introductions

9:15 -9:45

Which is greater - average attendance at Busch Stadium or the number of servers we collect data on every night?

Paul Merline, AT&T

9:45 -10:30

Virtualization Comparison - AIX vs VMware

Chris Althen, MetLife

10:45 -12:00

The Practitioner’s Guide to the Transactional Galaxy

Eva Tuczai, OpTier

12:00 – 1:00

Lunch

1:15 – 2:15

(Two Concurrent Tracks)

CMG-T: Windows System Performance Measurement and Analysis – Part I

 (short) (full)

Jeff Schwartz, Integrated Services Inc.

Performance and Capacity Management Guru's Views of z/OS 1.12 and 1.13

Ivan Gelb, Gelb Information Systems

2:30 - 3:30(Two Concurrent Tracks)

CMG-T: Windows System Performance Measurement and Analysis – Part II

 (short) (full)

Jeff Schwartz, Integrated Services Inc.

CICS Performance and Capacity News and Best Practices

Ivan Gelb, Gelb Information Systems

3:30

Closing Remarks

Optional Social Gathering at Chevy's (Kennerly & Tesson Ferry)

Meeting Details

Date and Time

Tuesday, November 15, 2011 : 8:30 AM – 3:30 PM

Location

MetLife - St. Louis

13045 Tesson Ferry Road

St. Louis, MO  63128

http://regions.cmg.org/regions/stlcmg/Location-Metlife2.html

Costs

$25 if paid by October 21, 2011

$50 if paid by November 11, 2011

$75 at the door

Special Note

Fee is waived for anyone who is out of work or full-time college student with ID. St Louis CMG must receive RSVP by October 21, 2011.

Payment Methods

Send Payments to:

St. Louis Computer Measurement Group

PO Box 1474

Maryland Heights, MO  63043

OR

Use PayPal to send your payments to: stlcmg@cmg.org

Sponsor Information: OpTier

In today's always-on economy, businesses need always-on IT. OpTier is the leader in business transaction-driven Application Performance Management (APM), assuring more business transactions every second than any other IT management vendor. OpTier's unique cross-silo business transaction approach automatically provides unmatched visibility by tying together:

·         Business process

·         End-user

·         Application

·         Datacenter

·         Cloud perspectives

This automated approach in a single solution provides IT and business actionable intelligence to manage application performance that drives business.

Global customers rely on OpTier to protect revenue and improve end-user experience by

·         Eliminating outages

·         Resolving problems 100 time faster

·         Optimizing returns from existing IT investments

OpTier assures the performance of your applications and the highest return on your IT investments. To find out more visit www.optier.com.

Which is greater…the average attendance at Busch Stadium or the number of servers we collect data on every night? /

Paul Merline

This presentation is intended to give the audience a look at how one company handles its large data collection environment.  It begins with an overview of the current environment, followed by a strategy to be able to collect, process and store this volume of data to ensure the Capacity Planning community and other users have what they need to be successful.  It explores the future direction and explains how the challenge of converting to BMC Performance Assurance Release 7.5 was accomplished for this number of systems without downtime or loss of data using a strategy developed in-house and approved by the vendor.

Virtualization Comparison - AIX vs VMware /

Chris Althen

This session details a study used to compare and contrast two virtualization platforms, AIX and VMware. The focus is from a Performance Analysis and Capacity Planning perspective.  Parameters used for this comparison and contrast study include:

·         Common definitions to capacity parameters that define a virtual server

·         Platform specific requirements when performing performance diagnosis

·         Behaviors of the hypervisors

·         Storage architecture

The target audience for this presentation is Performance Analysts, Capacity Planners, and Platform Engineering teams (VMWare/AIX technical specialists) that work with one platform and are interested in the other.

The Practitioner’s Guide to the Transactional  Galaxy / Eva Tuczai

Whether your computing model is moving to the Cloud or is firmly planted in the ground, IT organizations armed with a myriad of APM tools still wrestle with meeting SLAs, rapid and precise identification of performance issues, and managing resources to meet business demands using less budget dollars.  This session will discuss real-life use cases on how IT organizations have solved these challenges with a horizontal instrumentation approach, compare this to vertical instrumentation, and discuss several horizontal technical approaches.  Use cases include:

·         Resource-intensive activities that impact performance of critical business transactions

·         Eliminating long triage calls by isolating bottlenecks down to specific components in shared services environments

·         Identify the contribution to transaction response time from off-campus components or services

·         Optimizing overall performance of asynchronous transactions and complex, multi-step business processes

·         Identifying and resolving intermittent production issues that cannot be reproduced in test or UAT

OpTier will provide an overview of our horizontal instrumentation solution, along with a demo of 2 use cases.

CMG-T: Windows System Performance Measurement and Analysis /  Jeff Schwartz

This basic tutorial in the CMG-T foundation curriculum introduces the metrics that are available from the Windows operating system and most prevalent applications. The sheer number of available metrics makes it difficult for anyone, even those analysts who are well versed in performance analysis measurements on other platforms, to discern the most important performance counters. This course will provide the necessary information to enable the Windows performance analyst to ascertain what the most important metrics are, how to interpret them, and the most appropriate collection mechanisms. It will also explain measurements either that are not easily obtainable or must be calculated.  Discussion will include performance data collection and analysis issues using commonly available tools.  Note:  All topics have been updated to include Windows Vista, Server 2008, and Windows 7.

This session will cover many of the following topics:

·         Windows performance data - how it is maintained within the OS, collected, and secured

·         Overview of Windows processor, process, and thread architecture

·         Overview of Windows memory management architecture and behavior

·         Overview of Windows I/O subsystem architecture and behavior

·         Overview of Windows networking subsystem architecture and behavior

·         Windows processor and memory performance analysis

·         Windows disk, network, and terminal server performance analysis (extra emphasis on I/O subsystem analysis)

·         Calculating important missing disk and response time metrics using Windows performance counters

·         Obtaining important WMI operating system and system configuration information

·         Obtaining important Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) operating system, process, file, interrupt, DPC, and other important information

·         Using kernrate and Krview to obtain and analyze causes of excessive Windows kernel usage (excluding interrupts and DPCs)

·         Summary of other tools, including Xperf and Windows 7 Relog, that can expedite Windows performance analyses

Performance and Capacity Management Guru's Views of z/OS 1.12 and 1.13  / Ivan Gelb

This session will cover the new information, potential “gotchas,” new or evolved best practices and recommendations for z/OS and its major subsystems.

The following is a somewhat partial list of areas the session will delve into:

·         z/OS

·         WLM

·         RMF

·         SMF

·         zManager

·         zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager (URM)

·         URM Platform Performance Management (PPM)

·         CICS

·         DB2

How can we do this in about one hour? Attend the session and find out. And, like in most Gelb sessions, audience questions may earn rewards.

CICS Performance and Capacity News and Best Practices / Ivan Gelb

Every new release of CICS creates new opportunities to explore for the systems staff charged with the performance and capacity management tasks. Add the rest of the z Series hardware and software changes, and the job becomes even more filled with choices which can improve CICS services quality and lower the cost per unit of work. This session includes presentation of the best practices in statistics collection and related analysis. The information filled session will highlight the most recent CICS Version 4.2 and 4.3 performance related news items and recommendations as well as include discussion of the old tried, proven and still recommended practices.

Paul Merline, AT&T Capacity Planning

Paul has spent his entire 26-year career upon graduation from SMS (now Missouri State) with the phone company beginning as a release control coordinator for several Bellcore-developed MVS applications.  In 1990, Paul was given the “opportunity” by a previous boss to make the transition to “the other side” (UNIX).  Upon completing the introduction classes, Paul became the “expert” on the team.  Initially, he planned and implemented conversions for three major applications to distributed hardware.  He then moved into collecting metrics for midrange systems and used a methodology obtained from the national CMG conference for reporting purposes.  Paul was then given another “opportunity” to move into development and created a data migration layer for the new SAP payroll system.  He then filled an opening in the Capacity Planning arena and has been there happily ever since.  Paul’s current responsibility is to administer the BMC Performance Assurance Console environment at AT&T.

Chris Althen,

Capacity and Performance Management

MetLife

Chris has been working in IT for 14 years, starting by making the rounds engineering solutions for Windows, AIX, Solaris, Linux and Storage/SAN.  Covering various enterprise disciplines including messaging, backup/recovery, systems management, workflow imaging solutions, and relational databases. 

The past 10 years have been spent in the area of capacity planning, performance diagnosis, and crisis management.  Recent years have been focused on virtualization platforms and applying Business Intelligence techniques to performance measurement data.

Eva Tuczai, Technical Presales Engineer OpTier

Eva has a 12 year background in Systems Management solutions that span the Mainframe, Middleware, Applications and End User solutions, including her employment with IBM/Candle.  She has focused on J2EE and ESB management solutions for 10 years, and was on the board of the Chicago WebSphere User Group, WindySphere, for three years. 

Eva has broadened her experience into SOA management and runtime governance, provisioning, Tivoli’s IBM Service Management solutions, and now Business Transaction Management with OpTier.  Eva is ITIL certified, and has a BS in Polymer Chemistry from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Jeff Schwartz, Integrated Services Inc.

Jeff has been conducting performance and capacity planning studies for over 30 years.  He began his career in the mainframe world doing performance and modeling studies, and since 2000 has focused entirely on high-end Windows and SQL Server performance.  Jeff has developed and given numerous courses and presentations on performance and capacity planning including several recent webinars on Windows and SQL Server performance. 

Jeff developed the CMG-T Windows Performance Course in 2006, and continues to update and teach it annually the conference.  He has also presented at CMG almost twenty times and continues to participate in CMG as a referee, mentor, and ERB member. 

During his career, Jeff has received several consulting awards, the most recent of which was the 2008 Microsoft Data Management Solutions Partner of the Year for his 280,000+ line Windows and SQL Server performance analysis software framework for consultants. 

Ivan L. Gelb, Gelb Information Systems

Ivan is President of Gelb Information Systems Corporation (GIS), a firm that provides management and technical consulting services in the U.S. and internationally. His Information Technology (IT) background includes: determination of optimum hardware and software requirements for mainframe, Unix, Linux and Windows applications; health checks of computer systems and related organizations; computer systems end-to-end availability management, performance management and capacity planning; development of software packages and proprietary measurement data analysis techniques.

Mr. Gelb performed technical and management services for more than 100 organizations such as Fidelity Investments, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, ING, PepsiCo, FBI, State of California, New Jersey State Office of Information Technology, and New York City Department of Education. Ivan served as Subject Area Chair, Editor, Referee, Director and is Past President of the Computer Measurement Group. He is a presenter of performance management and capacity planning professional education seminars, article writer and editor for a number of trade publications.