I flew back home from Minasi Conference 2010 over the weekend. The line up and variety of speakers was impressive.
- Roger Grimes (security guru at MS) pulled a Todd Lammle and scared the ***** out of us, basically saying that there’s no defence against most of the threats on the Internet now other than pure dumb luck. For example, much of the advertising that is online contains attacks. You might think you are on a safe site but they simply auction of advertising space which is infected. A certain “fair and balanced” right-wing American news site was mentioned.
- Steve Riley came and did a sales pitch on Amazon. We go the stock answers on compliance with European data protection acts. Sure – they won’t handover data to the US government when pressured to do so ;-) Strange – Steve did mention that AWS does keep 30 days of your database transaction logs … purely for your own good, of course.
- Eric B. Rux did a couple of sessions; one on Home Server and the other on getting into writing. The latter was interesting because a number of us in the audience (authors, editors, journalists) were able to contribute.
- Todd Lammle did a pre-conference training class that proved to be quite popular and extremely good value. All attendees got two copies of his books.
- Claus Neilson caused a few jaws to drop with his PowerShell presentation. I was impressed with an audit script he had that populated an open spreadsheet in Excel.
- Michael B. Smith did an afternoon on how to get from W2003 AD and Exchange 2003 to W2008 R2 AD and Exchange 2010.
- Laura E. Hunter (now joining MS internal IT) did a session on Forefront Identity Manager.
- And of course, Mark Minasi did a few sessions, including (as usual) a preview of what he’s working on for future classes and the upcoming conference season.
I did a presentation on System Center Virtual Machine Manager. It’s something that could take 2 days but I squeezed in the essentials into 70 minutes. My slide deck is online at Slideshare (below).
Unusually for me, I was able to get this done a little ahead of time. I did go through my demo (the end-to-end of a VM’s life cycle, templates, delegation, and self service) pretty quickly. That allowed me to talk about where organizations can go in the future with Hyper-V. Visual Studio empowers the tester/developer to work with Hyper-V via the environment/tools that they are comfortable with. VMM v.Next’s new App-V for Servers support, patching without reboot potential for VM’s, and model deployment. All this opened a few eyes. The idea of self service from VMM 2008 R2 onwards really made quite a few people think because they hadn’t heard of it before – and I’m talking about respected MVP’s!
My slides are just a cue card for me so there’s not much content in there. As you’ll see, I just mentioned the new features coming in W2008 R2 SP1 for Hyper-V. There was no discussion on how the stuff works. Keep an eye on the MS Virtualization blog and Ben Armstrong’s (Virtual PC Guy) for that info. My animations won’t work in this either. That’s a pity; they made Avatar pale in comparison.
A good time was had. The newcomers all commented on how weird it was to be at an IT conference where there was a social atmosphere. Most of us know each other at this event so there’s always something going on somewhere.
My next appearance will be at PubForum 2010 in Frankfurt in June. It’s another “small” conference that is very low cost for the attendees. The speakers are … wow! There is a lot of stuff happening at it this year. I’m doing a 2 hour class on Hyper-V best practices and I’m also doing a 1 hour session on the new stuff in Hyper-V.