Archive for the ‘ Microsoft ’ Category

ITCamp 2011

I haven’t written anything on my blog lately, mostly because I’ve been busy organizing what seems to be one of the largest IT community events in the country: ITCamp 2011

We’ve received an amazing response from both the speakers we’ve invited, the sponsors we’ve contacted, and from all of you out there who have registered for the event (we’re way past the 200 people mark).

Quoting from the event website:

ITCamp 2011 in numbers:

  • 2 conference days, with 2 parallel tracks each day (Dev and ITPro)
  • 19 speakers (among whom we have 10 Microsoft MVPs and 4 international speakers)
  • 21 technical sessions and over 5 hours of networking/discussion breaks

Don’t miss ITCamp if:

  • You want to be up to date with the latest IT technologies
  • You appreciate the chance to interact with highly skilled professionals in your area of expertise
  • You are an IT manager, team lead, programmer, database or systems administrator and you work with the Microsoft Application Platform
  • You want to find out more about useful stuff meant to improve your existing skillset
  • You enjoy presentations held by experienced speakers, who are well known across the country or even across the world
  • You wish to attend trainings that are both cost-efficient and packed with useful infoYou intend to expand your customer or collaborator/partner portfolio

The event starts tomorrow, and will take 2 whole days. You can follow what’s happening there on Twitter  (@itcampro or #itcampro) and Facebook (facebook.com/ITCamp.ro).

2011
05/25
CATEGORY
Events
ITCamp
ITSpark
Life
Microsoft
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Microsoft Connection Days

Another round of events is coming up – and this time it’s all about the NGO-s.

So what’s the deal with Microsoft Connection Days? TechSoup Romania has teamed up with the ITSpark community in a Microsoft-sponsored event designed to bring NGO and IT people together, in an attempt to help the civil society use technology in order to achieve faster and more efficient results. This is one more thing that makes Microsoft’s investment in Romanian civil society an obvious commitment on their part.

I’ll be travelling along with the rest of the ITSpark team to Cluj-Napoca (April 5th), Bucharest (April 8th) and Timișoara (April 15th), and we’ll talk about Microsoft tools and their benefits for civil society. If you’re in any of those cities and are interested in attending, the details about the events are here (in Romanian).

See you there! :)

2011
04/02
CATEGORY
Events
ITSpark
Microsoft
TechSoup
Travelling
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SCVMM 2012 Beta is out

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 beta (evaluation) is now available for download. More info on what SCVMM 2012 brings in to the table:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 delivers industry leading fabric managment, virtual machine management and services deployment in private cloud environments. Virtual Machine Manager 2012 offers key new features that include hypervisor creation and management, network management, storage management, private cloud creation, self-service usage and service creation. It features deep investments in server application virtualization, service design and service modeling all of which can be used to efficiently offer an on-premises private cloud.

  • Fabric Management
    • Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management – Deploy Hyper-V to bare metal server, create Hyper-V clusters, orchestrate patching of a Hyper-V Cluster
    • Third Party Virtualization Platforms – Add and Manage Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX Hosts and Clusters
    • Network Management – Manage IP Address Pools, MAC Address Pools and Load Balancers
    • Storage Management – Classify storage, Manage Storage Pools and LUNs
  • Resource Optimization
    • Dynamic Optimization – proactively balance the load of VMs across a cluster
    • Power Optimization – schedule power savings to use the right number of hosts to run your workloads – power the rest off until they are needed
    • PRO – integrate with System Center Operations Manager to respond to application-level performance monitors
  • Cloud Management
    • Abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds
    • Delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas
    • Enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud
  • Service Lifecycle Management
    • Define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, os images and applica tion packages
    • Compose operating system images and applications during service deployment
    • Scale out the number of virtual machines in a service
    • Service performance and health monitoring integrated with System Center Operations Manager
    • Decouple OS image and application updates through image-based servicing
    • Leverage powerful application virtualization technologies such as Server App-V

Again, download is available here (both as an installer and in VHD format).

2011
03/22
CATEGORY
Downloads
Free stuff
Microsoft
Virtualization
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New Hyper-V component architecture poster

An updated version of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Component Architecture poster, including the new SP1 features (Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX) has recently been published on Microsoft Downloads.

The new poster provides a visual reference for understanding key Hyper-V components and technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, focusing on architecture, snapshots, live migration, virtual networking, storage, RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory.

You can also refer to the previously published Windows Server 2008 Hyper-v Component Architecture, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 component posters.

2011
02/21
CATEGORY
Downloads
Microsoft
Virtualization
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MAP 5.5 is out

After the public beta available last year, Microsoft has recently released the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit version 5.5. MAP provides agentless discovery, inventory and assessment for a variety of scenarios, now supporting assessment for migration to the Windows Azure and SQL Azure platform.

The Windows Azure assessment inventories web applications and SQL Server database instances in the environment and reports the information you need to plan the migration of these on-premises workloads to the Windows Azure Services Platform and Microsoft SQL Azure Database.

The new 5.5 version provides the following new features:

  • Assessment for migration to Windows Azure and SQL Azure
  • MySQL, Oracle and Sybase database discovery for SQL Server migration projects
  • Server consolidation assessment for Hyper-V
  • Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7 upgrade assessment

Definitely a handy tool! You can see it in action here.

2011
01/21
CATEGORY
Downloads
Free stuff
Microsoft
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Future Hosting conference 2010

I attended #FHC10 in Cluj this Friday as a guest speaker, with a talk on how to host your virtual private cloud (more info on FHC on the conference web page). The slides are below:

First of all, I’d like to thank the organizers (@wbfro and @lorandm) for this opportunity – it was an interesting day, with quite a few of the players in the local hosting industry attending the event. The conference ended with a very heated discussion panel, with @todipruteanu from Microsoft, @manac from Appnor, and @horiavasiliu from WebFactor.

All in all, the conference has definitely grown as compared to last year’s event, and my view is that it’s going the right way.

2010
10/24
CATEGORY
Events
Life
Microsoft
Virtualization
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Linux under Hyper-V R2 screencast (Romanian)

Even if it’s been done a couple of months back and only privately shared with some 3rd parties until today, I’m now making this screencast (in Romanian) on hosting Linux under Hyper-V R2 public. The screencast itself comes as a result of me being in close contact with some of the larger players in the Romanian hosting industry during the past year (while working with Todi and the rest of the great people in the local Microsoft subsidiary), so I did this as a way to provide some localized content on the topic at hand, as Linux clearly plays a major role in the local hosting market.

While some most of the companies I’ve talked with were only moderately interested in taking the next step and hosting their virtualized environments on top of Hyper-V, this was largely due to their lack in information on the subject. And I do know for a fact that the content covered in this screencast has changed many of these views. :)

I’m sorry for the quality of the audio, I’ll try and see if I can make it better for next time. Without further ado, you can find the screencast below (the HD version is available on Vimeo):

If you want, you can also download the slides here.

Part of the content was covered in Brent Shoemaker & John Kelbley’s WSV305 session at this year’s TechEd North America. I’ve also got some demos showing how to install the Linux Integration Services v2.1 (RTM) inside Linux VMs, and in the end I talk about some more tools that make your life easier when dealing with Linux and Hyper-V. Also, here are some useful links extending or better describing the topics addressed in the screencast:

Hope you enjoy it! ;)

2010
10/01
CATEGORY
Microsoft
MVP
Tips and tricks
Virtualization
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