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 
In November 2012 during Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference in Hamburg a couple of fellow MVPs (Aidan Finn aka @joe_elway, Carsten Rachfahl aka @hypervserver, Thomas Maurer aka @ThomasMaurer) I delivered a keynote and a master class on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. During some down time at the conference we took the time to do some podcast interviews with Florian Klaffenbach form Dell aka @FloKlaffenbach. We also sat down for a video interview on our beloved subject. Carsten Rachfahl was the interviewer/director and did a great job, for which I’d like to thank him in this post as he’s been doing a bunch of them over the years and it’s nice to see the results of the time he puts into them.
Subjects include converged networking, migration paths, Cluster Aware Updating and the very capable Windows 8 hypervisor we can now enjoy for free.
I enjoyed my time at the TEC2011 conference. The networking with fellow IT Pros was excellent and the discussions were rich in content. It’s fun to see that a lot of people are already looking at Windows 8 server. In that respect the session by Hans Vredevoort “Hyper-V Storage Deep Dive” was a very good one, offering a look at things to come. Information is not yet flowing in on Windows 8, or at least not in the quantities we’d like. We all expect that situation to improve before the end of the year when we’ll (hopefully) find a first beta under the x-mas tree to play with during the holidays season 
. Jaap Wesselius was haunted by the demo gods. Well it was either the demo gods or all those “always on” IT Pros bringing the wireless down. But he recovered strong in his session “Virtualizing Exchange 2010” that was actually called "Exchange on Hyper-V:do’s and don’ts". Not even the demo gods can keep Jaap down. We also enjoyed seeing Carsten Rachfahl in action in his session on “Hyper-V networking Best Practices” which he brought well and with a sense of humor on his new best practice since the evening before when a bunch of us where testing things out on Hyper-V clusters all over Europe Maarten Wijsman (in Holland) & Rick Slagers (on the scene at TEC2011) form Wortell.nl were both assisting in this endeavor.
I had a good time, met a lot of people from the community like Joachim Nässlander (@Nasslander). The Belgian ProExchange community was well represented and Ilse Van Criekinge was there as well. I learned a lot and I’m happy to have attended.To conclude our conference on Wednesday Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver), Hans Vredevoort (@hvredevoort) and I did a video panel interview on Hyper-V Windows 8 Server and some 10Gbps cluster networking. He’ll put it on line on his web site http://www.hyper-v-server.de/videos/ so you can find there when it’s released. Jaap, Hans and I went to dinner and concluded the conference with a beer in the bar. It’s back home tomorrow and then to work.
In October 2010 Aidan Finn (MVP) his book “Mastering Hyper-V Deployment” was released and in November three copies of this book landed on my desk. I bought them (pre order) via Amazon. Nope I did not get them as a gift or anything. Why Three? Well that’s the number of people I wanted to get up to speed about Hyper-V and virtualization management and operations in a Microsoft environment.
His book takes you along a journey through a Hyper-V project that will teach you about virtualization in all it’s aspects. It also touches on many supporting technologies and products such as System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, System Center Essentials 2010, Data Protection manager 2010 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. No one book can be the only source of knowledge and understanding, but using this book as a start for both new and experienced IT Pros to learn about virtualization with Hyper-V will give you the best possible start. Consider it going to an Ivy league college on a scholarship paid for by Aidan’s experience and hard work. The subsidized tuition fee is the price of the book.
We feel a bit sorry that Aidan only got one copy so we made a group picture of the gang of three on the desk of our newest team member. He got a copy of the book together with 4 recycled PC’s and a TechNet subscription to build a lab.
If you know people who want or need to learn about Hyper-V, you’d do well to make sure they get this book and have them set up a lab to play with the technologies. Those efforts will pay off big time when they implement their solutions in the wild. If Ireland is doomed it won’t be because of smart & hardworking Irish IT professionals like Aidan. You see when you design, build and support IT solutions that your customers depend on 24/7 you can not hide behind false promises, you can’t fake away from the fact when “stuff” doesn’t work or hide behind vast amounts of papers & documents void of any substance. Nope, you are responsible for everything and anything you build. Aidan backed and supported by some very knowledgeable colleagues has made that burden a bit lighter for you to bear with this book. Aidan’s blog lives here: http://www.aidanfinn.com/