Author Archives: workinghardinit

DELL Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 in Frankfurt

Posted on by
Reply

As you might have noticed on Twitter I was in Frankfurt last week to attend DELL Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014. It was a great conference and very worthwhile going to. It was a week of multi way communication between vendor, marketing, engineering, partners and customers. I learned a lot. And I gave a lot of feedback. As a Dell TechCenter Rockstar and a Microsoft MVP in Hyper-V I can build bridges to make sure both worlds understand each other better and we, the customers get their needs served better.

Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 - Frankfurt

I’m happy I managed to go and I have some people to thank for me being able to grab this opportunity:

  • I cleared the time with my employer. This is great, this is a win win situation and I invested weekend time & extra hours for both my employer and myself.
  • I got an invite for the customer storage council where we learned a lot and got ample of opportunity to give honest and constructive feedback directly to the people that need to hear it! Awesome.
  • The DELL TechCenter Rockstar program invited me very generously to come over at zero cost for the Enterprise Forum. Which is great and helped my employer  and myself out. So, thank you so much for helping me attend. Does this color my judgment? 100%  pure objectivity does not exist but the ones who know me also know I communicate openly and directly. Look, I’ve never written positive reviews for money or kickbacks. I do not have sponsoring on my blog, even if that could help pay for conferences, travel expenses or lab equipment. Some say I should but for now I don’t. I speak my mind and I have been a long term DELL customer for some very good reasons. They deliver the best value for money with great support in a better way and model than others out there. I was sharing this info way before I became a Rockstar and they know that I tell the good, the bad and the ugly. They can handle it and know how to leverage feedback better than many out there.
  • Stijn Depril ( @sdepril, http://www.stijnsthoughts.be/), Technical Datacenter Sales at RealDolmen gave me a ride to Frankfurt and back home. Very nice of him and a big thank you for doing so.  He didn’t have to and I’m not a customer of them. Thank buddy, I appreciate it and it was interesting ton learn the partners view on things during the drive there and back. Techies will always be checking out gear …

Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 - Frankfurt

What did all this result in? Loads of discussion, learning and sharing about storage, networking, compute, cloud, futures and community in IT. It was an 18 hour per day technology fest in a very nice and well arranged fashion.

I was able to meet up with community members, twitter buddies, DELL Employees and peers from all over EMEA and share experiences, learn together, talk shop, provide feedback and left with a better understanding of the complexities and realities they deal with on their side.

Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 - Frankfurt

It has been time very well spent. I applaud DELL to make their engineers and product managers available for this event. I thank them for allowing us this amount of access to their brains from breakfast till the moment we say goodnight after a night cap. Well done, thank you for listening and I hope to continue the discussion. It’s great to be a DELL TechCenter Rockstar and work in this industry during this interesting times. To all the people I met again or for the first time, it was a great week of many interesting conversations!

For some more pictures and movies visit the Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA 2014 from Germany photo album on Flickr

Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 5 Added Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 Active Directory

Posted on by
3

6 weeks ago (February 25th 2014) Microsoft finally took away the last barrier to upgrading some of our Windows Server 2012 Active Directory Environments to R2.  Most of them are still running Exchange 2010 SP3 and not Exchange 2013. The reason is that Exchange 2013 was not deployed is whole other discussion Eye rolling smile.

However that dis mean that until the release of  Exchange Server 2010 SP3 Update Rollup 5 last month we could not upgrade Active Directory to Windows Server 2012 R2. Rollup 5 brought us support for exactly that. We can now:

  • Support Domain Controllers running Windows Server 2012 R2
  • Raise the Active Directory Forest Function Level and Domain Functional Level to Windows Server 2012 R2

Please note that you cannot deploy Exchange Server 2010 (SP3 RU5) on Windows Server 2012 R2 and you’ll probably never will be able to do that. I’m not sure Microsoft has any plans for this.

Now our office moves have been concluded, meaning I can get back to IT Infrastructure instead of being an glorified logistics & facility peon, we’re doing the upgrade.

This also means we can move the Active Directory environments to the latest version so we have the best possible position for any future IT projects at very low risk. The environments are already at W2K12 functional level. If the budgets get so tight they lose/scrap EA or volume licensing it also allows them to run at this level for many years to come without causing any blocking issues.

The Hyper V Amigos Showcast Episode 2: Unmap

Posted on by
8

We’re back for our second episode of the Hyper-V Amigos show cast. In this episode we discuss and demonstrate UNMAP in Windows Server 2012 R2 a bit. As always it was fun to work with Carsten Rachfahl.

2 Hyper-V Amigos having fun discussing UNMAP

 

Here’s our fun and unscripted (other than the PowerShell used in the demos) attempt at showing you UNMAP behavior with Hyper-V and a DELL Compellent SAN

If you want to read more on our experiences with UNMAP search my blog https://blog.workinghardinit.work/tag/unmap/. I have prepared some links for you.

I still need to get the slides uploaded, but all that info is in the blog posts.

Enjoy!

EDIT:

In relation to the question below about not much difference between Dynamically expanding VHD/VHDX. That demo didn’t work out so well here so I include  some screenshots of a comparison I just ran:

This is the dynamically expanding VHDX. on an IDE controller, no ODX.

image 

This is the dynamically expanding VHD on an vSCSI controller, with ODX.

image

So yes, losing ODX makes things slower for dynamically expanding VHDX, but it still beats a Dynamically expanding VHD that has ODX.  A VHDX is a lot better at dynamically growing than a VHD.

Speaking At The ITPROceed Event–June 12th 2014, ALM Antwerp

Posted on by
1

The Belgian IT Pro community is organizing the ITPROceed event a “technology geek fest” as they call it on their web site.

image

It’s a joint venture between the IT pro community and Microsoft Belgium to help you all proceed in designing, deploying and operating Microsoft technologies.

The sessions will not only help you proceed but succeed as well. The speakers are Microsoft MVPs, MEET members & passionate community experts. They’ll share expertise & information gather by using these technologies in real life deployments.

A rich mix of technologies you have available and need today will be discussed like the Cloud OS, System Center, SQL, Office 365, Windows 8, Unified Communications, Lync, Azure and SharePoint.

I’m speaking

I’ll be speaking about the features in Windows Server 2012 R2 that make it “The Scalable & Capable Cloud OS”.

Come see how you can leverage the capabilities of Windows Server 2012 R2, a true cloud OS, to achieve powerful and scalable solutions. We’ll demonstrate how to use technologies as SMB Direct, DVMQ/vRSS, ODX, UNMAP, VHDX and Storage QoS. This will help you get the most out of commodity infrastructure and investment in Windows today.  We’ll share our experiences with you based on real life deployments to help you proceed and succeed.

Join us!

Really, make time in your schedule and attend this event by registering here.

image

Attend the sessions, talk shop with your peers and discuss your questions with the experts. I’ll see you there.