Category Archives: Community

Hyper-V Team at Microsoft Rocks

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The Hyper-V team at Microsoft and the Belgian Hyper-V contact at Microsoft are a very communicative and responsive group of people. Every time I have brought a need, a question or a problem to their attention they take it up and deliver a solution, an answer or a fix respectively. An example of this can be found in this blog post https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/01/29/microsoft-really-listens-enhances-nvspbind/ on functionality they added to nvspbind on our request.

More recently we ran into an issue with the Windows 2008 SP2 SKUs “Without Hyper-V” which I blogged about in KB2230887 Hotfix for Dynamic Memory with Windows 2008 Standard & Web edition does not apply to without Hyper-V editions?. I also brought this to the attention of John Howard. The reply was swift and positive. The Dynamic Memory owner Serdar was on the case and working with the Windows Sustained Engineering group to provide a re-release of the hotfix so it would support those “Without Hyper-V” SKUs. This has been fixed now as announced on the TechNet forum thread here, just scroll to the latest post. The only negative point here is that they forgot to mention it on the blog post and that you now need to call them to get the hotfix, why this is, I do not know.

UPDATE: As of 24 hours the hotfix is downloadable again http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2230887 (v2).

Over the years I’ve been impressed with what they delivered with Hyper-V out of the box. They’ve had some issues but they recognized them early and fixed ‘m fast. It has been a pleasure working with this technology for the last three years and I am now enjoying the benefits of Dynamic Memory with Windows Server 2008 SP1. All I can say that if you have a genuine interest in the technology and communicate clearly and politely with Microsoft personnel they are very engaged to help you. I’m pretty pleased Smile.

Microsoft Offers Operations Manager Community Evaluation Program (2012 CEP)

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At TechEd 2011 Microsoft announced the OpsMgr 2012 Community Evaluation Program (CEP) and are now inviting everyone to apply to take part in this in the public Beta time frame. They position a CEP as follows:

Many of you are likely familiar with Microsoft TAP’s, Technology Adoption Programs, where a small pool of customers partner with our engineering teams to preview and provide feedback on pre-beta software. TAP participants provide our engineers with some early guidance and validation of next generation software, prior to us releasing publicly-available beta software. TAP is a great program, but it starts very, very early on and usually fills up quick (and waay before beta). The OpsMgr 2012 TAP has been very active in helping us with early builds, but it is unfortunately full.

The Community Evaluation Program (CEP) has recently been created to provide a broader range of customers with an in-depth experience with our upcoming beta software.

Essentially, a CEP is an organized way of bringing our subject matter experts (SMEs) from our product teams, our community (like MVPs and experienced users) and those interested in taking a deep look at our v.Next software for evaluation and preparation for deployment purposes.

This is good news, we’ got SCVMM2012 Beta running in the lab, it will be nice to get our ands on SCOM 2012 Beta as well. For an overview of the Operations Manager 2012 CEP, take a look at TechNet blog post http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2011/06/02/now-enrolling-for-the-operations-manager-2012-cep.aspx and the OM12 CEP overview datasheet.

If this is to your liking you can get all the information you need here and follow this link to apply for the CEP Apply for the OpsMgr 2012 CEP. Somewhere in June the accepted participants will get the SCOM2012 topic schedule & access to the CEP discussion forums. If you have questions on all this you can send them to [email protected].

BriForum 2011 Europe Here I Come

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As you might have read a previous blog and noticed in the sidebar, I’m off to London (UK) to attend  BriForum 2011 Europe. It’s time to get away from the wide screens overlooking my ICT empire toys and broaden my horizons  For those who think the cloud is going to take away your job … think again, I’m getting busier than ever. The reality is that we just can’t push a button and have everything up and running in the cloud. Greenfield projects and startups might beat existing infrastructure & application architecture over the head with cloud and make those businesses run harder for their money but they will run and compete. That race will produce a huge workload.

So I’m of to dive into some sessions on Cloud, Server & Application Virtualization, VDI … should make for some interesting days. I hope to be able to talk to lots of people with a variety of experiences to help find out new or alternate ways to address some issues (or challenges) we need to tackle in the years ahead. Subjects like Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, application-aware storage in a virtualized environment, Geo Clustering, Site Recovery, … should give us ample to discuss. Give us a shout if you’re there. It’s also a nice opportunity to meet up with some fellow bloggers and twitter. acquaintances.

A colleague of mine is heading to the USA, Atlanta to attend TechEd 2011 USA. So he’s crossing the big pond to get some brand new info on the latest and the greatest in Microsoft technologies on the IT Pro side of the business.

So of to London, I go, onwards & always going forward in IT as there is no turning back I’ll keep you posted when I find the time to do so.

100

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No this is not a cheap and reduced version of the movie 300. I do not resemble King Leonidas in anyway except perhaps in my defiance to those who want to coerce their will upon me in the data center forcing other solutions on me than what I deem best. To paraphrase it “This is Hyper-V!” But let’s get real, I’m Belgian so the Belgian chocolates (pralines) named after Leonidas are perhaps the most realistic link to the movie 300 I have and even then, when we need some pralines as a gift we manage to end up with a huge chocolate bunny. But I totally digress from the subject, having a high definition beamer and liking movies tends to invoke this. This blog is about 100; actually this is blog entry one hundred.

What can is say about it? I’m still blogging, which to me was one of the things I wanted to find out. Can I keep writing something worth reading? The first part I have answered myself but the second part, is it worth reading, that’s for my readers decide. So, if you have things to say about the blog, feedback to provide, opinions to share, by all means, please do. Let me know what you think. Is it useful, is it amusing? Or perhaps even both? If you feel like telling me, send me a mail via the contacts page, if you don’t mind voicing your opinions publicly just leave a comment to this blog or sound of on twitter to @workinghardinit

Thanks for reading Party smile