Tag: Events

Community Event: From The Desktop to the Cloud: Let’s Manage, Monitor and Deploy

We’ve just announced the details of the latest user group event in Dublin … it’s a biggie!  I’ll be presenting two of the deployment sessions, on MAP and MDT.

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Join us at the Guinness Store House on February 24th at 09:00 for a full day of action packed sessions covering everything from the desktop to The Cloud, and maybe even a pint of Guinness afterwards.

We have our a fantastic range of speakers ranging from MVPs to Microsoft Staff and leading industry specialists to deliver our sessions ensuring a truly unique experience.  During this day, you will have the choice of attending sessions of your choice, covering topics such as Windows 7/Office 2010 deployment, management using System Center, and cloud computing for the IT pro (no developer content – we promise!).

We have our a fantastic range of speakers ranging from MVPs to Microsoft staff and leading industry specialists to deliver our sessions ensuring a truly unique experience. During this day, you will have the choice of attending sessions of your choice, covering topics such as Windows 7/Office 2010 deployment, management using System Center, and cloud computing for the IT pro (no developer content – we promise!).

We promised bigger and better and we meant it.  This session will feature 3 tracks, each with four sessions.  The tracks are:

  1. The Cloud: Managed by Microsoft Ireland
  2. Windows 7/Office 2010 Deployment: Managed by the Windows User Group
  3. Systems Management: Managed by the System Center User Group

You can learn more about the event, tracks, sessions, and speaker on the Windows User Group site.

You can register here.  Please only register if you seriously intend to go; Spaces are limited and we want to make sure as many can attend as possible.

The Twitter tag for the event is #ugfeb24.

What to Expect From the Private Cloud Academy Event This Friday

Virtualisation Academy is a series of events that System Dynamics (my employers) and Microsoft Ireland will be running in the coming months.  The first session is called “Private Cloud Academy”, focusing on cloud computing on your premises using Microsoft’s Hyper-V and System Center.

As it’s the first event, I’ll warm things up by talking about Hyper-V and what makes it different.  In other words: management of an IT infrastructure using System Centre.  Most people see Hyper-V as virtualisation.  I see it as an enabler for a more dynamic computing environment, so I will explain that vision.

We’ll move closer to the cloud by discussing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.  My focus will be on the library, delegation of roles, and the Self-Service Portal.  That was the first real move towards the compute cluster/cloud approach using System Center.

Then we’ll move to System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal 2.0 (SCVMM SSP 2.0) or Microsoft’s private cloud.  I’ll be getting deep on this puppy.  I’ll talk requirements, architecture, and so on.  The demo will be an A-Z configuration and demonstration of a new business unit self provisioning VM’s in the private cloud.  Hopefully I’ll also have the dashboard running tonight (everything else is ready).

I’ll be wrapping up with some futures.  What’s coming in SCVMM 2012?  What’s coming in Azure VM Role?  And what can we expect (not confirmed but discussed previously by MS) with the cross-premises cloud.

It’s going to be a very full 3 hours.  If I get time I’ll try to bring in more stuff like the new Dynamic Datacenter offering from MS.

This event is filling up fast (we had HUGE interest in the first 24 hours; more than any other user group event launch that I’ve done) and there will be no webcast so make sure you register AND come along; We (System Dynamics) do want to meet you after all Smile

TechEd Europe 2010 Keynote – Big Shock: It’s All About The Cloud

I’m not at the poor cousin of the TechEd family this week.  Last year’s experience put me off.  However, I’m tuned into the keynote to see what’s happening.  The very good news is that Stephen Elop (the speaker at last year’s keynote where half of the room walked out) has left for Nokia and that Brad Anderson (Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Management & Security Division) is taking over the duty.

While I’m waiting … I would expect lots of System Center v.Next/2011 content to be on show this year.  Those products tend to make big headlines at MMS and almost all of the family has some big release next year .. OpsMgr, VMM, ConfigMgr.  Oh … here we go …

Brad starts off my pitching “the cloud”.  It’s not a surprise.  And the message is …. .everyone else in cloud is wrong; Platform-as-a-Service is the way to go.  The huge investment in Azure did not affect that ;-)  Dagnammit – I don’t have enough drink in the house for the “MS keynote – cloud drinking game”.

Windows Phone is next up.  It’s only launching today in the USA.  The first pitch is “choice”.  Obviously aiming at where MS feels Apple is weak, i.e. lack of handset variety.  Some would say that makes Apple is strong because the control the hardware/OS integration completely.  The see-it-all-at-once and social media integration in WP7 is very good on the face of it (I actually have an iPhone rather than WP7).  WP7 should also be controllable using System Center.  Not much reaction at all to a “do you want a demo of it?” question by Anderson.  Problem: geeks are at the show and they’ve already seen the demo.  It’s a demo of the apps really – aimed squarely at the developers in the audience.  Nice looking apps from Tesco and Ebay.  Eek, the developer demo is canned.  Looks pretty similar to what I saw in the PDC keynote. Dev stuff – I’m taking a quick power nap.  Brad is back with the news that since the European launch 3 weeks ago, 600 European apps are published.

We need to deliver apps to users in a predictable and secure way.  There is tension between users and IT – gimme gimme gimme versus control.  I smell ConfigMgr v.Next.  It’s all about IT delivery being focused on the user, e.g. user pulling down apps and the apps following the user around to different PCs if they are the “owner” PC.  User centric client computing is the brand that MS is using.  Ahh … SP1 first.  Ah … Windows 7 marketing first.

88% of worldwide businesses (what size is not mentioned) say they will move to Windows 7 in the next 2 years.

SP1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 new virtualisation features:

  • RemoteFX (previously blogged): big for VDI graphics in the LAN
  • Dynamic Memory (previously blogged).  Claiming a 40% density improvement in VDI.  Anderson claiming that will give Hyper-V the best density in VDI in the market.

Michael Kleef comes on stage.  He big-ups the Citrix relationship.  Citrix are embracing RemoteFX and it’ll feature in XenDesktop.  Now we see IE8 running in a XenDesktop VM via ICA.  A flash video in full fidelity and audio is playing.  HP BL460 blades are in the background and a perfmon view shows the CPU utilisation is minimal – because the work is being done by the GPU.  A Silverlight application in IE9 is run with lots of graphics, moving bits, and BI reporting.  Hmm, the Citrix WAN scaling tools can allegedly stretch RemoteFX over the WAN … interesting!

Back to the cloud with SaaS.  Office365 is a next generation replacement for BPOS.  Intune (very basic desktop management) is on deck.  Demo of Office365.  We’re in yawn-ville at the moment.  This keynote needs a shot of adrenaline.  InTune is being sold as “management”.  It’s very, very light compared to ConfigMgr.  Nice idea – but I’d rather see a cloud based child-site for ConfigMgr.  Anderson promises that InTune will become as rich as ConfigMgr.

A RC of ForeFront EndPoint Protection is available today.  It is based on the same architecture as ConfigMgr.  That means you can have one integrated infrastructure to manage desktops and servers configuration and security.  And that’s all there is about that.  I guess the ForeFront teams got more pop today than they did last year 🙂

Now it’s cloud (IaaS), cloud (PaaS) and private cloud for the rest of the day.

Infrastructure as a Service.  Private Cloud computing from MS is Hyper-V and System Center.  What momentum does Hyper-V have?  Hyper-V has grown 12.6 points and VMware has grown over 4 points in the market over the last 2 years. 

Announcements:

  • Hyper-V Cloud: This is the partnership program that I’ve just blogged about.  It’s a bundle of software and hardware.  MS has a set of funds called Accelerate.
  • Lots of guides, etc: previously blogged.

HP Hyper-V partnership: HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V is an integration between HP Blade System Matrix and MS System Center.  HP is announcing HP CloudStart based on rapidly deploying private clouds based on Hyper-V.

What’s coming in the next version of System Center?  Greg Jenson has the answers.  3 key features:

  • Elastic
  • Shared infrastructure in the data centre
  • Deployed by an application owner by self-service

This is made possible by the next version of VMM.  We get the demo shown at TechEd NA 2010 in the Spring.  This features Server App-V.  VMM vNext is almost identical to what you get in Azure VM Role and that also has Server App-V.  Modelling of an n-tier app architecture is shown, highlighting elasticity.  That’s great for techies …. we want self service so that’s what’s up next!  We see some delegation of the service template to a potential app owner.  It’s similar to 2008 R2 but with a service template which describes an architecture rather than deploy a VM.  That’s understanding the business app owners and their needs.  Deploying a new service = deploy the template.  Things like IIS and SQL will be deployed as virtualised applications that are abstracted from their VM’s.  That allows zero downtime patching of VM’s from the template.

Azure Virtual Network allows a cross-premises domain between your site and Azure.  Azure VM Role allows you to run Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs.  I blogged about that announcement from PDC.

Power nap while Azure dev stuff is talked about.  Next we see OpsMgr using the RC (but supported) management pack for Azure to monitor an Azure based application.  It can respond to spikes in demand by spawning Azure instances.  Careful now; don’t want a nasty credit card bill at the end of the month because of elastic growth that incorrectly interprets slow response times.

Anderson wrapping up by saying that we will likely use a mix of cloud technologies.  We have different solutions to choose from and integrate to suit the needs of our businesses.

Over 70% of MS research/development resources are focused on the cloud.

Last Friday’s User Group Event, Including Dynamic Memory

We ran our first Windows User Group event for quite some time last Friday.  It was a full day, with about 45% of the 138 registrants turning up.  The other 55% missed out on an excellent day that was stuffed full of information.

I kicked off with the intro.  Dave Northey (MS Ireland DPE) stepped in with a quick few slides on how MS Ireland is getting even more involved with the community, including a new feedback tool based on Silverlight.  I talked about Service Pack 1 beta release for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  This featured a live demo of Dynamic Memory being configured, pushed to the extremes of my demo laptop, and handling things quite well.  It was quite an interactive session.  The question of the morning was:

“Would a virtual machine that has expanded from 2 GB RAM up to 8 GB and then ballooned back to 2GB take longer to live migrate than a VM with a static 2 GB of RAM?”  I didn’t for certain so I checked with product group.  The answer is: live migration only has to handle whatever memory is physically assigned so the answer is the times should be identical.  Somehow, I screwed up the audio of my webcast but some people stayed tuned in anyway.

The coffee break came a little late.  Martha Rotter (MS Ireland DPE) did a quick session to demo Windows Phone 7 and IE9.  I think everyone was impressed with IE9 being able to use a client’s GPU to process graphics.

Nathan Winters (Exchange MVP, Gray Convergence) did a session that covered Exchange 2010 SP1.  There was a little info on Exchange 2010 and tonnes of new info.  Nathan reckons you could probably have an entire day on just SP1!

Lunchtime – and MS Ireland has especially set up a demo booth with the Xbox 360 Kinect device (that’s the one where you become the controller).  It was difficult bringing people back into the auditorium after that!

There was a session swap because of schedule conflicts.  Wilbour Craddock (Partner team, MS Ireland) did a session on SCE 2010.  Most MS Ireland customers fall into the small & medium business bracket so this was of great interest to people.  It’s still surprising how many people have not heard of SCE because it solves many problems that are not being resolved by the usually deployed free/crap-ware.

The sessions ended with John McCabe (Unified Communications MVP, CDsoft Ltd) presenting on UC (Live Communications) “wave 14”.  We now know this as Lync Server 2010 (Hmm, interesting name).  This one isn’t that widely adopted in Ireland which is odd; it solves many problems but I think the ability to telecommute is held back more by employers attitudes rather than technology at this point.

We wrapped up the day by giving away lots of goodies.  Books, Arc mice, XBox games, stress balls, all went out.  We ended up running out of questions to ask the audience for the prizes – the last question was “who wants to go home now?”.

Feedback was positive.  We’re already planning the next session.  The original plan was to have it in February.  That might be brought forward but that depends on a few things.  Details will be communicated asap.

Windows User Group Ireland, September 10th 2010

The Windows User Group is back with a day-long event featuring updates on the latest in Microsoft IT infrastructure. Join us on Friday, September 10th in the Microsoft Auditorium in Leopardstown to hear expert speakers talking about Windows Server, virtualization, Exchange, unified messaging, and System Center for the small/medium enterprise. This day will give you valuable information that will educate you on what benefits new technologies from Microsoft will bring to your business.

The agenda is

Start

Finish

Session

Speaker

08:45

09:15

Registration

09:15

10:45

Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX

Aidan Finn (MVP), System Dynamics

10:45

11:00

Break

11:00

12:30

Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2010

Nathan Winters (MVP), Grey Convergence

12:30

13:15

Lunch

13:15

14:45

Communications Server 14

John McCabe (MVP), CDSoft Limited

14:45

15:00

Break

15:00

16:30

System Center Essentials 2010: Enterprise Management for the SME Customer

Wilbour Craddock, Microsoft

You can register and attend the event for free.

Date: Friday, September 10th, 2010

Location: EPDC-2, South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18

Registration: 08:45 to 09:15 with a strict start time of 09:15

The detailed agenda and speakers’ bios are as follows:

Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX (90 Minutes – 09:15 until 10:45)

Speaker: Aidan Finn (MVP: Virtual Machine), Infrastructure Team Lead with System Dynamics

Webcast: LiveMeeting

Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is around the corner. It introduces some new features that will be of huge interest to anyone that is interested in Hyper-V or Remote Desktop Services (including Citrix software). Memory is often the main constraint in virtual machine to host density. Dynamic IT provides a new mechanism for configuring virtual machines with a variable amount of memory. Aidan will discuss what over commitment is and how it is bad. He’ll then introduces you to the mechanics behind Dynamic Memory and show it in action. Aidan will also introduce you to RemoteFX. This is a new solution to provide high quality graphics, such as 1080p video, to Remote Desktop clients. This will be used in Remote Desktop Services and compatible Citrix solutions.

About Aidan Finn:

Aidan is the Infrastructure Team Lead with System Dynamics, a consulting services company located in Dublin that provides IT infrastructure and business intelligence expertise. He has been working in IT since 1996 and has specialised in working with Microsoft infrastructure solutions including Server, desktop, System Center and virtualisation. Aidan is an MCSE and a Microsoft Valuable Professional with an expertise in virtualization. Aidan co-wrote Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2 (Sybex), is the lead author of Mastering Hyper-V Deployment (Sybex), and is contributing to Mastering Windows 7 Deployment (Sybex). You can find his blog at https://aidanfinn.com.

Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2010 (90 Minutes – 11:00 until 12:30)

Speaker: Nathan Winters (MVP: Exchange), Unified Communications Lead with Grey Convergence

Webcast: LiveMeeting

Exchange 2010 SP1 was announced at TechEd US 2010 and contains some exciting enhancements to Exchange 2010. This session will first set the context for these new features and then walk you through what is now possible:

· Reminder of the Exchange 2010 core tenets

· An update on where Microsoft is with Exchange Online

· Introduction to the Feature Enhancements of Exchange 2010 SP1 such as:

· The New Exchange Control Panel Management UI

· Improved High Availability and Disaster Recovery functionality

· Improved Outlook Web App UI and Performance

· Better Mobile Device Experience

· New Information Protection and Control

Ø Personal Archive Enhancements

Ø Retention Policy Management Enhancements

Ø Multi-Mailbox Search Enhancements

· Demo

· Questions & Answers

About Nathan Winters:

Nathan Winters is the unified communications lead at Grey Convergence, a specialist Microsoft partner for unified communications and collaboration. Nathan has been working in IT for eight years and specializes in unified communications with a focus on Microsoft Exchange and Office Communications Server. Nathan has consulted at numerous Fortune 100 companies across a variety of vertical markets.

In 2006, Nathan founded the Microsoft Messaging and Mobility User Group UK, which holds regular meetings in the UK to discuss topics related to Exchange. In 2007, Nathan was named an MVP (Exchange Server) for his work with MMMUG and his regular contributions to the Mark Minasi Forum, and he has received the same honour each year since.

Nathan’s articles have been published on leading websites and magazines, including Windows IT Pro Magazine, MSExchange.org, Simple-Talk.com, Microsoft (TechNet Industry Insiders), and the MMMUG website.

You can contact Nathan at nathan@clarinathan.co.uk or through his blog at http://www.nathanwinters.co.uk

Communications Server 14 (90 Minutes – 13:15 until 14:45)

Speaker: John McCabe (MVP: Unified Communications), Technical Consultant with CDSoft

Webcast: LiveMeeting

Communications Server 2010 (Wave 14) is Microsoft’s Next Generation Unified Communications Platform. It brings many new features including a completely new UI. John will bring you through the main features and some of the new supported scenarios available in this platform and discuss how you can even use it now to replace your PBX! This really will be a serious contender for businesses of all sizes.

About John McCabe:

John currently works as a Technical Consultant for CDSoft Limited providing solutions to the Irish Market Place across multiple industries. John has over 12 years in the IT Industry ranging different disciplines from security, networks and of course Microsoft Infrastructure. John has attained MCITP/MCTS/MCP in various tracks as well as a multiple other professional certifications. John was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award in October 2009 for extensive community work and promoting the Microsoft Product Group.

System Center Essentials 2010: Enterprise Management for the SME Customer (90 Minutes – 15:00 until 16:30)

Speaker: Wilbour Craddock, Partner Technical Specialist, Microsoft

Webcast: LiveMeeting

The aim of this session is to provide a technical overview of the key capabilities of SCE 2010, and how it provides an integrated management solution for SMB customers, from hardware right through to the virtual OS’s running on Hyper-V and applications/services in these VM’s. Attendees will gain valuable information around differentiating SCE with the other System Center technologies, which form part of the Server Management Suites, from both a technical, and pricing perspective. We’ll also cover DPM 2010; part of the new SCE Plus SKU, and how it provides a centralized, powerful SMB-friendly application protection and DR solution, protecting both virtualized servers, application workloads, and desktop data.

To help attendees understand the solutions better, we’ll be constructing a customer scenario to provide a complete solution that can be adapted for specific customer and partner engagements. This solution will include both licensing, and pricing information, to give a better idea of the overall solution cost, and ROI. We’ll focus on delivering a demo of this scenario, concentrating particularly on the virtualization management, PRO functionality, hardware integration, and overall management of the environment.

About Wilbour Craddock:

Wilbour is a former Windows Server MVP and Canadian User Group lead now working for Microsoft Ireland in the Partner Team and frequent speaker on the TechNet Ireland tours. Wilbour’s background is not that dissimilar from most IT Professionals, having started on a help desk and progressed through system administration to leadership roles in government organizations serving as a solutions architect overseeing development and deployment teams and helping set long-term IT strategies. He blogs with the TechNet Ireland team on the IEITPro blog.

PubForum 2010 Berlin Registration is Open

The early bird registration for the virtualization conference is open.  PubForum is doing a second event in 2010, this time in Berlin.

It’s an economic event.  Don’t let the name fool you.  It might be fun but during the event it is serious stuff with some of the big names in virtualization speaking and sharing.

For example, I was at the Frankfurt event a couple of months ago.  I spoke for 2 hours on Hyper-V best practices on the Friday afternoon.  I had a one hour break where I was answering questions and even used RDS Gateway to demo System Center and Hyper-V.  Then I was back in and speaking for another hour on the newer add-ons to Hyper-V.

I strongly recommend attending if you can.  It’s conveniently timed with minimal impact on work.  It is very economic.  Yes, it is fun, but you will learn lots and have a chance to ask the experts the hard questions.

My Hyper-V Presentations at PubForum Frankfurt 2010

I’m exhausted.  I’ve done 2 presentations this week at Pubforum, one after the other with a quick break.  3 hours of me talking.  Phew – those poor people who had to listen to me!

I’ve posted both presentations.  As usual, they are only my cue cards.  Most of the content is me speaking or answering questions.

This is the 2 hour class that I presented:

And this is the one hour class that I presented:
 
 
 

PubForum 2010: What Has Citrix Done Lately?

The theme is move work to a more optimal place.

We were going to get a demo of a Citrix client on an iPad but the projector interface just woulldn’t work.  Guess it’s dodgy hardware 😉 OH you know the fanboys will flame me over that.

XenClient

72% of corporate machines will be laptops.  Synchronized VDI VM’s will be critical.  Citrix launched XenClient, a client hypervisor.  Question/Comment: There are only a few models of computer that have support for the client hypervisor.  I guess it is monolithic.  No AMD support.  The adoption rates of this will be quite limited without massively expanding the supported hardware list.

Synchronizer allows you to check out a VDI VM to your laptop running XenClient.  Nice.  Imagine that with OVF – could check out a VM to any client virtualization then – assuming OVF support in all products.

XenClient can passthrough the graphics card for 3D.  This is experimental and only supports 1 VM at a time. 

CItrix pitch the idea of the user having a public and private VM.  Good luck with that.  A user will not do that.  They’re either too lazy, will forget or find it to be a waste of time.  Another idea is that the user can supply their own laptop and a corporate build VM can go onto it.  Uh uh! THe hardware list is too limited, mainly to pricey h/w I guess, and end users will bring non-supported hardware in.  Also, the drive will be wiped when a XenClient will be done.  A P2V must be done before hand of the user’s build because thew will have an OEM install with no media, not to mention their personal data.  There will be a compliance issue regarding access and retainment of that P2V image on the corporate network.

Nice idea – but it needs to be a complete solution that is fully thought out.  I don’t believe it is anywhere near that yet, based solely on what I am hearing here

XenApp 6

Windows applications on demand, anywhere.  Out since March.  Dazzle provides serlf0service apps.  HDX provides “RealTime” and plug’n’play.  We may see some System Center integration.

FlexCast for Apps is a streaming solution including support for services.  A next release may include support for streaming drivers.

HDX provides USB PNP, 3D graphics, etc. 

NetScaler VPX

I guess VPX is their network traffic optimisation solution?

NetScaler VPX for Hyper-V will run as a service for Hyper-V to accelerate it.  Hmm, interesting.

Virtual Appliances

Workflow Studio, XenApp EVA and XenDesktop EVA are appliances that are based on Hyper-V.

XenServer 5.6

Citrix have 11% of the market share.

I see XenServer for the very first time.  It appears to have something like Dynamic Memory: minimum and maximum RAM setting per VM.  No shared paging in XenServer – the response to a question from a VMware user I guess.

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MS Ireland Event: Best of MMS 2010

Microsoft Ireland are hosting a “best of” event with content and some speakers from the Microsoft Management Summit that is on this week.  Registration is open now.  The two sessions I’m most looking forward to are the ConfigMgr V.Next one by Jeff Wettlaufer and the Opalis session by Greg Charman.

It sounds like something similar is being done in the UK so you folks should watch the local blogs, events pages and emails.  Considering all the volcano ash disruptions, very few people from Europe who were even registered will get to go.