Just as a heads up to all people planning to attend the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 (MMS 2013) this blog is to let you know that registrations open on December 3rd 2012.
So, I’d keep an eye out for the MMS 2013 site and register as soon as you get the opportunity. This event has the tendency to sell out fast.
Thanks to some great people at Dell in Germany (yes, you Florian), Belgium and of course Alison Krause (@AlisonatDell), Maryna Frolova (@MarineroF) and Stephanie Woodstrom I got invited to attend the “Fluid Forward Think Tank” at the Dell Storage Forum in Paris.
We had a healthy variation in customers, partners, consultants and DELL employees discussing various aspects of IT related to storage. The task of herding the cats fell upon the shoulders of Simon Robinson (@simonrob451) who’s an Analyst and VP at 451 Research, a firm that deals with storage and information management. I for one think he did so brilliantly. This interactive discussion was streamed live and if you missed it you can click on this live stream link to look at our ramblings 🙂
I had to pitch some of my dreams of leveraging al the new mobility features as well as the high to continuous available that is being enabled with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V on inherently unreliable components what opportunities these present to us customers and storage vendors.
Here’s the gang around the table:
It was a fun, educational discussion as the mix of backgrounds, industries, job functions was diverse enough to address all sides of the storage story, the good, the bad and the ugly. We gave them some food for taught I think. Well the folks at DELL can now take this back to Austin and reflect on it all. If need be, I’ll drop by some day to provide some feedback and remember @WarrenByle I ‘d like to try out that STI of his 
After an interview I ran of to a Compellent customer panel to learn something and provide some feedback on our first experiences.
Time flies fast and it’s time to look ahead to 2013. My continuing investment in myself is part of that. Despite a lot of rumors about big changes to MMS (its future, location, timing etc.) things will go forward as they’ve been in the past years. That includes the location. As you probably already heard it’s back in Las Vegas, state of Nevada, USA. So after the, for many people, somewhat disconcerting announcement at MMS 2012 indicating the above mentioned changes, MMS 2013 will once again be held in Las Vegas again. As before it will be focused on the entire System Center Suite. That was confirmed by a mail form the MSS conference team recently and a TechNet blog post
Recently is was announced that the MMS 2013 content survey is now open. So they’re planning for the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 content and they’d like to hear from us. Why? Well, the better they align the content of the conference to our needs, the better it will be as an experience. This means our return on investment will be bigger which is always a good thing. So if you’re going or thinking of going this is the place, MMS 2013 Content Survey, to voice your opinions on what it should look like content wise. You have two more weeks to fill it out and than it’s scheduled to close down.
It’s great to have an event focused on managing, deploying and protecting the infrastructure we’ve spent so much time, effort and money building. This conference is dedicated to exactly that. Smaller in scale but very focused. All together in the same hotel/conference center for 5 long days living in System Center and nothing else. As the world’s top operators in this space are there, the networking opportunities are also excellent. I can still remember the amount of talking and discussing I did with my colleagues in 2012, that was stimulating.
It’s also the place to provide feedback to Microsoft about System Center. Things you like, don’t like, things that are missing etc. I most certainly have some feedback for them.
I’ll most certainly try to attend, that’s for sure. So it’s time to fill out the request form and start cutting through the red tape. Let’s hope the economy doesn’t tank completely and that we can go. The chips might be down right now but let’s not cost cut ourselves out of skills, education, opportunities and a future. Remember, keep moving forward and don’t quit yet, you can always give up later 
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As the readers of my blog know I was in Barcelona this week to attend the Technical Experts Conference Europe 2012 organized by Quest (now a part of DELL). Together with my fellow MVPs, friends and colleagues Aidan Finn (@joe_elway), Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver) and Hans Vredevoort (@hvredevoort) we presented 8 sessions at the Virtualization Track and did a Hyper-V Experts panel to share what we have learned and help answer questions attendees on the new capabilities of Hyper-V in Windows Sever 2012. It was both fun and interesting to do. We learned some more from each other and also from the questions of an alert audience whom we enjoyed presenting to.
Mattias Sundling, a Technical evangelist at Quest and the owner of the Virtualization Track at TEC 2012 Europe did an audio podcast all 4 of us MVPs in the “Virtual Machine” expertise presenting in that track . You can find that podcast here on the vKernel/DELL web site http://www.vkernel.com/podreader/items/tec-europe-2012-mvps-with-mattias-sundling or on YouTube by clicking on the screenshot below. Enjoy.
