Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Sorry for the delayed posting; I didn’t take my laptop on the 1st day and I twittered my thoughts thoughts the day – hopefully you can see them on my home page but here is a more considered version of my experiences so far..

The wireless is not as good this year – I’m struggling to get a connection and have had to resort to a wired connection in the work area which is a shame.

The keynote had a lot of Green IT and virtualization messages, VMWorld had almost exactly the same message (and a mature product 🙂 ) at VMWorld last year – there were some interesting parallels.

As usual, well organised and easy to move around the conference centre, good facilities – I note TechEd will be moving to Berlin next year, will be interesting as the Barcelona site seems ideal, Amsterdam was too big but this feels about right – but bit of variety can’t do any harm!

VMWare have a stand in the exhibitors hall, sadly they don’t have their ESX4 demo available – they are hoping to be able to have it running by Weds.

Reading between the lines from sessions like the keynote and OS deployment tool schedules – I strongly suspect that Windows 2008 R2 will be released with Windows 7 between June 09 and June 2010 – yeah, it’s a big window… but it seems to be consistent.

Windows Server 2008 R2 is currently under development, beta out shortly

Interesting new Server 2008 r2 features:

• Will support Hyper V live migration of VMs
• 2008 R2 will be x64 only, no x86 version
• Branch Cache – file and http cache for branch offices – hope to catch some more details on this, as I assume it needs client-side support – Windows 7 seems to be mentioned in conjunction with it
• BitLocker to go – encryption for removable volumes (HDD based backups etc.)

Interesting new tech from the keynote

• Exchange online – the ability to {seamlessly} migrate users from your internal Exchange 2007 server to one hosted within Microsoft’s cloud (is this Azure? – I’ll try to find out) works by setting up an AD sync job and then can move the mailbox out/back again – clever, launching spring 2009
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 will beta at the end of November 2009 – looks to bring good SLA and cross-platform (Linux etc.) support
• SQL Gemini – fast and flexible client side BI analysis tools – looked very clever from the demo
• App-V (think SoftGrid for servers) will be coming, more info in 2009 – virtualized Exchange/SQL etc. would be interesting

In general, it does seem a bit toned down from the last time I came in 2006, less big announcements but I think that’s a hangover from the lessons learnt around the Vista hype machine and still a lot of good technical content.