Tag: Events

Minasi Conference 2012

Mark Minasi’s mini-IT conference is back in action in 2012.  It might be mini in size, but it swings a big game in content.  The speakers include big conference names like Mark Minasi and Don Jones.  You’ll also find a bunch of MVPs, Microsoft employees, and industry experts speaking and attending.  Being a mini-conference, this is a place where you can get to spend time with these people without the having to run away to some meeting or their next session.

This is the first Minasi Conference I won’t be able to attend.  Unfortunately my calendar is nuts and a few things, like this and the Vienna PubForum, have had to be dropped Sad smile

Sunday – April 29th 2012

  • 12:00 – Conference Registration Begins
  • 1.00 – Opening Session led by Mark Minasi + Don Jones, What has changed in the last 3 years, how to stay on TOP!
  • 2.00 – Session 1: Mark Minasi – 10 (or more) things that you don’t know about Windows Server 8
  • 3:15 – Break
  • 3:30 – Don Jones
  • 4:00 – Ed Wilson – Microsoft Scripting guy on everything but PosH 3
  • 4:30 – Break
  • 4:45 – Mark Minasi
  • 6:00 – Welcome Reception

Monday  – April 30th  2012

  • 9:00 – Jimi Vigotti – how I do it and how you can to (with the right kit).
  • 10:15 – Dave Bisson – Enterprise App Store
  • 11:30 – Break
  • 11:45 – Stacy Hein – SQL Server at scale. Office 365 style
  • 1:00 – Lunch (Provided)
  • 1:45 – Todd Lammle – The next step.
  • 3:00 – James Summerlin – SQL Server Integration Services – More in-depth than last time!
  • 4:15 – Break
  • 4:30 – James Adgate – Security in The Enterprise in 2012:  Managing DLP Programs and Driving Standards for Secure Coding of Home Grown Web-Facing Enterprise Applications.
  • 5:45 – Offsite Dinner Organized with Transportation

Tuesday – May 1st 2012

  • 9:00 – James Summerlin – Juniper, Life after TMG/ ISA
  • 10:30  –Scott Calvet – TBC Desktop Virtualization VMware View 5
  • 11:00 – Dennis Olidis – Free Tools to Troubleshoot and Diagnose your Windows System
  • 12:30 – Lunch (Provided)
  • 1:00 – Eric Rux  – TBC– Using Windows in your Home!
  • 2:15 – Break
  • 2:30 – A N Other – Microsoft Conferencing, Skype and Lync
  • 3:45 – Break
  • 4:00 – Curt Spanburg – Microsoft Business Application Survival Skills for the IT Admin
  • 5:30 – Dinner (on your own) at a local restaurant. Last chance to rub elbows.

Wednesday -  May 2nd 2012

  • 9.00  – Ultan Kinahan – Fixing the big stuff!
  • 10:00 – Ton Siemons – Comparing Hypervisors, VMware, HyperV and Xen
  • 11:15 – Break
  • 11:30 – Michael Ferguson – Managing Security
  • 12:45 – Closing and Lunch
  • 2:00 – Unofficial Round Table

You can learn more about the registration on the official site, and on-going conversation regarding the event can be found on Mark’s forum.

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Looking Back On MVP Summit 2012

This week was the highlight of the calendar for any Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP), the annual MVP Summit in Redmond.  I cannot go into details on the sessions.  But I can say it was excellent, with some serious deep depth stuff being presented by the product groups.

Throw in the mix with meeting and chatting with many of the program managers who help in the direction of the products, chatting with Jeff Woolsey over dinner, hanging out and chatting with Ben “Virtual PC Guy” Armstrong before a session, spending time with lots and lots of my fellow MVPs, asking the hard questions so I can give the easy answers (trademark pending!), listening to serious experts who were genuinely interesting in sharing and hearing our feedback, and even learning some PowerShell Winking smile

The Summit is a great chance to give feedback.  There were certain things (which I won’t go into) that we did get a chance to talk about.  It’s not often you get a chance to sit down with decision makers, talk over things they might not have considered, or try to get an understanding of why they did go in some direction.  That helps us MVPs get your message to the product groups, and helps us in explaining product direction to you.

And oh yeah, Thanks to Didier van Hoye (Virtual Machine), a bunch of us had a visit to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Monday to your their IT installation and chat about what they are doing.  Wow!  That was some impressive installation (again, sharing details is not possible).

I had my last Summit session this afternoon, with an impromptu presentation by a PM that I asked for and he jumped at and helped me assemble a bunch of things in my mind.  Tonight, it’s a relaxed night out with Didier, Carsten Rachfahl (Virtual Machine) and Kerstin Rachfahl (Office 365).  I start the journey back to Ireland tomorrow night.  And then it’s the countdown to the System Center 2012 launch events with MSFT Ireland and another VAD Roadshow for work later this month.

BTW, I cannot wait to return next year.

Hyper-V.nu Community Event, January 2012

If you read this blog or you follow me on Twitter then there is a very strong chance that you also read Hyper-V.nu and follow the crew from there on Twitter too.  They run a great online community that covers Hyper-V and System Center in the Netherlands.  A few months ago they asked if I would come over to speak about Windows 8 Hyper-V Networking at a day-long event they were hosting in the Microsoft offices in Amsterdam.  Well, of course I would.  They’re good guys and Hans Vredevoort was the tech reviewer on Mastering Hyper-V Deployment and is a major contributor to Microsoft Private Cloud.

The guys advertised the event, and within 2 days they’d filled all the seats.  Registrations came from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and UK, and there might be other countries I don’t know about.  It was a good day with technical content, demos, and laughs.

Jaap Wesselius and Peter Noorderijk kicked things off with the keynote, touching on some of the highlights of Windows Server 8 and the history, growth and success of their community.  Then it was me. 

Hans did a good session that went into detail on a small bit of the storage story.  There’s a lot to that story!  His demo was brave and it worked.  With a mix of PowerShell and GUI, he provisioned a storage pool and some spaces, demod a active/active file server cluster, created and permissioned a share, created a VM on a share, and did a live storage migration of a running VM from one share to another. 

Ronald Beekelaar did a deep dive on disk deduplication, talking about this new storage feature, explaining along the way the different methods and technologies that have been used up to now to get more data on disks.  “Chunking” seems to be the way forward!

Maarten Wijsman wrapped up the technical side of things with VMM 2012, talking about the pillars, creating a bare metal host, and explaining some of the features of service deployment.

Robert Bakker of Microsoft Netherlands wrapped the formal side of the event up talking about System Center 2012 and the licensing that was announced on Tuesday.

For me, the best bit was meeting a lot of people I’d not met in person before but “talk” to regularly on Twitter, and spending some time with some of the European community at dinner the night before.  I also got to meet some interesting people and heard what they are doing and experiencing.  That’s the great thing about community events … it’s content and people.  All in all, an excellent event.  I’m sure the guys will do more – you should register as soon as you can!

Hyper-V Immersion Coming To Belfast on Feb 7th

Due to popular demand and the massive success of the three Dublin events, Microsoft Ireland has decided to bring the day-long Hyper-V Immersion event to Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Come along and find out why; Hyper-V has grown up a lot over the last three years and now includes the core functionality you need to meet your business and technical requirements.

This session is a unique presentation that builds on your existing experience with virtualisation (regardless of hypervisor) and will equip you with up to date skills through in-depth, advanced, real world training that is not available anywhere else!

As a standalone, one day immersion into Hyper-V or as the first step towards certification from Microsoft Ireland, this is a not to miss opportunity!

Agenda

  • A history of Hyper-V and a glimpse into the future
  • Hyper-V Architecture and Features
  • Building a stable and reliable Hyper-V infrastructure
  • Advanced topics: High Availability, Live Migration, Dynamic Memory & Linux Guests

Presenters: Aidan Finn (MicroWarehouse) and Dave Northey (Microsoft Ireland)

Audience: Infrastructure Specialists, IT Decision Makers, IT Generalists, IT Implementers, Administrators, Consultants, Technical Support.

Timing: We will run the workshop from 9.30am until 5.00pm – please aim to be there for 9:00 for registration, tea & coffee.

Location: BMC Titanic Quarter Campus is located in central Belfast on the banks of the River Lagan, within walking distance of the City Centre. The Campus can be easily accessed by foot, road and rail. Parking is available in the basement car park for a fee of £1 per hour.

Registration: http://hypervimmersion.eventbrite.com/

The 3 events in Dublin were interesting, with a lot of Q&A.  What I enjoyed was that the questions were very different from day to day.  I’ve no doubt that Belfast will be fun based on past experience.  There’s always a lot of back-and-forth and the audience makes it different for the speaker.  I’m looking forward to the day.

My advice: register early if you’re serious about attending.  The Dublin events booked out in near record time (only the Windows 7 launch events beat it, I reckon).

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Event: Hyper-V Immersion Training for IT Pros

My final 2 months of 2011 are nuts and here’s part of the reason why.  I’ll be co-presenting 3 * 1 day immersion training events on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.  The session is the same on each day; it gives you an opportunity to pick one that suits your schedule and means we should have enough seats for all.  That means you should only register for 1 day.  Do not register for 2 or 3 days.

The day starts with the basics in the morning, and dives deep into all the nuts and bolts, from clustering, to networking, to Linux, to Dynamic Memory, to CSV and backup design.  Sign up and attend this, and you’ll be eligible to attend the hands-on training classes we’ll be running in the new year.

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Presenters: Aidan Finn (Me) and Dave Northey (DPE, Microsoft Ireland, aka @IEITPRO)

Audience: Infrastructure Specialists, IT Decision Makers, IT Generalists, IT Implementers, Administrators, Consultants, Technical Support.

Location: Microsoft European Development Centre, Building 2 South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18

We will run the workshop from 9.30am until 5.00pm on 3 different dates; please choose one date which suits you:

There is no cost for attending this training session. All participants to this 1 Day session will receive a priority invite to the in-depth ITPro training taking place in early 2012, and you will be entered into a fabulous draw in which we have 3 new Nokia Lumia 800 to give away Smile

Event: MicroWarehouse Quarterly Roadshow

I’ll be on the road again next month on behalf of my employers.  This time around the session is aimed not at techies, but at sales, account managers, and pre-sales.  The topic: how to get you and your customers ready for 2012 … there’s a lot of stuff coming and you don’t want to lock yourself and your customers out of those opportunities!

Below is the info for the Dublin event.  Information about events in Limerick, Galway, and Belfast should be out soon.

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Upcoming Events I’m Speaking At

Here’s some of the events I’m either attending and presenting at.  I’d recommend attending these event is you can, despite me being there Smile

E2E London 2011

Once again, experts in all kinds of virtualisation technologies will be gathering to share their knowledge at this super-economic mini-conference. I’ll be talking Hyper-V as usual with a 45 minute and a 900 seconds session. Some other MVPs and Microsoft virtualisation experts from around Europe will be there presenting. And as usual, there will be lots of Citrix, VMware and common virtualisation technology sessions.

I’ll be doing two presentations. One will be a brain dump on what’s coming in Windows Server 8 Hyper-V. I say "brain dump" because this topic could do with an entire day and not just a session. My second session will be on the subject of CSV design and backup.

Hyper-V Community Event Amsterdam

Lots of Hyper-V and System Center people will be speaking at this event run by the Hyper-V.nu crew in the Netherlands. Speakers include me, Hans Vredevoort, Ronald Beekelaar, Jaap Wesselius, Peter Noorderijk, Maarten Wijsman and Robert Bakker. Hopefully the place won’t blow up cos that’s a lot of the Hyper-V online community right there!

I’ll be talking about the new networking features of Windows Server 8 Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Road Show for Irish Microsoft Partners

THIS EVENT IS FOR MICROSOFT PARTNERS ONLY

I will be speaking at a series of events next week on behalf of my employers, MicroWarehouse Ltd (a Microsoft Value Added Distributor).  Anyone who works for a Microsoft partner is welcome to attend (no cost).  Each event (Dublin, Belfast, Galway and Cork) will be aimed at the technical audience: so that’ll be field engineers, consultants, IT architects and, technical sales. 

The first part of the session is aimed at getting the best from Hyper-V.  It’s based on best practices, things I’ve learned from Microsoft and other MVPs, and common mistakes I’m encountering in the field.  That’ll be about 2 hours of “level 400” in-the-guts deep tech.  The second part of the session will be 1 hour, looking at The Great Big Hyper-V survey.  In that we’ll look at what people are doing with Hyper-V and System Center, now and in 2012, comparing/contrasting with best practices (from the first part of the session), and maybe more Smile

And who knows, maybe I’ll have my Windows 8 slate PC there and I might be able to answer some questions about Windows Server 8 Hyper-V if I’m asked Smile All the details are below:

THIS EVENT IS FOR MICROSOFT PARTNERS ONLY

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Call us now on 01 616 0400 or events@mwh.ie

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Learn how to improve your Hyper-V deployments with resident MicroWarehouse MVP, Aidan Finn. During his presentation Aidan will cover:
  • How to improve your Hyper-V Deployments: This level 400 technical presentation will contain information about how to design and deploy Hyper-V while avoiding some common issues and maximising performance.
  • The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011: Learn how other organisations are deploying Hyper-V, System Center, and security including analysis of the information, how people could improve their deployments and looking to the future of Hyper-V and System Center in 2012.

 

When & Where All events 9am – 1pm.

Monday 26/09/2011

MicroWarehouse, Dublin

Tuesday 27/09/2011

The Fitzwilliam Hotel, Belfast

Thursday 29/09/2011

The G Hotel, Galway

Friday 30/09/2011

Rochestown Park Hotel, Cork

 

About Aidan Finn

 

 

Aidan Finn (Hyper-V MVP) of MicroWarehouse   has been working with Hyper-V since it was a beta on Windows Server 2008.  He has 15 years’ experience working in IT infrastructure, specialising in Windows Server, desktop deployment and management, System Center, and virtualisation.  Aidan Finn is the author of Mastering Hyper-V Deployment (Sybex 2010), and a contributing author of Mastering Windows 7 Deployment (Sybex 2011) and Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2 (Sybex 2010).

 

 

 

 

 

MicroWarehouse | 13 Heaney Avenue | Park West | Dublin 12
t: +353 (0)1 616 0400 | f: +353 (0)1 623 2800 | www.mwh.ie |sales@mwh.ie

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THIS EVENT IS FOR MICROSOFT PARTNERS ONLY

Blogging For IT Pros Here at Build Windows #bldwin

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock over the past 2 years, Windows 8 is on the way.  There’s been no end of speculation as we get closer to the feature announcements and revelations at the Build Windows Conference in Anaheim (LA), USA, next week.  The hype has truly started, and the giddiness by geeks (like me) has been fuelled by the blog posts giving us little snippets of information.

Next week is when we Windows nerds go into overdrive.  Build Windows will be the venue when all sorts of Windows 8 information will be officially revealed to the public.  It’s primarily aimed at developers (replacing PDC) and hardware vendors, but it will also be the site of a bunch of reveals for us IT Pros.  The agenda is secret, and only a few of the speakers are publicly known.

I am lucky – I am going.  My job is to work with Irish Microsoft partners on System Center, Forefront, and virtualisation (Hyper-V).  And I am also involved in a lot of more general Windows work, e.g. working with partners selling Windows 7.  And the powers that be decided it would be good for business for me to go to Build.

There will be a lot of tweeting from people that are there, who are watching sessions online (keynotes streamed live, sessions online after 1 day), or who are re-tweeting.  I might do the occasional tweet but I figure the twitterverse will be flooded by #bldwin material, and it will be impossible to follow.  So my ambition is this: I am going to try blog as much as possible, posting session notes after each session.  That will mean I’ll have a (hopefully) easy to read and complete (as much as I can) set of notes.  I’ll be attending sessions that the IT Pro will be itnerested in – you won’t see much in the way of javascript from me 🙂 I know; some of you with blue badges are now worried.  Don’t be; I’ll be doing factual recording only.

You will be able to find all of my blog posts from Build here.

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E2E London 2011, Virtualisation Conference

Once again, experts in all kinds of virtualisation technologies will be gathering to share their knowledge at E2E London 2011, a super-economic mini-conference, formerly known as PubForum.  I’ll be talking Hyper-V as usual with a 45 minute and a 900 seconds session.  Some other MVPs and Microsoft virtualisation experts from around Europe will be there presenting.  And as usual, there will be LOTS of Citrix, VMware and common virtualisation technology sessions.