Category Archives: Community

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.

A Festive End Of 2011 & A Great 2012 To All

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Well the end of 2011 is getting closer and 2012 is about to knock at my door. 2011 was a very busy year and 2012 show no signs of being different, quite the opposite actually. We’re going to be deploying the System Center 2012 Suite, diving in to Windows 8 Server and I’m doing some storage projects in the  >200TB usable storage space range. Getting our feet wet with the private cloud concept in production etc. On top of that I’m planning to attend some conferences and might be speaking at some of those again on Hyper-V, Clustering, Storage and Windows 8 Server.

I’d like to thank all my readers and let you know I appreciate the feedback and your words of thanks when you’ve found my posts helpful or funny.

To all my IT buddies I’ve been lucky enough to have met up with in 2011 I hope to see you all again in 2012 for some more fun and educational conferences and dinners. There is a very helpful and smart bunch of people out there and I enjoy talking with them.

To those of you who are changing employers, jobs, starting your own companies or going freelance, I wish you all the best. It’s reassuring that in these day of constant economic doom & gloom we see people moving ahead full steam and with confidence.

I have a great small team of great IT Pros & Developers working with in the trenches and hope they continue to have fun and keep finding positive challenges in their jobs. They have “the right stuff” and we couldn’t get things done without their skillsets. The challenge for management is to help ‘m get the job done nothing more or less than that, to take away obstacles and let ‘m be the best they can be.

This year was also the first time I presented to a very stimulating, knowledgeable and communicative technical audience. There is room for improvement in my presenting skills but I enjoyed it and it was very good learning experience for me. It’s not easy to deliver good content, and share knowledge. I thank all of you who make an effort to do so and I wish you all a happy, prosperous, carefree and healthy 2012!

Download The Next Wave Of System Center Suite Products Release Candidates

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As you all probably know by now in 2012 there will be a lot of new tools available for us IT Pros. Windows 8 Server alone holds so many new features and added value that it alone will keep us busy for many years to come. On top of that, the 2012 version of the System Center Suite is being released. I hope most of you have started looking at the betas and the release candidates. If not I encourage you to do so. There are a lot of great improvements that will help us enhance our current setups and operations, not to mention enable us to build a private cloud. For some musings on why you might want to do that, even if you have no public cloud plans yet, I refer you to my blog post The Private Cloud A Profitable Future Proofing Tactic?

To help you get started with testing I include some links to some of the most interesting products.

If you select the “Download All Available System Center 2012 Products” option you’ll get all most current versions of the pre release. To fully test the System Center 2012 Suite products you’ll need Windows Server/Hyper-V but also the current line of System Center Suite (upgrade testing).

The full Windows 2008 R2 SP1 OS is available here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dd459137.aspx  and you can find the free Hyper-V Server here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dd776191.aspx 

The most relevant current System Center Suite products are available via these links:

To top it all of and get acquainted with “The Cloud” grab the “Deploying and Managing Windows Azure Applications” here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/hh282846.aspx

There you go. All this should keep you usefully occupied and out of trouble during the end of year holidays and make you an knowledgeable and capable IT Pro, ready for the year to come.

TechDays 2012 Belgium – Register Now

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TechDays 2012 in Belgium will be here sooner that you think right now. So start planning for it. Set aside the time and get your attendance approved by your management. If you need some help with the latter take a look here for some help with a pre edited e-mail message for IT Pro and for Developers.

Most of you will already know why you would attend these 3 full days of technical sessions for developers and IT-professionals but if you don’t, go take a look at the TechDays 2012 web site for more information.

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TechDays in Belgium has been around for a while and it’s celebrating it’s 10th year of existing. And with good reason. I’ve seen this event grow bigger and especially better over the years. If you work in the IT sector and your involved with Microsoft products this is one of the premier events to attend in Belgium. You won’t be disappointed!