Long summer nights ahead (well more like fall in Belgium, but hey I’m in Sunny Madrid 
at TechEd now).
Grab the bits from MSDN or TechNet!
Need guidance? Look at the documentation that went live just now here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh801901.aspx
Have fun & happy learning!
I’m so ready for the first Windows 2012 R2 preview bits. Yes that’s what our current setup looks like. Two RDMA capable NICs at the ready 
… let the bits come. I’m pretty excited to test Live Migration over Multichannel & RDMA.
.
We choose to get RDMA NICs for new servers and replace non RDMA card in host where there’s a clear benefit. By the way have you seen the news on the Mellanox ConnectX®-3 Pro Single/Dual-Port Adapters => NIC support for NVGRE is here people!
One of the great additions to Hyper-V in Windows Server 20012 R2 are shared virtual disks. TechEd 2013 is disclosing a lot of new and improved features and this is one of them!
This single feature brings benefits to me I can use to solve business issues today:
How easy is it? Look at this:
New-VHD -Path C:ClusterStorageVolume1Shared.VHDX -Fixed -SizeBytes 30GB
Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName Node1 -Path C:ClusterStorageVolume1Shared.VHDX -ShareVirtualDisk
Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName Node2 -Path C:ClusterStorageVolume1Shared.VHDX –ShareVirtualDisk
That’s it, basically. No fabrics to extend to the guest, no vFC needed. In simplicity it looks a lot like SMB 3.0. A major improvement.
With a shared VHDX I get mobility and flexibility I’m used to with VHDX files & virtualization. FC, iSCSI, SMB3.0, Storage Spaces, PCI Raid, Share SAS, it all doesn’t matter what happens to the underlying storage infrastructure when doing guest clustering in this way.That’s sweet!
We have a lot of large size LUNs. 2-16TB. We want to virtualize all of these as the speed of backing up these large VHDX file a LOT better than backing up a LUN with millions of smaller files. But when we need high availability we have to go for vFC, iSCSI and don’t get that benefit. Yes we can also use SMB3.0 already gave us a helping hand (SQL Server guest clustering if you don’t or can’t do “Always On”) in some scenarios but it’s not the major storage deployment out there (not yet) AND we’re talking about file server workloads. Now with shared VHDX we can have our cookies and eat it to. Or better 2 cookies!
This just rocks. My live just got better and easier. So can yours. Moving to Windows Server 2012 (R2) is all that’s needed. For more information look here at Application Availability Strategies for the Private Cloud (Speakers: Jose Barreto, Steven Ekren)
It’s that time of the year again, when TechEd is coming closer. I’m attending the European Edition in Madrid, Spain. But I can guarantee you I will be on line a lot during the USA edition as well. At be attending the USA edition this year if I could but work, time and budget wise I can’t make that happen. This isn’t because the European edition is less, absolutely not. The reason is that at MMS2013 in Las Vegas last month we got the heads up that Microsoft will start talking publicly about the new version of Windows and I’m game for that. Windows Server 2012 is the best Windows version ever but I know what I’d like to see in there to make it even better. I’m kind of curious if anyone at MSFT follows my thinking on this subject. I hope so!
So yes I’m a TechEd advocate, you bet! If you want to know why, read my blog post here on https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/06/05/why-i-find-value-in-a-conference/.
Come and learn amongst your peers, network with them and industry experts. To become competent and gain expertise you are going to have to get out there and expose your ideas, insights and thinking to your peers around the globe. That’s how it works. To those who dismiss quality conferences like this I can only say that you are wrong. To those who claim it’s a paid holiday I can only say that to a liar all other men are liars and to a thief all other men are thieves. Enough said. Invest in knowledge and competence development, it will pay of better than some extra thousands of € in the bank!
So if you can please join me and attend TechEd. It’s a blast and a tremendous learning experience. I never ever miss attending TechEd, not even at times it wasn’t easy for me to do so. You can register here. I hope to see you there!