I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

Even though this comes with a slight delay, I’m just writing to say I’m very excited about our recent tour of events covered by the ITSpark and CodeCamp communities.

To keep things short, the end of November had both our communities covering events in 5 cities – Timișoara, Oradea, Cluj, Iași and Bucharest – and speaking to a total of about 400 attendees.

Among the speakers, we’ve had 6 Microsoft MVPs, and we’ve covered topics ranging from new technologies coming out in 2012 (Windows 8, SQL Server “Denali”, .NET Framework 4.5, the System Center 2012 suite and Hyper-V 3.0), to technologies already in use today (HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, EF, Unit Testing, MVC, WCF streaming and Office 365).

The feedback we’ve got was extremely positive, so we’ll definitely do this again in the future. Until then, I’ll leave you with a few other links (impressions, photos and some session slides):

• Adrian Stoian writes about the experiences in Timișoara and Oradea on his blog
• Our CodeCamp friends in Iași posted some pictures from their event as well
• Mihai Tătăran’s session on building Windows 8 apps with HTML5 and JavaScript
• Radu Vunvulea’s slides on Windows Phone multitasking and local database (a session which unfortunately he didn’t get to present in Bucharest, as his flight from Cluj was cancelled)
• Andrei Ignat session on MVC/EF is here
• Andrei Rinea’s WCF streaming slides and code are here
• All the sessions in Iasi are gathered in a post on the CodeCamp.ro blog
• My slides on Hyper-V 3.0 overview
• …and a couple of photos from the event in Cluj:

If you want more resources on Windows 8, I definitely recommend you check out the Build conference website, where you’ll find 275 recorded sessions on technologies coming in W8.

Also, for those of you who haven’t had a chance to get to the events, I just wanted to point out a thing we also mentioned to the attendees, which is that we’ve published all the video recordings from the ITCamp conference earlier this year. If you weren’t there or just wish to view some of the sessions again, head on to our ITCamp channel on Vimeo.

I don’t want to end this without sending our thanks to all our sponsors and partners for these events: Microsoft Romania, Yonder, Ullink, Small Footprint, Endava, Pras Consulting, OradeaDevs, Avaelgo and Transcent.

A huge thank you to all the speakers and attendees as well – we couldn’t have done all this without you!

Now that the Build Conference is over and the buzz is starting to wear off, I’d like to wrap up the things I’m most excited about when it comes to Hyper-V 3.0 and Windows 8.

First off, the fact that we now have Hyper-V on the client version of the OS made me dump my old dual boot setup and install Windows 8 Client as the main OS on my laptop. I’m very satisfied with how it runs so far, so it’ll probably remain that way until the Beta/RC versions come out.

But even cooler are the new features added to Hyper-V 3.0 – and here I’m thinking of things like:

• 160 LPs (logical processors) and up to 2TB of RAM support on the host
• 32 vCPUs (virtual-CPUs) and 512 GB of RAM support inside guests
• NUMA architecture support inside the guest
• Multiple concurrent Live Migration tasks (along with Live Migration queuing support in Failover Clustering)
• Live Migration without Failover Clustering
• Live Migration with no shared storage
• Hyper-V Replica (a feature which was announced a few months ago, Hyper-V Replica allows replicating a virtual machine to another Hyper-V host without the need for expensive storage hardware and replication software – it even works with local storage!; this brings in new Disaster Recovery scenarios which were very hard to achieve previously)
• Support for NFS storage (using SMB 2.2)
• Storage Live Migration without the need of a shared storage solution and a clustered setup
• Online Snapshot merge (the root cause of many issues with Hyper-V in the past was that the snapshot merge could only be done while the virtual machine was offline, and it usually took a *very* long time)
• VHDX format (the 2TB limit on VHDs is now raised to 16TB with VHDX)
• Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX) – enables Hyper-V to take advantage of the storage features on backend storage systems, i.e. when performing file copies, an ODX-enabled SAN will handle the data transfer itself with zero to minimal CPU utilization
• Dynamic Memory now allows you to specify a minimum memory value in addition to the startup and maximum values, as well as enables changes while the VM is running allowing you to increase the maximum or decrease the minimum memory
• Fiber Channel support inside guests
• Extensible Virtual Switch (the new virtual switch has a number of additional capabilities such as bandwidth shaping, while also being extensible and allowing a number of new features)
• Virtual machine priority on Failover Clustering setups (allows VMs to be started according to their set priority in case of a cluster node failure)
• Hyper-V now works fine with a wireless NIC as well (no more wireless connection sharing workarounds)
• In-box Metering – support for tracking virtual machine utilization (CPU, memory, network and disk space), currently only available via PowerShell cmdlets and not exposed in the GUI (this is amazing if you want to add a billing component to your virtualized infrastructure setup, for instance)
• Speaking of PowerShell, Hyper-V 3.0 now comes with a complete set of native PowerShell cmdlets – basically allowing you to script anything you can do via the UI
• Support for backing up virtual machines in Windows Server Backup

Windows 8 itself brings a number of new features as well, some of which do contribute to the overall Hyper-V experience, such as NIC teaming (finally!) and the native ISO and VHD support (no need for 3rd party tools to mount ISOs anymore).

All in all, I’m extremely excited about all the changes in Hyper-V 3.0, and I can’t wait to start “spreading the news” in my upcoming events and workshops.

If you want to test out Windows 8 (Server/Client), a Developer Preview version of the Windows 8 Client OS is available for free. In case you want to run it inside a virtual environment, this blog post should help you out. Also, as Ben Armstrong mentioned on his blog, while the Windows 8 Developer Preview does run under Hyper-V – there is a known problem with running the Windows 8 Developer Preview on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2.  If you are planning to do this you should have a look at this hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2526776

After releasing a public beta in May this year, Microsoft has now released version 6.0 of its capacity planning tool, the Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP), which is the follow up of version 5.5, released beginning this year.

Version 6 includes assessment and planning for evaluating workloads for public and private cloud platforms, identifying the workload and estimating the infrastructure size and resources needed for both Windows Azure and Hyper-V Fast Track. MAP 6.0 also provides an Office 365 client assessment, enhanced VMware inventory, and Oracle schema discovery and reporting.

Version 6 can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.

Via cloudcomputing.info