Merry Christmas and a Happy 2012

goldfinch ecard

My Christmas card for 2011 is inspired by a frequent visitor to my back garden the Goldcrest.  The trick to seeing them is to resist the temptation to tidy up and dead head too much, whereas that’s exactly the sort of thing you should be thinking about in your data centre to keep it clean and tidy.  The problem here is often knowing what you’ve got, and why it’s needed especially with an explosion of virtual machines.  So before you hit the delete key I would suggest you download and run the Microsoft Assessment & Planning Tool (MAPT).  This not only reports on Microsoft stuff it looks at 3rd party software and your hardware and virtualisation environment.

I will certainly be doing lots of tidying up on my demo rigs to free up enough resources for System Center 2012 now much of it is at release candidate and of course the release candidate of SQL Server 2012 is now available as well.  The team have planned out lots events next year, IT camps, the System Center 2012 preview tour is still on tour and of course I’ll be at SQL Bits to complete my perfect attendance.

Until then, whatever you’ll be doing over the Christmas break, have fun and don’t hog the XBox.

 

Andrew