Yes, it’s available … so here we go …
First thing on the agenda is SCOM 2012 SP1. After that we’ll see If we miss SCVMM 2012 SP1 at that much at all. It’s something we’ll look at for network virtualization, power optimizations & private cloud. We left SCOM/SCVMM behind to get the tremendous value of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V High Availability clustering and haven’t looked back since. PowerShell filled up any holes we had nicely and we are very happy with what Windows Server 2012 delivers.
I’m a January 1st MVP. That means that on the 1st January I get an e-mail that brings news of a renewal or not … so apart from celebrating the new year relaxing a bit we also keep an eye on our inbox. This is what arrived just now:
Dear Didier van Hoye,
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2013 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Virtual Machine technical communities during the past year.
The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."Mike Hickman
Director
Community Engagement
Microsoft
Great news to start the new year with. While you get the MVP reward for contributions over the past year to the community I must say that being active in the community is a very rewarding endeavor in itself. For my job I need to figure out a lot of things and I like to share them, including my mistakes, for the benefit of all. Sharing means communication, which leads to questions and discussions that help all of us gain a better knowledge of how things work. It’s not one way traffic. They say there is no better way to learn a subject that to teach it or write a book on it. I think that holds true. Heck, “just” doing a presentation on one subject helps. There’s a constant stream of new capabilities and options that can be leveraged to achieve our goals and being able to discuss these with so many experts from different environments makes a lot of difference in wrapping our heads around it all.
It also helps me be better at my job. So it also helps my employers. In that respect I have very good bosses. They invest in their people without hesitation. They don’t fear the possibility that we might leave for greener pastures. Instead they focus on getting the best out of us and support this actively. Pretty smart and we all gain something from this, as this makes for a very nice green pasture to stay on and they get knowledgeable, motivated employees.
I’m very happy and I’m looking forward to seeing many of my fellow MVPs in Redmond in February for the 2013 MVP Global Summit. Last year’s summit was very educational. It was also a blast to meet so many people in real life for the very first time and talk shop. Thank you all for the opportunities, the challenges and the continuous learning journey.
To conclude I wish all my community buddies and readers a wonderful and happy 2013!
To wave goodbye to 2012 I’m posting the latest screenshot of the easiest and very effective money saving feature you got in Windows Server 2012 than RTM in August. Below you’ll find the status report of a backup LUN in a small environment. Yes those are real numbers in a production environment.
If you are not using it; you’re really throwing away vast amounts of money on storage right this moment. If you’re in the market for a practical, economical and effective backup solution my advice you to is the following. Scrap any backup vendor or product that prevents it files of LUNs being duplicated by Windows Server 2012. They might as well be robbing you at gun point.
You can pay for a very nice company new years party with these savings
I wish you all a great end of 2012 and a magnificent 2013 ahead. In 2013 we’ll push Windows Server 2012 into service where we couldn’t before (waiting for 3 party vendor support and if they keep straggling they are out of the door) and work at making our infrastructure ever more resilient an protected. With System Center SP1 some products of that suite will make a come back in our environment. 10Gbps is bound to become the standard all over our little data center network and not just our most important workloads.
vKernel (now part of DELL) is kicking of 2013 with the VIRTu Alley Online Symposium. It runs over two days and focuses on virtualization and cloud management. 
VIRTu Alley takes place on Tuesday, January 15th from 10:00 – 13:00 EST and on Wednesday, January 16th from 10:00-13:30 EST. Don’t forget it’s EST. Meaning that you need to add 5 hours if you’re in GMT (Dublin) or 6 Hours if you’re in GMT +1 (Brussels)
From the comfort of your office & home 
Go to the Virtu Alley web page and have a look at the agenda for both days. you’ll see they’ve mananged to line up some great speakers. Some of them I know personally. Aidan Finn and Damian Flynn (MVP and published authors) are both presenting on day 2 just like myself. Aidan on what’s new & improved in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Damian on Network virtualization. I will be speaking on Advanced Hyper-V Maintenance with Cluster Aware Updating.
The event itself if free but you do need to register for each day on which you want to attend sessions.
See you there!
