Experience Days by TechNet BeLux

As a Microsoft MEET member and MVP, I’d like to invite you all to attend the Microsoft “Experience Days”.

There are several tracks at the Experience Days from which you can choose. The complete track information can be found at here.

There are two tracks that are especially of interest to IP Pros: The Best of Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 2012) and Experience Windows Server 2012.

The Best of Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 2012)

During The Best of Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 2012), we will provide you with the best possible opportunity to learn about what’s new in System Center 2012. Led by experts who attended MMS 2012 in Las Vegas, you can expect in-depth sessions on infrastructure management, service delivery & automation, application management, desktop & device management.
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Experience Windows Server 2012

At Experience Windows Server 2012 day you will discover how Windows Server is going beyond virtualization by scaling and securing workload, how it will enable the modern work style by giving people access to information and data regardless of the infrastructure, network, device or application they use to access it. And you will discover the power of many servers with the simplicity of one by efficiently managing infrastructure while maximizing uptime and minimizing failures and downtime.

Join us and learn more about:

New Hyper-V Virtualization Platform

What’s new in Active Directory

Storage and Management Improvements

Clustering Improvements

Plus much more…   

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Hyper-V

I’ll be talking on June 7^th at 15:00 – 16:00 about Windows Server 2012 Storage Evolved For Hyper-V in the Experience Windows Server 2012 track:

Windows Server 2012 is a very storage centric version. We’ll cover the changes, improvements and additions to Windows Server 2012 storage capabilities and their impact on Hyper-V. We talk about the enhancements with the new virtual disk format (VHDX), offloaded data transfer (ODX), TRIM/UNMAP, large sector disks and the new storage options for Hyper-V including Storage Spaces, ReFS, Bitlocker, CSV 2.0, NTFS online scan/repair and SMB 3.0 file storage and what the latter means for Live Migration & Storage Options for Hyper-V

Virtualization with Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V is simply the best, bar none. If you watched Brad Anderson’s MMS 2012 Keynotes you know what’s coming and that he encouraged you to take the lead in all this. Well here’s you chance. If you agree that there is war on for talent, you also know and understand that knowledge will give you opportunities and choices. Invest in your future and as such in addressing and solving the business needs of your both clients and businesses. We all know it takes a serious effort in combination with a sustained commitment to become and stay competent in ICT. The TechNet BeLux team & the community is there to help you cultivate your talent and gain the knowledge you need.

 

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Here’s a quick overview of my speaking engagements in the next two months. I encourage everyone to attend the smaller and often les expensive or even free events as they provide a fast way to get up to speed with new technologies. Don’t be shy. Everyone is welcome and we’re all there to learn. It will not surprise you that all the sessions I’ll be presenting are on Windows Server 2012 & Hyper-V.

Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference (E2EVC) –Vienna 2012

I’ll be doing a session on Saturday 26th on the advanced networking features in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. At this small scale conference interactive “chalk & talk” sessions never stop. They just go on and on at breakfast, lunch, dinner, the bar until we need to get some sleep to repeat this process the day after. If you’re very lucky there might still be an spot open for which you can register.

Continued Education Day for IT Coordinators & Teachers in Education

At the end of May I’ll be presenting a session on what’s new in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V targeted at this audience. I’m convinced that the combination of the tremendous licensing efforts Microsoft does in education and simply the best virtualization & cloud platform in existence, will provide them with the right solution to get the job done.

TechNet BeLux - Experience Days

On June 7th I’ll be presenting a session at the “Experience Days”. That session is called “Windows Server 2012 Storage Evolved For Hyper-V” in the Experience Windows Server 2012 track. You can register here for this track or, if you think another track is more of interest to you go to the links above to register for those. All tracks are free and open to all.

More to come

During the summer I’ll be doing a large storage migration project. That means I’ll be getting my hands on SMI-S support for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and ODX to use with Windows Sever 2012 & Hyper-V.  So I’ll be putting my money where my mouth is so to speak.  I’m looking forward to that for the learning experience alone and it’s time to find me my “No, I will not fix your computer” T-shirt as I won’t have time for that . But rest assured, I will share my experiences through blogging, tweets, presentations & with my fellow community members for all man kind.

TechEd Europe 2012 (Amsterdam, 25-29 June 2012)

After a sad year of no TechEd Europe in 2011, one of our favorite tech conferences for Microsoft technologies is back in full force. Ladies & Gentlemen, TechEd Europe 2012 will be here sooner than you think.

It’s more than just technical training, it is networking, white board sessions and passionate discussion amongst peers, experts & Microsoft employees who built the products. If you still need more technical content than that take a look at the pre-conference agenda for a full day of expertly delivered education.

No this is not just a commercial, I haven’t missed a TechEd Europe yet this century and for good reasons. If you’d like to read why take a look at this blog post Why I Find Value In A Conference

There will be loads of sessions on all products in the System Center 2012 and Windows 8. In the developer sphere there’s the .NET Framework 4.5 & Visual Studio 2012 to look forward to. Combine this with a lot of experience based guidance on current technologies and you can’t afford to miss out. To avoid disappointment register as soon as possible to join your fellow IT Pros & Developers.

Hope to see you there!

My Recommendations For Our IT Pro at TechDays 2012 Belgium

I’m very busy with storage at the moment and as I’m already doing some other conferences this year we’re giving some other members of our IT the opportunity to attend TechDays 2012. That doesn’t stop me from giving some hints to the junior but very smart & fast learning IT Pro that’s in our delegation (4 developers & 1 IT Pro) and I might as well share those hints with you. The idea of sending him to TechDays is to expose him to a variety of subjects that are related to current and future needs/trends in the industry and in our line of business. It’s not just focused on training. I want him to look at the bigger picture of all parts in the puzzle. It’s about getting some context and tasting the possibilities. It’s also good to see some of our local IT talent (like Mike Resseler and Kurt Roggen) in action. Naturally I leave it up to him to make his own choices, and I hope he does. So here are, in chronological order, my recommendations:

February 14th

10:45-12:00
Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012

12:00-13:00 (If you want to lunch & learn)
Manage VM’s and Services across Private Clouds and Windows Azure with System …

13:00-14:15
Take the Spaghetti out of Windows Azure – an insight for IT Pro Techies Part 1 (John Craddock)

14:30-15:45
Take the Spaghetti out of Windows Azure – an insight for IT Pro Techies Part 2 (John Craddock)

16:15-17:30
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, Fabric Management, creation and consumption of the cloud (Vijay Tewari)

17:45-19:00
Windows 8 Dynamic Access Control (John Craddock)

February 15th

09:00-10:15
Windows 8 Hyper: Availability (Bryon Surace)

10:45-12:00
Discover what’s new in Windows 8 Active Directory (Paul Loonen)

13:00-14:15
The Private Cloud, Principles, Patterns and Concepts (Tom Shinder)

14:30-15:45
Toolmaking for Administrators using Windows PowerShell (Jason Helmick)

16:15-17:30
Windows 8 Disk Dedupe (Speaker: Mike Resseler)

17:45-18:45
What’s new in PowerShell V3! (Jason Helmick)

February 16th

09:00-10:15
Private Cloud Day Session 1- Building your Private Cloud Infrastructure (Kurt Roggen)

10:45-12:00
Private Cloud Day Session 2- Creating & Configure your Private Cloud (Kurt Roggen)

13:00-14:15
Private Cloud Day Session 3- Monitor & Operate your Private Cloud (Mike Resseler)

14:30-15:45
Private Cloud Day Session 4- Automating & Delivering Services in your Private Cloud (Mike Resseler & Kurt Roggen)

16:15-17:30
Private Cloud Day Session 5- A Solution for Private Cloud Security (Tom Shinder)

Dell Storage Forum Europe 2012

If you’re into storage and a happy DELL customer / user like me you might very well want to check out the DELL Storage Forum2012 in London (January 9-12). Don’t wait too long however as time is running out. Compellent has some impressive features and conditions (licensing, modularity, easy of use, PowerShell support, Live Motion & federation, Hyper-V support, Snapshots) that I’m very interested in. It’s those abilities that make a SAN worth it’s money in 2012 and beyond, that combined with a way to get out of the forklift upgrade cycle of storage.

Storage vendors have a lot of competition going on and are under a lot of pressure from customers to provide better value for money due to operational costs, complex licensing and fork lift upgrades, expensive upgrades and sometime lack luster support. Those vendors that can address these concerns best will be in a good spot when they face competition, not only from the storage vendors but also from software SAN producers and Microsoft with Windows 8 Server. I think Compellent is a viable candidate in this space and I’ll be checking them out extensively. Data growth is a huge issue and affordable storage needs are a big concern for most companies. Vendors know that and I hope they compete on offering better & more affordable solutions rather than banking on the fact customers need them that much they won’t need to change their business too much.

Download The Next Wave Of System Center Suite Products Release Candidates

As you all probably know by now in 2012 there will be a lot of new tools available for us IT Pros. Windows 8 Server alone holds so many new features and added value that it alone will keep us busy for many years to come. On top of that, the 2012 version of the System Center Suite is being released. I hope most of you have started looking at the betas and the release candidates. If not I encourage you to do so. There are a lot of great improvements that will help us enhance our current setups and operations, not to mention enable us to build a private cloud. For some musings on why you might want to do that, even if you have no public cloud plans yet, I refer you to my blog post The Private Cloud A Profitable Future Proofing Tactic?

To help you get started with testing I include some links to some of the most interesting products.

• Download System Center 2012 evaluation products: http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-be/evalcenter/hh505660.aspx

If you select the “Download All Available System Center 2012 Products” option you’ll get all most current versions of the pre release. To fully test the System Center 2012 Suite products you’ll need Windows Server/Hyper-V but also the current line of System Center Suite (upgrade testing).

The full Windows 2008 R2 SP1 OS is available here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dd459137.aspx  and you can find the free Hyper-V Server here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dd776191.aspx 

The most relevant current System Center Suite products are available via these links:

• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3​
• System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1

To top it all of and get acquainted with “The Cloud” grab the “Deploying and Managing Windows Azure Applications” here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/hh282846.aspx

There you go. All this should keep you usefully occupied and out of trouble during the end of year holidays and make you an knowledgeable and capable IT Pro, ready for the year to come.

The Experts Conference – TEC 2011–After Action Report

I enjoyed my time at the TEC2011 conference. The networking with fellow IT Pros was excellent and the discussions were rich in content. It’s fun to see that a lot of people are already looking at Windows 8 server. In that respect the session by Hans Vredevoort “Hyper-V Storage Deep Dive” was a very good one, offering a look at things to come. Information is not yet flowing in on Windows 8, or at least not in the quantities we’d like. We all expect that situation to improve before the end of the year when we’ll (hopefully) find a first beta under the x-mas tree to play with during the holidays season . Jaap Wesselius  was haunted by the demo gods. Well it was either the demo gods or all those “always on” IT Pros bringing the wireless down. But he recovered strong in his session  “Virtualizing Exchange 2010” that was actually called "Exchange on Hyper-V:do’s and don’ts". Not even the demo gods can keep Jaap down. We also enjoyed seeing Carsten Rachfahl in action in his session on “Hyper-V networking Best Practices” which he brought well and with a sense of humor on his new best practice since the evening before when a bunch of us where testing things out on Hyper-V clusters all over Europe   Maarten Wijsman  (in Holland) & Rick Slagers  (on the scene at TEC2011) form Wortell.nl were both assisting in this endeavor.

I had a good time, met a lot of people from the community  like Joachim Nässlander (@Nasslander). The Belgian ProExchange community was well represented and Ilse Van Criekinge was there as well. I learned a lot and I’m happy to have attended.To conclude our conference on Wednesday Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver), Hans Vredevoort (@hvredevoort) and I did a video panel interview on Hyper-V Windows 8 Server and some 10Gbps cluster networking. He’ll put it on line on his web site http://www.hyper-v-server.de/videos/ so you can find there when it’s released. Jaap, Hans and I went to dinner and concluded the conference with a beer in the bar. It’s back home tomorrow and then to work.

Kick Starting Your Windows 7 Deployments With Mastering Windows 7 Deployment

I have to hand it to Aidan Finn, he doesn’t stop at sharing information via his blogs or the community. He joined forces with Darril Gibson & Kenneth van Surksum went the extra mile. The wrote a readable, useful book Mastering Windows 7 Deployment about a subject on which consolidated documentation is scarce, scattered around the internet or written badly so you still can’t figure it out or is to boring you just don’t read it. If I need to define the goal of this book: get people a good head start for Windows 7 deployments in a planned and organized fashion.

This is not a book for the absolute newbie who doesn’t know the difference between a local and a domain account. It isn’t targeted at the WDS/MDT experts who’ve solved, fixed and worked around any and all PXE boot, network errors, cryptic WDS or MDT deployment errors & configuration challenges known to man kind. In that case this stuff is known to you (or should be). The point is those experts have already learnt a lot the hard way and they put in a considerable effort to do so. But knowledge needs to be transferred and spread around and to do that you need to cover the basics and work up from there, showing progress and results. The progress and results motivate people.

In that respect, this books get’s you started on that path from chapter one and by page 5 you’re already being guided into auditing & reporting via MAPS to prepare a roll out proposal. The effort put into discussing the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) is important. I remember the work that we needed to do for Vista x64 bit and how that paid off when deploying Windows 7. What surprises me it that a lot of IT Pro’s don’t even know about the ACT, file and registry virtualization or shims. I recommend another blog on this subject http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cjacks/ , Chris Jackson, the “App Compat Guy” and a very good conference speaker on the subject. The scenarios with the User State Migration Tool will benefit system administrators who dread touching end users their PC and the precious data it might contain. If so, I hope you are backing up the data on those workstations, if not than that is really scary.

Perhaps some readers will already be using certain tools touched upon in the book but not others. In that case this is a great way to start with them and see where they fit in and what they can do for you. We did Vista x64 bit deployments in 2008 with WDS; rolled out Windows 7 x64 in 2010 using WDS/MDT and I still found this book interesting enough to buy some copies and add it to the toolkit of my team. What I’d like to add as a useful hint: look into disable rearming by using <SkipRearm>1</SkipRearm> in the unattended XML file you can pass to sysprep as in “/generalize /quiet /unattend:<file_name.xml” so you don’t run into a when you do it more than 4 times on the same image (An error message occurs when you run "Sysprep /generalize" in Windows Vista or Windows 7: "A fatal error occurred while trying to Sysprep the machine").

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) sections point you directly to some gems we found very useful in our deployments. That you can pre stage computers in the MDT database to help make the roll outs as “light touch” as possible is cool, but that you can automate that with the MDT PowerShell module makes it really very valuable. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2009/05/15/manipulating-the-microsoft-deployment-toolkit-database-using-powershell.aspx for more details. Michael Niehaus is to MDT what Chris Jason is to ACT. As identifier we use the MAC address as we get that on a label on the PC and we can easily get a list of those to mass import them together with creating the computer objects in Active Directory. We also added driver profiles depending on the client make & model. When you combine this with boot from PXE provided by WDS to boot to an MDT WinPE, and remember WDS also gives you multicast, you have a real sweet solution going. This is the route we went last year and has served us well (we came from a pure WDS solutions, and RIS before that when we still did XP rollouts but that was more than 4 years ago … time flies.

Task sequencer is a gem that we indeed also use to roll out certain default software like 7zip, a pdf reader, ISO burner, anti malware, etc. The fact that these are not in the image makes it very easy to deploy newer versions as they come available.

The chapter on KMS, VAMT, volume licensing will be of use to people who have never dealt with it coming from Windows 2003/XP

This book will come into its own for any SME or enterprise departmental system administrator with who needs to be launched swiftly and on his or her way to their targets, which are smooth Windows 7 deployments. A lot of production system administrators are in the progress of looking at Windows 7 and might have a lot of experience with Windows XP and Windows 2003 but not with Windows 2008(R2) and Vista/Windows 7. If you’re in that bracket you’re definitely going to get a kick start with this book and it contains some neat tips and tricks to get over some initial gotchas. Don’t think that this is for big enterprises only. Apart from the system center products most tools are free downloads or a part of the Windows server license you already own.

As always, the only way to understand technologies is to work with them, use them. That’s the way to gain insight, experience, and context. So play with this stuff in a lab. Run into a bunch issues and fix them. If you need to get up to speed with all this stuff then you should dig into this book with a hands on approach. The book will also help you make more sense of other information out there and you’ll be able to put that into context better. As a bonus, I’m pretty sure that anything you learn from it will help you with deploying Windows vNext as well.

Shameless Plug For Mastering Hyper-V Deployment By Aidan Finn

In October 2010 Aidan Finn (MVP) his book “Mastering Hyper-V Deployment” was released and in November three copies of this book landed on my desk. I bought them (pre order) via Amazon. Nope I did not get them as a gift or anything. Why Three? Well that’s the number of people I wanted to get up to speed about Hyper-V and virtualization management and operations in a Microsoft environment.

His book takes you along a journey through a Hyper-V project that will teach you about virtualization in all it’s aspects. It also touches on many supporting technologies and products such as System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, System Center Essentials 2010, Data Protection manager 2010 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. No one book can be the only source of knowledge and understanding, but using this book as a start for both new and experienced IT Pros to learn about virtualization with Hyper-V will give you the best possible start. Consider it going to an Ivy league college on a scholarship paid for by Aidan’s experience and hard work. The subsidized tuition fee is the price of the book.

We feel a bit sorry that Aidan only got one copy so we made a group picture of the gang of three on the desk of our newest team member. He got a copy of the book together with 4 recycled PC’s and a TechNet subscription to build a lab.

If you know people who want or need to learn about Hyper-V, you’d do well to make sure they get this book and have them set up a lab to play with the technologies. Those efforts will pay off big time when they implement their solutions in the wild. If Ireland is doomed it won’t be because of smart & hardworking Irish IT professionals like Aidan. You see when you design, build and support IT solutions that your customers depend on 24/7 you can not hide behind false promises, you can’t fake away the fact when “stuff” doesn’t work or hide behind vast amounts of papers & documents void of any substance. Nope you are responsible for everything and anything you build. Aidan backed and supported by some very knowledgeable colleagues has made that burden a bit lighter for you to bear with this book. Aidan’s blog lives here: http://www.aidanfinn.com/

The SP1 Béta Wave – E2K10 & W2K8R2

News from Tech Ed 2010 North America rolls in and we have the announcements of Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Béta for July 2010. Exchange 2010 SP1 Béta became available today! I’m grabbing it

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the the final releases of the products be announced at Tech Ed 2010 EMEA. Now I also wouldn’t mind if they came sooner due to the new and improved feature set both service packs offer, but I’m not really counting on that.

Bob Muglia’s live streamed keynote @ Tech Ed 2010 North America is nearing it’s end by now and he’s pretty up beat about lots of subjects Visual Studio 2010, Azure, System Center, Cloud, Exchange, OCS 14, Windows Phone 7, SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Bing Maps & SDK, Avatar as a cloud case study & collaboration with Microsoft etc.

Cloud is omnipresent but they talk about hybrid. Making sure Hybrid is cost effective is important to me. I don’t need more work and costs but less.