Category: Events

Phew!

I have finally had the opportunity to speak at TechEd, TechEd Europe 2014 to be precise. My session had a looong title: From Demo to Reality: Best Practices for Deploying WS2012 R2 Hyper-V. The agenda was twofold:

• Explain how Microsoft justifies big keynote claims about Hyper-V achievements and how they power big demos, e.g. 2 millions IOPS from a VM.
• Discus the lesser known features of Hyper-V and related tech that can make a difference to real world consultants and engineers.

I had a LOT of material. When someone reviewed my deck they saw 84 slides and 10 demos and the comments were always started with: you have a lot there; are you sure you can fit it into 75 minutes. Yes I am …. now … I can fit it into just under 74 minutes

All of my demos were scripted using PowerShell. I ran the script, it would pre the lab, wrote-host the cmdlets, run them, explain what was going on, get the results, and clean up the demo. I will be sharing the scripts over the coming weeks on this blog.

It was fun to do. I had some issues switching between the PPT machine and my demo laptop. And the clicker fought me at one point. But it was FUN.

Thank you to everyone who gave me feedback, who supported me, who advised me, and to those who helped. A special mention to Ben, Sarah, Rick, Joey, Mark, Didier, and especially Nicole.

Life has been crazy for me lately. I’ve spent near 100% of the last 3 months at work (and a lot at home) working on material for lots of different Azure educational events. And in addition to that, I’ve been preparing my session for TechEd Europe, starting with the keynote at 08:30 in Barcelona (Spain, CET) on Tuesday morning.

I am there as a speaker this year, so I will not be in the media pit, and I might not even get into the keynote hall at all! I will be live blogging in any case, and I will also be attending lots and lots of sessions, mostly on Windows Server vNext Hyper-V, storage, and networking, and plenty of Azure too. I’ll be doing my best to live blog those sessions that I attend. I will also be covering virtualization and related content for Petri.com.

My tools of choice this time around are:

• Toshiba KIRAbook (Windows 10 Technical Preview): The battery life is incredible in this machine.
• OneNote: This is my preferred tool of choice for note taking.
• Windows Live Writer: I’m blogging and this is how I publish to my site.
• Canon 1D mk IV and 24-70 L IS mk II: A good camera is useful.

Of course, I am presenting, so that’s a big focus point for me. My session is all about squeezing the most our of Hyper-V. I’ve got information about features of Hyper-V that you might not know about or have been afraid to try. I’ll dive into some of the mechanisms used to enable some of those amazing demos of the recent past. And I have LOTS of demos (10 as it stands at the moment).

So come along to CDP-B329 From Demo to Reality: Best Practices Learned from Deploying Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V – it’s a fine big room with 1100 seats to fill!!!! That’s pressure, but it’s nothing compared to competing in Speaker Idol (5 minutes is hell!).

As an attendee, the most exciting bit of the conference preparation is registration and booking travel. Then the excitement builds up with the release of the schedule builder – this is, historically, a list of the sessions that Microsoft is free to advertise and talk about at that point in time … other sessions are hush hush until the keynote 😉

The Schedule Builder is the tool that gives you the ability to list all of the sessions and check the ones that you want to add to your schedule. I typically break it down to time slots for the track(s) that I’m interested in, and check any session I like the sound of – and yes, I will double or even triple book … sometimes rooms are full, sometimes I change my mind, and sometimes I hear that sessions/speakers are excellent or not so good. Microsoft uses this information to plan room assignments for the sessions. Later on, you can sync the schedule builder to Outlook or download an ICS file – leave that as late as possible, maybe even until after you’ve attended the Monday foundational sessions.

The TechEd Europe 2014 Countdown Show, presented by Microsoft’s Joey Snow (@joeysnow) and Rick Claus (@RicksterCDN), featured the Schedule Builder last week.

In fact, at the 8:30 minute mark, the guys even mention a certain Hyper-V session 🙂 Thanks, lads!

I love a free promo!

Check out the schedule builder if you are attending, and maybe even the CH9 Events app on your mobile device to have a handy digital builder with you on site.

Speaking at TechEd has been one of my career ambitions for years – it is the pinnacle of speaking in the Microsoft world. I started of presenting at MSFT community events and had no such goal. But eventually I reached the point with my knowledge of Hyper-V that I felt like I could contribute and that I wanted to speak on the bigger stage; certainly presenting one of the sessions at the WS2012 launch in London (1000 attendees in the room) fired me up even more. I submitted sessions to TechEd, but never got anywhere. I gave up on my goal last year.

Then things fell into place at TechEd North America. I wasn’t going to do Speaker Idol. But when I was asked, I had an idea and I said to myself “frak it, do it! It’ll be fun to do”. And I ended up winning a slot in “TechEd” int he USA next year. I also talked to some folks and they gave me some advice about submitting sessions for TEE14. I submitted one session and …

Getting good news is always a nice way to finish the day. Early yesterday evening I received an email informing me that Microsoft had picked their sessions/speakers for TEE14. I followed the link to check the status of my submission and there it said:

Approval Status: Approved

Yes; I did my happy dance 😀 My guess is that we cannot talk about our sessions yet, but you can safely guess that I’ll be talking about Hyper-V.

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there when I present … at TechEd!

In a blog post on Channel 9, Microsoft has announced that TechEd North America is no longer … and has been replaced by Microsoft’s Unified Technology Event for Enterprises. Yes Microsoft’s Unified Technology Event for Enterprises. I had to copy & paste that cos it doesn’t exactly stick in the mind. So MUTEE replaces TechEd.

Huh.

Now we have proof that marketing people ARE actually paid by the letter.

The reason for the rename is:

You talked, we listened… The world of IT and enterprise development and your needs are rapidly changing. In a cloud first, mobile first world you need …

And they go on to list the stuff that was present at TechEd.

And who exactly (outside of Microsoft) asked for this? Let them stand up and be counted (and knocked in the head by a flying brick).

So they’ve “re-imagined” (sigh!) TechEd as [copy & paste] Microsoft’s Unified Technology Event for Enterprises [/copy & paste] for marketing Kool-Aid.

Anywho, MUTEE TechEd North America 2015 will be on in Chicago (direct flight for me with immigration in Dublin!!!!) on May the 4th (start the Star Wars puns about a bad character called MUTEE). Note that it’s a 5 day event, not a 4 day one? I like that.

The Office blog also published a post. It appears that this will be one IT super conference, instead of the lots of conferences. That is a very positive thing, especially for people who did MEC, TechEd, etc.

By the way, I’m using the tag #StillCallingItTechEd on Twitter. I think everyone outside of Redmond will stick with the TechEd name. It stinks of marketing speak with naming for the sake of renaming, without any imagination.

EDIT 1:

OK, that was quite a … sarcastic post. If we (I mean “If I”) think about this for a moment, it means that there is one big event for IT pros to attend. And hopefully, this will be BIG, not just TechEd sized (there are bigger IT events from Oracle, VMware, etc). That is a very positive thing; we’d have one thing on the calendar – one to plan for, one to travel to, one to be away from work/family for. And it would be one event to budget for! But I’m still not calling it MUTEE.

EDIT 2:

Here is a post by the Server & Cloud blog. Nothing new there.