Heading Home after Ignite 2016

While traveling back home here are some musings on Microsoft Ignite 2016. I’m not going to regurgitate all the news and announcements here.

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There were many and they were divers. Azure Identity, Security, storage, management, Windows Server 2016, Hyper-V, Storage Spaces, Storage Replica … are all offering a wide variety of new capabilities and options. It’s impressive now and it will be even more impressive in the future. When I connect the dots and look at the opportunities my take on what the future roadmap can and might be visualizes in front of my eyes. That’s the value I can add to an organization that’s committed to its future and realizes it needs to leverage IT to it’s fullest potential. That means you cannot treat IT as a facility because we build it on commodity products. Every success is build on creative and well directed use of the components and the capabilities. This requires a lot more than lip service or merely covering up bad choices and political ambitions with a thin layer of “big principles”. The key to success is speed, agility, insight in a world where mobile and cloud offer tremendous new opportunities. Large, long term, centralized projects have their place but sticking to them by default in the wrong place, the wrong way and manner will lead to failure in a 24/7/365 mobile world where federation, collaboration across boundaries are paramount. The small, cost effective and efficient projects delivering real value with a purpose will make giants, bot in government and the private sectors stumble and even fall.

We have so much opportunity here that many cannot see the trees through the forest anymore. This will lead to many failed projects, ambitions and organizations in combination with a waste of time and money. That’s were we can make the difference.

As an attendee and MVP I was very happy to be able to attend in order to calibrate my compass and correct course. In good tradition I signed the billboard for attending MVPs at Ignite 2016  I’m already looking forward to heading back to Redmond for the MVP Global Summit and continue the discussion at the Microsoft Head Quarters.

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To me, the Ignite 2016 edition was one of intensive networking with Microsoft experts and management. This extended to 3rd party vendors and partners of Microsoft. This, in combination with the discussions with my peers  to discover their views and insights have given me a very up to date view on where we are at and where things are going. That’s the value I’m taking back home to work with and help people reach their full potential. That’s not an easy task as many today are or feel at least a bit out of balance to completely lost. Technologists are the one to step up all the way to the board level and steer their organizations towards a successful future.  Many companies are not ready for this and some management feels threatened by this. There’s basically no need for that fear as we are technologists, not politicians. We solve problems, we don’t create them. We drive companies towards success, if you let us.

Happy New Year from a renewed Microsoft MVP in 2016

Happy New Year from a renewed Microsoft MVP in 2016

It’s January 1st 2016, late in the afternoon here local time and I have just received great news to start the new year with. It came by way of an e-mail notifying me I have been renewed as a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MPV).

The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say “Thank you for your technical leadership.”

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So it’s time for a happy New year from a renewed Microsoft MVP in 2016. My expertise is now Cloud and Data Center Management. It’s quite an honor to be renewed. Somewhere people think I make a big enough difference to be recognized, that caresses my ego just a little bit. More importantly however it means I get the opportunity to keep working with a lot of passionate and talented people. The ability to participate in a global community and ecosystem focused on our areas of expertise is something I have enjoyed for many years now. Attending the MVP Summit is the cherry on the cake and they sure do make you feel welcome at every place you stop on and around the campus.

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My fellow MVPs are always very helpful, they are both an inspiration as well as a source of tremendous experience and knowledge. Being a MVP has opened opportunities to both learn and teach, both professionally and personally. That’s what enabled me to grow in depth and breadth within my areas of expertise which ultimately translates into our new expertise assignment, cloud and datacenter management.

Thank you!

It’s a good time to wish you all a happy New Year. Let me take a moment to express my gratitude to all loyal or accidental readers of WorkingHardInIT. A blog without readers would be a sad thing but luckily you’re all reading this blog more and more, year after year.

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I’m grateful you for your continued support and spending the time reading my blog. To the people, businesses and organizations that given me so many opportunities and support and with whom I had the pleasure to work with in 2015, I say thank you and let’s continue to do so. I wish you all a marvelous 2016 with lots of joy, good health and tons fun at and outside of work!

The road ahead

2016 will be an interesting year. There’s a lot going on in our industry, some of it is hype, a lot of it is real. That reality is sometimes sobering but often inspiring. Keep cool, don’t panic or go ballistic. Smart discipline with a good portion of common sense, insights and a solid, yet flexible plan wins the day. You’ll also need some luck and turn up at the right place at the right time every now and then, ready to make the most of an opportunity. You get the idea.

There are and have been, as always, personal and professional challenges. That’s a given. Only newbies and idiots make picture perfect plans. They then get “dazzled” by the first punch on their snout which sends their plans falling apart like shattered glass. Sometimes the challenges are bigger and harder. This can mean you need to work even harder, smarter and perhaps even longer. It can also mean to cut your losses and disengage. No matter how good you are, how long, hard and smart you work, you cannot right all wrongs in this world. Leave that to the self-promoting LinkedIn blogs on “personal success and growth” aimed at ridiculously entitled people or the painfully naïve.

Importance

2016 will also know its challenges. They will be met with all the attention and dedication required where and when needed. They will be passed by or ignore where the effort just isn’t worthwhile. There’re good places to go, nice things to do and great people to meet. If I can seize as many opportunities in 2016 (TechEd, ITPROCeed, E2EVC, VEEAMON, Microsoft MVP Summit, ExpertsLive)  like I have been able to do in 2015 I’ll be a happy man, both professionally and personally.

How to get a dream job in 2016?

I’ve been asked that a couple of times. I’m not the one  for handing out personal advice, that would only shock your parents and potentially shake your worldview as well. Professionally I’d say, your profession, your career is not the same as your job. It might be, but more often than not it isn’t. That’s OK. You can build a career in your (chosen) profession even despite your job or jobs. Most MVPs work very hard and we put a lot of personal time into our technical skills and community. It isn’t a lifestyle of the rich and famous as some would think when you read a blog about a conference or summit.

VEEAMON 2015 Party

Those are a fun part of work, that’s for sure, but they don’t define our work days. It’s lots of work, learning, sharing and many battles are uphill!. We all have jobs that require us to do things we’d rather not have to do. Do what you need to do to stay afloat but try to do as much of what you like and enjoy it as possible. Do it smart and don’t waste your time or let others waste yours. The latter is something you should not do to other people either. When it comes to jobs it’s not all that simple as the sloganesque “Do what you love, versus work for money/the man/a pension/security” for most people. Sure most don’t like to admit that they have to take crap, but we all do. Anything else is as much BS as every employer that seems to pretend everybody has to be and is an engaged, inspired team player who’s going all out for the company, beyond and above what the job demands. That’s a bit too much like Office Space’s “Is this good for the company?” for comfort 😉

Recent Changes In My Technology Community Life

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

Join me for aTechNet Live Meeting: Hyper-V Storage Efficiencies & Optimizations in Windows Server 2012 R2

So you have been  playing with or down right seriously testing Windows Server 2012 and perhaps even Windows Server 2012 R2. That’s great. Many of you might have it running in production or are working on that. That’s even better.

Windows Server 2012 has brought us unseen capabilities & performance enhancements that make it a future proof fundament for many versions to come and it is ready for the ever accelerating pace of hardware improvements. R2 has fine tuned some points and added improvements that are stepping stones to better today and even greater in vNext. I’d like to invite you to a free TechNet Live Meeting on Hyper-V Storage Efficiencies & Optimizations in Windows Server 2012 R2 and look at some of these capabilities with me.

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As a virtualization guy two subjects are very dear to me and that is networking & storage, and this event is about a subset of the storage improvements. You might have heard about ODX and UNMAP but you have not had the change to play with it. You have read about the tremendous scalability of the IOPS in a VM and about large sector support for the next generation of hard disks drives. Well some of these we’ll demonstrate (ODX, UNMAP, Dynamically expanding VHDX performance) if the demo gods are with us. Others we’ll discuss so you’ll know where this comes into play and how you’ll benefit from them even without realizing you do. So without further delay register for the free TechNet Live Event here.