At the end of the 2013 MVP Global Summit I was interviewed by Kerstin Rachfahl @ItsmeKerstin on what it’s like to be an MVP. You can find the results of her diligent & rendering work here or click on the picture for the link.
If you notice that I mention meeting, learning from and interacting with a large number of intelligent and passionate people a couple of times as one of the best thing about being a MVP than that is because it just is 
See update in yellow in line (April 11th 2013)
I recently saw KB2834898 (pulled) appear and it’s an important one. This fast publish statement is important as until recently it was accepted that Live Migration with pass through disks was supported with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Live Migration (just like with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V) as long as the live migration is managed by the Hyper-V cluster, i.e. the pass through disk is a clustered resource => see http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/440.hyper-v-how-to-add-a-pass-through-disk-on-a-failover-cluster.aspx
UPDATE April 11th 2013: Now after consulting some very knowledgeable people at Microsoft (like Jeff Woolsey and Ben Armstrong) this KB article is not factual correct and leaves much to be desired. It’s wrong, as pass-through disks are still supported with Live Migration in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, when managed by the cluster, just like before in Windows 2008 R2. The KB article has been pulled meanwhile.
Mind you that Shared Nothing Live Migration with pass through disks have never been supported as there is no way to move the pass through disk between hosts. Storage Live Migration is not really relevant in this scenario either, there are no VHDX file to copy apart fro the OS VHDX. Live migrations between stand alone host are equally irrelevant. Hence it’s a Hyper-V Cluster game only for pass through disks.
I have never been a fan of pass through disks and we have never used them in production. Not in the Windows Server 2008 R2 era let alone in the Windows Server 2012 time frame. No really we never used them, not even in our SQL Server virtualization efforts as we just don’t like the loss of flexibility of VHDX files and due to the fact that they tend to complicate things (i.e. things fail like live migration).
I advise people to strongly reconsider if they think they need them and only to use them if they are really sure they actually do have a valid use case. I know some people had various reasons to use them in the past but I have always found them to be a bit of over engineering. One of the better reasons might have been that you needed disks larger then 2TB but than I would advise iSCSI and now with Windows Server 2012 also virtual Fibre Channel (vFC), which is however not needed due to VHDX now supporting up to 64TB in size. Both these options support Live Migration and are useful for in guest clustering, but not as much for size or performance issues in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. On the performance side of things we might have eaten a small IO hit before in lieu of the nice benefits of using VHDs. But even a MSFT health check of our Virtualized SQL Server environment didn’t show any performance issues, Sure your needs may be different from ours but the performance argument with Windows Server 2012 and VHDX can be laid to rest. I refer you to my blog Hyper-V Guest Storage Performance: Above & Beyond 1 Million IOPS for more information of VHDX performance improvements and to Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V & The New VHDX Format Leads The Way for VHDX capabilities in general (size, unmap, …).
Is see only one valid reason why you might have to use them today. You have > 2TB disks in the VM and your backup vendor doesn’t support the VHDX format. Still a reality today unfortunately 
But that can be fixed by changing to another one 
Well I’ll be traveling towards MMS 2013. A big thank you, by the way, to the team back home for keeping an eye on things while reading the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Installation and Configuration Guide.
I’m attending this conference for the great networking opportunities and to establish the role System Center will have in our future. Many thousands of us will be attending MMS 2013 in Las Vegas (Nevada, USA) once again for that very same reason. I’m travelling over LHR to LAS with the help of British Airways as one of their Boeing 747s does the job quite adequately.
System Center 2012 SP1 has been released with full support for Windows Server 2012 whilst Windows 8 is gaining traction and the BYOD & Hybrid trends are ever increasing the challenges for management & support. Meanwhile we’re faced with ever bigger challenges keeping up with Private, Hybrid & Public cloud efforts and trends while maintaining our “legacy” systems.
I’m looking forward to discuss some serious issues we’re dealing with in managing an ever increasing varied ecosystem. Things are moving fast in technology. This means we need to adapt and move even faster with the flow.My friends, colleagues, fellow MEET members & MVPs, business partners, Microsoft employees I’m looking forward to meeting up at the Summit in Mandalay Bay!
Next to the sessions I have meetings lined up with vendors, friends & colleagues from around the globe as we optimize our time when we can meet face to face to talk shop and provide feedback. If you can’t attend follow some of the action here at MMS 2013 Live!
If you read my blog or follow me on twitter and are attending be sue to let us know so we can meet & greet.
Just a short heads up to let you all know that the sessions of the TecDays 2013 in Belgium are available on the TechNet site. The slide decks can be found on http://www.slideshare.net/technetbelux
In case you want to see my two sessions you can follow these links:
Now there are plenty more good sessions so I encourage you to browse and have a look. Kurt Roggen his session on PowerShell is a great one to start with.