Category Archives: Conferences & Events

Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany

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It’s with great joy that I can share that the Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany website is live and you can now register to attend. My fellow MVP and friend Carsten Rachfahl has realized one of his ambitions to organize a large community driven conference by and for the IT community in the DACH region. But please free to attend if you’re from outside that region, it is open to all and welcomes anyone who wishes to attend. Just note not all sessions will be in English, but in German.

Organizing such an event is not an easy undertaking and I want to applaud Carsten for making this happen. He’s one of Germany’s for most experts and via his company, Rachfahl IT-Solutions, he’s always contributed heavily into the community. Thank you Carsten, you contribute a lot and we appreciate those efforts.

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I invite you all to attend and join us on May 12 for the first edition of the Cloud & Datacenter Conference Germany in Dusseldorf. It offers more than 25 presentations by top community speakers in five parallel tracks. These tracks cover the entire spectrum of Microsoft technologies available to help you design, build and maintain a state of the art modern IT infrastructure. The conference covers Windows Server 2016, Hyper-V, Microsoft software defined storage, networking, azure stack, System Center, OMS, failover cluster, IaaS, azure, Nano server, PowerShell, containers, and much more.

I’m happy and honored to speak at this conference with so many true real life experts that are part the global community around Microsoft technologies. My presentation will aim to get you briefed on the new and improved functionality in Windows Server 2016 Failover Clustering. In that respect it’s a nice addition to my session What’s new in Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012 R2. I can only suggest to get up to speed on those as these are still very much valid and I’’ be focusing on the delta between Windows Server 212 R2 and 2016.

The breadth and depth of the technologies available to us cannot be overstated and is still growing. It takes a team effort with both complementary and overlapping expertise to stay on top of things. Education is a huge and important part of daily life for anyone working in IT.

Nowadays when any meeting can be held on-line an in person a conference is still very valuable. It enables you to focus on absorbing the content without being distracted by the realities and interrupts of daily work life. That’s why I still invest in attending conference and I hope you do so as well. When you attend one, be there! That might sound silly but it’s painful to see attendees working remotely and being on the phone all the time. Bart true emergencies that’s a waste of money and effort. Allow yourself or your employees to optimize the ROI of that conference by having them do why they came. Learn, get inspired and network with peers.

Register soon to secure your spot. The price is set a level to make sure it will not be an issue. Sponsoring by companies who have real investment in cloud and datacenter management and benefit from a flourishing well informed ecosystem make this possible.

Hyper-V Amigos Chat at the Grand Canyon

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Yes, you read that correctly, there was a Hyper-V Amigos Chat at the Grand Canyon. Last year, during the last week of October and the first week of November in 2015 my friend Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver) and I were in in the USA for Veeam’s VEEAMON 2015 and the Microsoft Global MVP Summit. In between those two events, we – two of the legendary Hyper-V Amigos – had to telecommute. No problems for us, we’re masters at remote working. We’re agile, flexible, dynamic, resourceful and mobile so we drove to the Grand Canyon to muse on our thoughts and recorded some videos on our experience at VEEAMON 2015 and our first experiences with the Windows server 2016 Technical Previews so far.

The results are nothing but amazing footage of a Hyper-V Amigos chat at the Grand Canyon. Both Hyper-V MVPs, Veeam Vanguards and Dell Tech Center Rockstars discuss what they know best and love to do whilst on their way to the Microsoft MVP Summit in a roundabout kind of way Smileimage

Enjoy people, have a great 2016. Click on the image above or follow this link:Hyper-V Amigos Chat at the Grand Canyon. More info on these technologies can also be found at http://hyper-v-amigos.net and http://hyper-v-server.de.

Recent Changes In My Technology Community Life

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Microsoft Most Valuable Professional

There have been some recent changes in my technology community life. As an MVP I have been assigned to the Cloud and Datacenter Management award category. This reflects the fact that we all touch on a lot more technologies than the expertise we have received or award for. In my case Hyper-V means I also do networking, storage,  high to continuous availability (clustering, network load balancing), data protection, IAAS as well as Identity Management (authentication/authorization) both on premises and on Azure.

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In that spirit we attended the MVP Summit 2015, which was a great experience and confirmed what Scott Guthrie stated above, we are “most valuable professionals”.

Veeam Vanguard

Another award is decorating my home office. It’s the inaugural member edition of the Veeam Vanguard Award we received at VEEAMON 2015 in Las Vegas that we attended.

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That conference was a blast by the way. Breakout sessions, white boarding sessions, presenting on Hyper-V related technologies and lots of networking with smart and engaged technologists. We also sat down with some CEOs of  2 companies and helped them determine an upgrade path for their hyper-V environments for the next 12 to 18 months. We  even some real world troubleshooting in one of the attendees environment. I’d like to think we delivered value for all involved and we got to learn a lot ourselves.

I liked what they shared about Veeam Backup & Replication v9 that’s in development. And their announcement for Veeam Backup for Linux was well received. You can preregister for that here

Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2015

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We’re leaving Las Vegas (VEEAMON 2015) and are heading for Seattle.

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I’ll be spending a week in Bellevue/Redmond from November 1st to November 8th to attend the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2015. As a Microsoft MVP one does not want to miss this summit. And I know quite a few MVPs who have quit their jobs the moment their boss told ‘m they could not go. Not saying we’d all do that but it’s true that skilled experts are in high demand and missing out on the MVP summit isn’t exactly making the best use of any MVP you employ.

It’s all NDA so basically I can’t tell you anything. But we’ll be sharing some tweets if joy and some lightweight blogs to share with the world how happy we MVPs are to be back at the mother ship for our annual firmware downloads and scheduled maintenance.

Until then here’s a nice Bing Maps overview of the MVP before & after hours area of operation.image

So yes, the Microsoft MVPs are descending on Bellevue / Redmond once again in large numbers. So you might hear a bit more Microsoft technology discussions in a bit more foreign languages or accents than otherwise. It’s us, no worries!

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It’s just great to an MVP Smile