Category Archives: Community

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!

Experts2Experts Conference London (UK) 2011

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I’m at the Experts2Experts Conference in London and I’m having a great time talking shop, tech & business with my fellow IT Pro colleagues from around Europe. Aidan Finn, Jeff Wouters, Carsten Rachfahl, Ronnie Isherwood.

It might be fun for Microsoft to join us for some of these lunch & dinner time dicussions. It would provide them with great feedback, ideas, concerns. Very educational. While we’re discussing Citrix, VMware, Microsoft & ISV solutions (RES, Appsense) this is not a vendor centric conference. Sure we all work with these products but we’re discussing it from our point of view. The challenges, the issues, the successes & failures are discussed and mentioned.

There’s a high density of virtualization, private cloud, desktop virtualization (VDI, Terminal Servers, Application Virtualization, Client hosted virtual desktops etc.) expertise at the conference to make it interesting.

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing some musings on “High Performance & High availability Networks for Hyper-V Clusters” during my session.

Carsten Rachfahl interviews me on 10Gbps networking with Hyper-V

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I was in Frankfurt Germany last week at The Experts Conference 2011 Europe (http://www.theexpertsconference.com/europe/2011/). I met up with a lot of great IT professionals from the on line community as you can read in a previous blog post . The video interview that was mentioned in that post is now on line. It’s a very good quality one and Carsten Rachfahl made an excellent interviewer who manages to make the entire process both educational and enjoyable.

The results are available for all to view right here on Carsten’s site (in German) where you can also find his other blog posts http://www.hyper-v-server.de/videos/videointerview-mit-didier-van-hoye-zu-hyper-v-und-10gbit/