Download The Next Wave Of System Center Suite Products Release Candidates

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As you all probably know by now in 2012 there will be a lot of new tools available for us IT Pros. Windows 8 Server alone holds so many new features and added value that it alone will keep us busy for many years to come. On top of that, the 2012 version of the System Center Suite is being released. I hope most of you have started looking at the betas and the release candidates. If not I encourage you to do so. There are a lot of great improvements that will help us enhance our current setups and operations, not to mention enable us to build a private cloud. For some musings on why you might want to do that, even if you have no public cloud plans yet, I refer you to my blog post The Private Cloud A Profitable Future Proofing Tactic?

To help you get started with testing I include some links to some of the most interesting products.

If you select the “Download All Available System Center 2012 Products” option you’ll get all most current versions of the pre release. To fully test the System Center 2012 Suite products you’ll need Windows Server/Hyper-V but also the current line of System Center Suite (upgrade testing).

The full Windows 2008 R2 SP1 OS is available here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dd459137.aspx  and you can find the free Hyper-V Server here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dd776191.aspx 

The most relevant current System Center Suite products are available via these links:

To top it all of and get acquainted with “The Cloud” grab the “Deploying and Managing Windows Azure Applications” here http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/hh282846.aspx

There you go. All this should keep you usefully occupied and out of trouble during the end of year holidays and make you an knowledgeable and capable IT Pro, ready for the year to come.

TechDays 2012 Belgium – Register Now

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TechDays 2012 in Belgium will be here sooner that you think right now. So start planning for it. Set aside the time and get your attendance approved by your management. If you need some help with the latter take a look here for some help with a pre edited e-mail message for IT Pro and for Developers.

Most of you will already know why you would attend these 3 full days of technical sessions for developers and IT-professionals but if you don’t, go take a look at the TechDays 2012 web site for more information.

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TechDays in Belgium has been around for a while and it’s celebrating it’s 10th year of existing. And with good reason. I’ve seen this event grow bigger and especially better over the years. If you work in the IT sector and your involved with Microsoft products this is one of the premier events to attend in Belgium. You won’t be disappointed!

Video Interview on CSV & Storage Design by Carsten Rachfahl

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I already mentioned that during the Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference I met a lot of great people and I presented on High Performance & High Availability networking for Hyper-V clusters (10Gbps goodness). Some of the people I met I already knew from the on line community and others were unknown to me until that event. Among the attendees we found some of the usual virtualization suspects in our community like Aidan Finn, Jeff Wouters, Carsten Rachfahl, Ronnie Isherwood.

Now Carsten Rachfahl is a MVP in Virtual Machine expertise but he’s also a dynamic entrepreneur who shows a lot of initiative. Using social media he is really making in effort to get people & customers to notice important snippets of information by providing easy and fast access to them. He’s very active as a speaker, on Twitter and on his blogs. On top of that he does podcasts and video interviews. For Hyper-V information go to http://www.hyper-v-server.de/  which you can also use  as an entry point for his other sites focusing on several aspects of IT in the Microsoft sphere in Germany. Like cloud computing & Licensing. There you’ll also find the videos of interviews on these subjects. It’s quite an impressive endeavor.

Carsten took the opportunity to make some videos with all the above suspects on various subject and he recently released our interview. 2011-12-01-didier-interview

In this video we continued the discussion that Aidan started on CSV and we briefly touched on a subject you could make hour long documentaries about: storage options in Windows Hyper-V now and in the years to come. Enjoy!

HP Discover 2011 in Vienna

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I’m off to Vienna (Austria) to attend HP Discover next week. The idea is to go look at their kit and learn a bit more about what’s available and possible. I hope to discuss their offerings with them and I will have storage as my main focus. This is because things are about to get busy in that area for us.  I’ll also provide them with some feedback on our experiences, what we like, don’t like etc. Call it “the good, the bad and the ugly" of free (no I don’t need or want a free Amazon gift card to provide it) customer feedback if you like.

I appreciate a chance to provide feedback to vendors directly and I do think it is important. Not because I have that much to say or have such a big impact but because apart from sales figures it’s the best way to help them and thus us as customers to get good things enhanced and broken stuff fixed.

If there is one thing that a lot of vendors are missing is a better view of the opportunities in the SME market that has a need for enterprise level features but on a smaller budget. That does exist and that market can be tapped more than it is now. Sometimes it seems like the commercial offerings in this market are divided in small & large and the sizes in between are crushed or forgotten between those two markets. I hear this a lot from colleagues & friends as well, so it’s not just me. We’re not the huge budget crowd but make up for that in numbers. We’ll see what HP has to offer that segment of the market in 2012.