Category Archives: Conferences & Events

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/

The Experts Conference – TEC 2011–After Action Report

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I enjoyed my time at the TEC2011 conference. The networking with fellow IT Pros was excellent and the discussions were rich in content. It’s fun to see that a lot of people are already looking at Windows 8 server. In that respect the session by Hans Vredevoort “Hyper-V Storage Deep Dive” was a very good one, offering a look at things to come. Information is not yet flowing in on Windows 8, or at least not in the quantities we’d like. We all expect that situation to improve before the end of the year when we’ll (hopefully) find a first beta under the x-mas tree to play with during the holidays season Smile. Jaap Wesselius  was haunted by the demo gods. Well it was either the demo gods or all those “always on” IT Pros bringing the wireless down. But he recovered strong in his session  “Virtualizing Exchange 2010” that was actually called "Exchange on Hyper-V:do’s and don’ts". Not even the demo gods can keep Jaap down. We also enjoyed seeing Carsten Rachfahl in action in his session on “Hyper-V networking Best Practices” which he brought well and with a sense of humor on his new best practice since the evening before when a bunch of us where testing things out on Hyper-V clusters all over Europe Smile  Maarten Wijsman  (in Holland) & Rick Slagers  (on the scene at TEC2011) form Wortell.nl were both assisting in this endeavor.

I had a good time, met a lot of people from the community  like Joachim Nässlander (@Nasslander). The Belgian ProExchange community was well represented and Ilse Van Criekinge was there as well. I learned a lot and I’m happy to have attended.To conclude our conference on Wednesday Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver), Hans Vredevoort (@hvredevoort) and I did a video panel interview on Hyper-V Windows 8 Server and some 10Gbps cluster networking. He’ll put it on line on his web site http://www.hyper-v-server.de/videos/ so you can find there when it’s released. Jaap, Hans and I went to dinner and concluded the conference with a beer in the bar. It’s back home tomorrow and then to work.

Build Windows Key Note 2011/09/13

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Updated as we follow the key note

After the talk about Windows 8 being even better and greater for all form factors (hardware people, the ARM architecture, it will be fun to see how the competition responds) I want to dive into Windows Server 8. Yes I’m here for the server side. But as the Hyper-V is now brought to the client there is a lot to say about Hyper-V here as well. No problem. But not yet, not yet.

First, mobile devices. Lots of touch, looks all very cool with the Metro UI. As I live in the country with the most expensive smart phones & mobile data subscriptions in the world I’m not a heavy user. It’s a great market, it’s cool, it’s important, but it’s not my primary theater of operation so to speak. But I might need to get me some of those devices to play with Smile It really looks cool. It looks all very fast & fluid. And the resource hogging should be reduced. Bring it on I say Smile But don’t worry if you’re a “Grand Pa Box” keyboard & mouse jockey. Windows 8 works just as well for you. the idea is Windows 8 everywhere on every device & form factor.

Now they first need to talk about all the developers will be writing applications for Windows 8. Here comes Metro Style applications development. The bold WinRT API bet (yet another one). The languages used are the one we all know, love or hate Smile. No worries you’re coding skills have not been dumped into the toilet. Oh yes, Silverlight is not dead. An no .NET is not dead either. Really? Even COM+ is not dead yet. But Metro style development is the way ahead. But please dump the hyped drama and o continue coding on your current projects Winking smile They promised everything that runs on Windows 7 today will run on Windows 8. There you go Smile with tongue out You might say with less drama that Win Forms & co will be less dominant. Nothing that new. New form factors & mobility ask for new tools. But guess what you’ll be coding those apps in? Metro Style apps will be written in C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, HTML5/JavaScript and/or using XAML. XAML is for “Jupiter,”which is the XAML/UI layer on top of Windows 8 needed for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps to work on the platform.

They are now coding on stage. Perhaps not the best use of time during a keynote but hey, we’ll get to the good stuff eventually. Once again we see the impression launched you can write apps in a couple of minutes with no knowledge at all. Take that devies! We IT Pro’s are not the only ones facing unemployment (cloud) Open-mouthed smile we’re all going to be replaced by a very small easy script with drag & drop. I know some hard core consultants/developers who are now buying stocks in their own company to cash in on the fixing of all that Smile

We’re treated to some very impressive hardware demos. Really impressive. Mobile device OS people we have met your competition and it is called Microsoft. The crowd goes wild when they are told they are getting a Samsung slate machine. Hmmm, why am I working instead of being at Build? My priorities are wrong I guess Sad smile

We’re shown deep freeze, the new task manager that look pretty neat.  The command line  to set a base line for your machine refresh is very appealing to me. At a point you have your machine just right => grab it for refresh if/when needed.

Metro over RDP looks awesome remote charms, virtual keyboard and of cause touch! I bet the VDI crow is going a little wild dreaming of the possibilities straight out of the box.

Hyper-V on Windows 8 client! We’re there Winking smile. The guy is storming through the features. He’s on the clock. We arrived at the business crowd. A lot of stuff for the desktop is also improved. Multiple Monitor support, control of Metro & desktop with shortcuts within the monitors. The UP button should be a good alternative to select delete in Window explorer paths. Lots of stuff to explore.

Windows Live integration with Windows 8 is extensive. The SkyDrive examples are impressive. Windows 8 will be the first mesh /hybrid / integrated OS. WinRT API exposes this so you can use that cloud extensibility in your Metro style apps!

Sorry if all this reads hectic, but it’s kind of hard to keep up. This is a tsunami of information! Keynote is wrapping up. The Hyper-V Windows 8 Server stuff will be for another day.

In the end a call to action for developers. Get the preview and get ahead of the pack delivering Metro style apps to a billion potential users. Up and at them developers!

Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference London 2011 Selling Out Fast!

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It seems a lot of Hyper-V expertise is converging on London in from November 2011 for the small but brilliant Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from them and listening to real world experiences of people who deal with the technologies on a daily basis. It will also be nice to meet up with a lot of on line acquaintances from the blogosphere and twitter. The conference is selling out fast. That’s due to the quality, small scale and very economic attendance fee. So if you want to meet up with and listen to expertise the likes of Aidan Finn, Jeff Wouters, Carsten Rachfal, Ronnie Isherwood and hopefully Kristian Nese have to share you’d better hurry up and register right now.

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

Perhaps we’ll meet.