Category Archives: Learning

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

Microsoft Belgium At The Speed of Light, Traffic At A Glacial Pace, AD FS 2.0 , Vittorio Bertocci & a Large Chocolate Bunny

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Wednesday April 27th 10:45

We’re helping out on the infrastructure side of a claims based authentication project with my team and I had some questions on AD FS 2.0. The two lead developers (U2U Consult’s Kris Vandermotten & Stefan Gevaert ) also had some outstanding questions or rather they needed a echo chamber to discus some design choices.  Now imagine you have TechDays 2011 going on in your country and Vitoria Bertocci (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/, @vibronet ) is over there to present a decent amount of sessions and is available to the attendees for questions.  OK I have two people of my ICT team running around to broaden there horizons but I’m at the office holding the fort. Kris says he saw Vittorio the day before but missed an opportunity to talk to him on Tuesday.  I’m thinking & saying , yeah I should mail him. I really should. Why haven’t I yet?

Wednesday April 27th 14:20

Kris & Stefan suggest to go to Antwerp and meet up with Vittorio. I’m thinking like, good plan but how do we get this set up so fast? Mail? Nah, what if he isn’t able to read it.  We need an other approach. I decide to use two channels. Twitter and telephony. One tweet (with a very fast response from Vittorio) and some phone calls to Microsoft employees I know might be at TechDays 2011. The first two are not there that day but Arlindo Alves (@aralves) is. I get him on the phone very quickly (note that he is extremely busy during an event like TechDays) and ask him if we can set up a meeting with Vittorio. He says he’ll ask and will get back to me. Well it’s 15:00 hours and we have a meeting set up for 10:00 hrs Thursday morning. Wow Smile Now I’m impressed with how fast this went from “let’s try” to reality.

Thursday April 28th 08:00 hours

We’re leaving in Gent to go to TechDays at Metropolis in Antwerp.

Thursday April 28th 10:05 hours

We arrive at Metropolis. Wow again but not in a positive way. I’m not impressed at all at the “speed” we got to Antwerp. I’m not even sure if you can call what I witnessed driving anymore. But hey, there is a reason I love telecommuting, riding my bicycle to work and using the train to commute.

Thursday April 28th 10:10 hours

We start a very interesting and fruitful talk with Vittorio about our project. He’s extremely knowledgeable on the subject, passionate about the technology and he loves to help people understand and use it better. We’re happy with what we learned and the talk ends with us keeping our promise to Arlindo & Vittorio. We brought Belgian chocolates. Now, we didn’t exactly manage to get “pralines”, it was a bit larger (http://twitpic.com/4qglxb). For some reason we think he’ll remember us when we send him a follow up mail.

Lessons learned. If you need to talk to some one at Microsoft don’t be afraid to ask. Also be willing to act fast and to grab an opportunity because people like Arlindo Alves from Microsoft Belgium are very good at making them happen!

BriForum Europe 2011 & The Experts Conference Europe 2011

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Great news from the educational & conference front. First of all, I’m attending BriForum in London, United Kingdom in May (http://briforum.com/Europe/index.html).  That’s good news, normally we’d have to pop over the big pond to go to that one, so this is pretty neat. And timely, due to some prospecting I’m doing for Disaster Recovery,  Business continuity, application aware storage in a virtualized environment It’s a good match and I hope to get in to some educational discussions about the challenges we all face. Some of the storage vendors we’re interested in are there as well so there is certainly some potential to make it a good experience.

And just recently confirmed that The Experts Conference is coming to Europe. TEC2011 Europe will be held in Frankfurt, Germany from October 17th to October 19th 2011. This conference is high quality and created to fill the needs of the most experienced users, which is one of the reasons I would like to attend. The more you learn & grown the more you bump into the next level of challenges and being able to learn form high level content and interact with experienced speakers and attendees who are dealing with the same issues can be very rewarding. Attendees of TechEd have a way to measure the level of the sessions, well, they are all supposed to be Level 400 only. Quest is hosting this, so they certainly should be able to round up the expertise.  I’m going to make it to the new “track” at this conference and that’s “Virtualization & Cloud”. More information can be found here http://www.theexpertsconference.com/europe/2011/virtualization-cloud-training/overview/

The timing of these conferences is pretty good. As I said we’re doing a lot of prospecting right now and hope to get a lot of information from attending these. For anyone interested why I attend conferences and why I think they are valuable see mu blog post on this subject https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/06/05/why-i-find-value-in-a-conference/

Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 for Windows Server 2008 R2 available for public download

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As TechNet subscribers, we had access to Windows Storage Server 2008 with Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.2  (also see Jose Barreto’s blog on this here). That was sweet but for one little issue. This SKU cannot be a Hyper-V Host. In order not to lose a physical host in the lab you could edit the MSI installer from the Windows Storage Server 2008 install media where you would delete the SKU check. Problem solved but not very legal so nobody ever did that.  You can install Windows Storage Server in a VM for the lab I know but that becoming very SkyNet like … Virtual servers providing virtual storage for virtual servers … and while a good option to have I like to have a hardware host.

Bring Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 along and Microsoft decided that we could have the iSCSI Software Target 3.3 software without constraints, except that you needed a TechNet/MSDN subscription, to install on W2K8R2. This is the one I’m running in my labs at the moment installed on a Physical Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise edition that also is a Hyper-V host. This provides all my iSCSI storage to both physical and virtual clusters. I used it to test MelioFS with FileScaler recently with a 2 node virtual cluster.

Today, Jose Barreto blogged about the public release of iSCSI Software Target 3.3 for Windows Server 2008 R2. This is very good news as now everyone has access to an iSCSI target for labs, testing, POCs, and even production. Thank you, Microsoft. Now with some luck, we could get some SMI-S support for it with SCVMM2012? Please?

If you need some help, Jose Barreto has a bunch of blog posts on configuring the iSCSI target, so I suggest you check out his site. As an added benefit, Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 setup & configuration is scriptable using PowerShell.