Category Archives: Community

Windows Server 2012 Is Launched

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It’s 17:00 hours here in Belgium (GMT+1, summer time) and Windows Server 2012 has been officially launched today world wide! The world wide launch event can be followed on line here so join in.

This is huge. Anyone who has been watching the virtualization & private cloud area of endeavor knows what this release means. I’m an early adopter and spent the day bringing another 2 Hyper-V cluster on line for our transition to Windows Server 2012 (UEFI boot).

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We are running it it production with great success.

This version is a game changer and it means a lot to us all en our customers. This is a very capable Operating System that puts to rest any doubts whether Windows will work in any environment imaginable. Sure, the competition will mark it as insignificant but that’s FUD. From this year on with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V the tables have turned. As of this year vLimited is stopped in it’s tracks, this is the year where they will loose ground and Hyper-V will lead. If nothing else customers tied in to them will benefit from this competition, but I hope they do more than just that Winking smile

Get ready for your future and invest in skills and knowledge. Start your learning journey here with events the Belgian community is contributing towards.It’s impressive what the community does to share knowledge and I’m proud to be part of that. I’m also honored to have had to opportunity to talk to so many Microsoft employees at many occasions, including the MVP Summit.

Attending the Dell Tech Summit EMEA

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As you read this I’m preparing to get on my way to the DELL Tech Summit in Lisbon, Portugal for a few days. I’ll be discussing the needs we have from them as customers (and their competition actually for that matter) when it comes to hardware in the Microsoft landscape in the era of Windows Server 2012.

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I’m very happy and eager to tell them what, in my humble opinion, they are doing wrong and what they are doing right and even what they are not doing at all Smile  I believe in giving feedback and interaction with vendors. Not that I have any illusion of self importance as to the impact of my voice on the grand scheme of things but if I don’t speak up nothing changes either. As Intel and Microsoft are there as well,  this makes for a good selection of the partners involved. So here I go:

  1. More information on storage features, specifications and roadmaps
  2. Faster information on storage features, specifications and roadmaps
    • Some of these are in regards to Windows Server 2012 & System Center 2012 (Storage Pools & Spaces, SMI-S, ODX, UNMAP, RDMA/SMB3.0 …) and some are more generic like easier & better SAN/Cluster failovers capabilities, ease of use, number of SCSI 3 persistent reservations, etc.
  3. How to address the IOPS lag in the technology evolution. Their views versus my ideas on how to tackle them until we get better solutions.
  4. Plans, if any, for Cluster In a Box (CiB) building blocks for Windows Server 2012 Private Cloud solutions.
  5. When does convergence make sense and when not cost/benefit wise (and at what level). I’d like a bit more insight into what DELLs vision is and how they’ll execute that. What will new storage options mean to that converged network, i.e. SMB 3.0, Multichannel & RDMA capable NICs. Now convergence always seems tied to one tech/protocol (VOIP in the past, FCoE at the moment) and it shouldn’t, plenty of other needs for loads of bandwidth (Live migration, Storage Live Migration, Shared Nothing Live Migration, CSV redirected mode, …).

Now while it’s important to listen to you customers, this is not easy if you want to do it right, far from it. For one we’re all over the place as a group. This is always the case unless you cater to a specialized niche market. But DELL serves both consumers and enterprises form 1 person shops to fortune 500 companies in all fields of human endeavor. That makes for nice cocktail of views and opinions I suspect.

Even more importantly than listening is processing what you hear from your customers. Do you ignore, react, or take it away as more or less valuable information. Information on which to act or not, to use in decision making, and perhaps even in executing those decisions. And let’s face it without execution decisions are pretty academic exercises. In the end management is in control and for all the feedback, advise, research that gathered and done, they are at the steering wheel and they are responsible for the results.

One thing that I do know from my fellow MVPs and the community is that for the past 12 months any vendor who would address those questions with a good plan and communications would be a top favorite while selecting hardware at many customers for a lot of projects.

Windows Server 2012 Bits Available for Download for Volume Licensing Customers

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A long awaited day has arrived. The bits of Windows Server 2012 RTM are available to us. Ever since the BUILD conference in September 2011 a lot of us have been diving into this version with enthusiasm and amazement for what’s in the product. As a matter of fact I’ve “sold” projects based on Windows Server 2012 internally since October 2011 because we were that impressed with what we saw.

  • Grab the bits on the Microsoft Volume Licensing site (from August 16th onwards). I whish I could tell you it’s also on TechNet or MSDN but no joy there so far.

So we’ve been pouring over the product and the information available, gradually gaining a better understanding of what it can do for us and our businesses. That meant building labs, testing scenarios, presenting on the subject at various occasions.  There was also a lot of thinking, dreaming and discussing ideas and options about what we can do this version of Windows. It has been very busy for the past 11 months but I’m also very happy to have had the opportunity to attend several summits and conferences where I met up with colleague, fellow MVPs, MSFT employees who all shared the enthusiasm for this release and what it means for Hyper-V and the Private/Hybrid Cloud.

 

So to all of them, ladies & gentlemen, my on line community buddies form all over this planet, it’s been a blast Smile. They have been very helpful in all this as have been al the Microsoft employees who’ve answered and discussed all the questions/ideas we threw at them. I would like to thank all of them for their time, their patience and the opportunities given to us. I can offer those guys & galls just one reward: the fact that from day one we are taking this in production and gradually will do so for all our infrastructure systems and so on. It’s a no brainer when you’ve worked with the RC and seen what Windows Server 2012 can do. And no, I’m not forgetting Windows 8. SMB 3.0 & Direct Access and Windows to go alone make that a sweet proposition, but I got those bits already.

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Well, the downloads are running and the installation of our first production Hyper-V Cluster and infrastructure servers can start as soon as that’s finished (we’ll lead Brad, we’ll lead Winking smile). After some initial tests these will be taken into service and that last feedback will provide us with the go or no go for the rest of our infrastructure. The speed & completeness of our move depends partially on how fast System Center 2012 SP1 brings support for Windows Server 2012.

So future blog posts and my next presentations will spiced with some real life production experience with the RTM bits. May all your roll outs be smooth ones!

Very Educational Microsoft TechEd 2012

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Hello from TechEd 2012 Europe at the RAI in Amsterdam. I’ve been extremely busy attending sessions, talking to Microsoft employees and vendor engineers. We’ve had some very interesting discussions and I learned a lot and clarified even more. TechEd has once more proven to be an excellent investment of time and I have been able to get a lot of face time with the right people. To me this is important because that helps me tremendously when designing solutions. Sorry for the low quality pictures.

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Bob Combs on stage at the TechEd Europe 2012  educating us on NIC Teaming

You know my mantra “options, options options” as this is what gets you a way out of a pinch. However a lot of options also mean you need to make decisions, and not just when dealing with issues but also at design time. Knowledge and understanding is what help to make the correct of the best decision fast. Attending this conference with its tremendous networking opportunities provides for a very nice and effective setting for passionate discussions and deep dives into scenarios. Challenging vendors, interacting with peers, throwing ideas out there and deep diving into the possibilities and drawbacks with each other is great and helps a lot to understand technologies better. You have to thrown what you have learned out there and discuss it to test your understanding of the subject. Don’t be afraid to do so. We all don’t know things, get stuff wrong, etc. Don’t let  fear stop you from interacting with your peers.

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Ben Armstrong in action on Live Storage Migration

It is also great to meet up with my community buddies from all over the word again and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to attend these conferences. For me personally these are priceless and the value to my employers/clients is considerable. There is a tsunami of new technology in the Windows Server 2012 stack and learning to put these into context is both fun and useful. These are very interesting times in the Microsoft Infrastructure ecosystem so life is good!