Inside the War Room

So today is launch day in Toronto where we kick off the cross Canada tour as we release Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office System and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.  There has been a lot of prep that has gone into this event and with a successful event in Edmonton on November 23rd we are ready to make you ready.  The last tour I went on I posted a picture of the gear we hauled around for the Core I|O Tour '06 in September.  Well this time we have a little more equipment to haul.  This picture was taken on December 1st as the IT Pro Advisors went through a dry run where we did the final tweaking of the demos.

There is a table under there somewhere.  On stage in the IT Pro track we have 4 Dell Precision M90 notebooks, each with a Core 2 Duo T7600 2.33GHz CPU, 4GB DDR-667, a 100GB SATA internal drive and a 250GB external SATA drive.  There are 17 virtual machines spread out over 3 Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 hosts that use up approximatley 200GB of hard drive space.  The largest virtual machine has a VHD that weighs in at a whopping 20GB!!!  And just as a precaution, because we are always prepared (and can never have enough hardware) we each have everything backed up onto another external 250GB Iomega USB2 hard drive.

On top of that we have a pile of Windows Mobile 5 devices including a Bell and a Telus Palm Treo 700w, a Bell and a Telus Motorola Q, and a GSM HP hw6950.  Going through airport security has never been more fun.  If you see an IT Pro Advisor in front of you at airport security, go to a different line -  it usually takes us a while to get through :)