Category Archives: Community

My Recommendations For Our IT Pro at TechDays 2012 Belgium

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I’m very busy with storage at the moment and as I’m already doing some other conferences this year we’re giving some other members of our IT the opportunity to attend TechDays 2012. That doesn’t stop me from giving some hints to the junior but very smart & fast learning IT Pro that’s in our delegation (4 developers & 1 IT Pro) and I might as well share those hints with you. The idea of sending him to TechDays is to expose him to a variety of subjects that are related to current and future needs/trends in the industry and in our line of business. It’s not just focused on training. I want him to look at the bigger picture of all parts in the puzzle. It’s about getting some context and tasting the possibilities. It’s also good to see some of our local IT talent (like Mike Resseler and Kurt Roggen) in action. Naturally I leave it up to him to make his own choices, and I hope he does. So here are, in chronological order, my recommendations:

February 14th

10:45-12:00
Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012

12:00-13:00 (If you want to lunch & learn)
Manage VM’s and Services across Private Clouds and Windows Azure with System …

13:00-14:15
Take the Spaghetti out of Windows Azure – an insight for IT Pro Techies Part 1 (John Craddock)

14:30-15:45
Take the Spaghetti out of Windows Azure – an insight for IT Pro Techies Part 2 (John Craddock)

16:15-17:30
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, Fabric Management, creation and consumption of the cloud (Vijay Tewari)

17:45-19:00
Windows 8 Dynamic Access Control (John Craddock)

February 15th

09:00-10:15
Windows 8 Hyper: Availability (Bryon Surace)

10:45-12:00
Discover what’s new in Windows 8 Active Directory (Paul Loonen)

13:00-14:15
The Private Cloud, Principles, Patterns and Concepts (Tom Shinder)

14:30-15:45
Toolmaking for Administrators using Windows PowerShell (Jason Helmick)

16:15-17:30
Windows 8 Disk Dedupe (Speaker: Mike Resseler)

17:45-18:45
What’s new in PowerShell V3! (Jason Helmick)

February 16th

09:00-10:15
Private Cloud Day Session 1- Building your Private Cloud Infrastructure (Kurt Roggen)

10:45-12:00
Private Cloud Day Session 2- Creating & Configure your Private Cloud (Kurt Roggen)

13:00-14:15
Private Cloud Day Session 3- Monitor & Operate your Private Cloud (Mike Resseler)

14:30-15:45
Private Cloud Day Session 4- Automating & Delivering Services in your Private Cloud (Mike Resseler & Kurt Roggen)

16:15-17:30
Private Cloud Day Session 5- A Solution for Private Cloud Security (Tom Shinder)

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.

Videointerview_What_is_your_favorite_Windows_8_feature-Didier_Van_Hoye

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.

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!