There are 10 sessions at a time Tuesday night during the TechEd 2007 Birds of a Feather evening! Making your choice can be hard. Luckily, if your a Systems Admin or Engineer, I think I’ve got you covered. Your datacenter; be it a single rack or an entire building… will be affected by virtual machines in the next 5 years. Do you know what other admins are succeeding (and failing) at in designing their virtual systems?
Topics of discussion at the 7:45pm event include:
- Why do you use virtual machines
- Biggest issues you’re facing today in using more virtual machines
- Individual virtual server hardware design
- VMWare vs. Microsoft, what made you choose
- Backups and disaster recovery designs using virtual servers
- Identifying virtual machines on the network
- Controlling virtual machine growth and resource overutilization
- Preventing unnecessary “temp” guests from being “always on”
I hope to see you there, and learn from your experiences.
Say hello to my first BOF moderation: Are you a TechEd 2007 attendee that keeps hearing how virtualization is here to stay and will affect your server (and desktop) environment in major ways? Are you a leading-edge engineer who already has a virtual datacenter and dealt with the many forms of virtualization and how it affects your physical server designs? If so, come to the Birds of a Feather session Tuesday at 7:45pm in Room N210 B.
I’ll be moderating this discussion which I hope will help dispel some myths, expose some potential hang-ups (see Breakout Session SVR240 Avoiding Virtualization Gotchas the same day at 1pm in S230 E), and educate us all on how we can better plan and prepare (and hopefully jump onboard) for this next wave in server build-out and datacenter design.
So there is a huge blogging world at TechEd. I use it to keep up on Breakout Sessions I?m missing, fun stuff happening in the TechEd-o-sphere (youtube, flickr, etc) and get that general ?plugged in? feeling at the event.
Several ways I this are:
This year is different for me in that I won’t be there until Tuesday morning, so until then I’ll be glued to Virtual TechEd. Not sure if the presenters will be uploading their content to the Schedule Builder on the fly, but it would be cool if I can catch some PowerPoint’s before I get there.
After 10 years on Windows in the enterprise, I think 2008 will be the year of virtual guest machines being used for production as a near mainstream tactic for “Server Virtualization”. VMware (as I’ve personally experienced) can be a lot to get going for a Windows shop, so I see the free Virtual Server 2005 R2 appearing as a way to take the now $5k dual-proc quad-core servers HP is putting out to good use. Few apps will utilize these I/O and CPU resources and with VS 2005 R2 SP1 out any time now, we’ll see even more barriers being taken down for those that actually want to utilize their hardware assets.
Soon SCVMM will hit the streets, Longhorn will ship, and if you’re a smart Windows shop and implementing SCCM, SCOM, SQL Reporting Server, and the other System Center products, you’re datacenter will be humming along with near-amazing agility and workload insight previously only seen in very highly maintained 1%’er shops. The amazing thing is if you’re willing to focus on System Center products rather than a mix and match of everything from other venders? you’ll end up with something much like a true distributed computing environment with deep insight into what’s going on at a application and “app system” level rather than the more common ‘pinging port 80/443′ to determine if services are up.
I believe this shift to virtual web and application servers will happen so quickly (for those that let it) that I’m hosting a Birds-of-a-Feather session on in at Microsoft Tech-Ed 2007 this year (Tuesday night). Come see what others are already doing to ensure their datacenter is “virtually ready”.
From the TechEd 2006 CommNet
* More than 1,250,000 pieces of Mikes and Ikes were consumed over the course of the week.
* 18,750 pounds of salad were prepared and offered at meals.
* 83,700 ice cream novelty bars and fruit and yogurt bars were served.
* 60,000 (or 5,000 dozen) eggs were eaten by attendees at breakfast.
* It took four tractor trailer trucks to transport the 150,000 bottles of water that were consumed this week.
* The total amount of fruit ordered for this week would fill three-quarters of a full-size tractor trailer.
* At least 1.6 million ounces of coffee were poured.
* More than 50,000 pounds of carbohydrates were consumed at Tech·Ed (Atkins who?).
* 7,500 table cloths were used and reset on a daily basis.