Monthly Archives: January 2012

Microsoft Management Summit 2012

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From the 16th of April until the 20th of April 2012 Microsoft is running animportant conference for anyone who’s involved with systems management in the Microsoft sphere. It is, of cause, the Microsoft Management Summit 2012 (MMS 2012) in Las Vegas (Nevada, USA).

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This is a conference that is held in very high regard and I’ve heard through the grape vines it’s one of the favorite conferences for Microsoft Employees to attend themselves due to its high quality and focus on the System Center suite. I’ve never had the opportunity to attend before and I would like to go.

It’s very likely that the System Center 2012 Suite of products will be officially launched at MMS 2012 and there will be an abundance of learning opportunities in regards to these. As said above, I’d really love to go and I encourage anyone who can make it to attend. Yes, I know it’s in the United States, so for us non US residents that can mean long and expensive travel and we’ll need a budget to stay in Las Vegas for a week. But it’s the only conference of its kind. There is no MMS Europe and such. Although I have to say that with initiatives like “Best of MMS” TechNet events Microsoft & the community make an effort to deliver content and information to a much larger audience, which is great.

If you’re in the target group for this conference and you’re interested take a look here. They even have cost/benefit sheet to help convince your management Winking smile

Now a lot of you are already be playing with the System Center 2012 Betas and Release Candidates but if you’re not  you might want to get a head start by downloading the System Center 2012 Evaluation Products and perhaps even by joining the Community Evaluation Program for System Center 2012 (Private Cloud) and Configuration Manager 2012.

Group Video Interview: What is your favorite Hyper-V feature in Windows 8?

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In 2012 the next version of Windows is one of the upcoming releases by Microsoft we all have our eyes on. We’re all about to start investigating Windows 8, a lot more than today, when the first beta version is released. Hyper-V 3.0 is going to be big especially in combination with other features in Windows 8. Together with System Center 2012  this all makes a very rich & powerful (private) cloud infrastructure.

At the Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference in London (November 2011) I not only presented on High Performance & High Availability networking for Hyper-V clusters (10Gbps goodness) but I also met a lot of peers from the industry like Aidan Finn, Jeff Wouters, Carsten Rachfahl & Ronnie Isherwood.

Carsten Rachfahl is a MVP who’s very much into Private/Public Cloud and is enthusiastic about the new features in Windows 8 like many of us are. He took the opportunity to make a video with all the above suspects on the subject of our most favorite feature in Windows 8. This was released today for all to see and enjoy.

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We had a great time making it.  Luckily for us he’s a good interviewer and we didn’t encounter too many bloopers. Enjoy! And as always, if you have any feedback or questions we’re happy to hear them.

I’m an MVP–What a Great Start Of 2012

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Microsoft presented me with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award under the Virtual Machine expertise. If you’d like to know a bit more about the MVP Program and the Award you can take a look here http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/aboutmvp

This is special to me, and I’m honored by it. It’s very nice to get such recognition both from your peers in the community and from Microsoft for sharing your experiences and knowledge for the better good. This doesn’t mean I’m an "know all, end all" guru, far from it. No one knows everything or never makes mistakes. To me it does mean my peers think highly enough of me so that they are willing to nominate me and serve as a reference for my skill set and contributions. That by itself is a huge compliment but I’m grateful to have the opportunities to learn a lot and for that I owe some thanks. I learn a lot from participating in a world wide community that shares experiences & knowledge. The amount of skills that these people bring to the table and the wealth of information that is shared by all is enormous. ”The community” is a varied group of experts in their own areas of excellence.

  • Some are (sometimes long time) MVPs like Aidan Finn, Hans Vredevoort, Jaap Wesselius, Jetze Mellema, Kurt Roggen, Mike Resseler, Kristian Nese, Carsten Rachfahl.
  • Naturally there are the Microsoft employees, both locally and abroad, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working on support & business cases and who’ve probably vouched for me when asked to do so.
  • Then there is the interaction with community members like Ronnie Isherwood, Jeff Wouters, Dave Stork, Peter Noorderijk, Maarten Wijsman, Rick Slager and my blog readers , and a lot of the  people who follow me on twitter (Ronny Pot, J. Wolfgang Goerlich, Kevin Ball, Kenneth, …) and so many other I’m probably forgetting to mention Embarrassed smile. Some of these I’ve had the privilege of meeting in real life and those occasions have always been both educational & fun. Sometimes these meetings turned into an international distributed testing/troubleshooting effort where we all learn something like at TEC 2011.
  • On top of that I have the luck to work with some really nice people both colleagues (Tom, Peter, Karel, Ivan, Sabrina, Jeff – you rock – and thanks for sticking with us through all the sometimes challenging projects). Some are consultants and people I know at other companies that work for or with us.

Together we learn a lot through the need to answer sometimes complex questions and find solutions for the problems at hand. This makes for a great learning school and ongoing education until that day arrives you’re recognized as an expert while you realize more and more how much there is to learn.