We’re coming to the end of the TechDays tour in Ireland. Tonight we have the Belfast “IT @ Home” gig where I’ll be doing my Win7 and digital photography session followed by Will and Dave on Windows Home Server, X-Box, etc. Tomorrow will be the IT Pro and the BI sessions – I’ll be doing the W2008/W7/Hyper-V session with Dave and I have a quick few words at the start of Niall’s accidental DBA session.
Dublin was interesting. We definitely had the most interaction with a crowd so far on the tour. We were stunned at how many had already been using Windows 7 and even more so when we found out one particular organisation that was already using it in widespread production.
The session with Dave was fun. We had a longer time slot than in Cork so I wasn’t speed-talking. We had more time for demo’s too. We had big plans. The demo I’m most worried about is the BrachCache demo because it uses pre-beta OS builds. It worked out perfectly yesterday. However, Dave was bravely going to build from scratch a Hyper-V R2 cluster and show live migration in action. Our server hardware plans didn’t work out so the “servers” were actually laptops. For live migration you need at least 2 non-wifi NIC’s … a tough ask with laptops so there was some fudgery to make the wifi appear like wired NIC’s. That ended up being our undoing as the live migration demo didn’t quite work out. Trust me … the stuff works … it just doesn’t work with wifi and that’s why it’s not going to be supported. We think we have a solution for this at the Belfast gig. We also had internet issues at the venue. This prevented Will’s branch cache demo from working.
Not to worry though, they guys will likely have things OK for tomorrow’s Belfast gig. We’ll be recording those and I’m sure they’ll do some controlled environment demos too for the new IT Pro blog that Enda, Will and Dave are running. And we’ll be doing lots of demos at the Windows User Group Hyper-V R2 session.