Virtualization solves issues at CDSBEO - Part II

This is part two of a two part discussion of technology in use at a local school board here in the Ottawa region. As I mentioned in the previous post - I love discovering how technology is being used to help support the delivery of education.

While I was at a virtualization conference put on by IDC a while back, I met James Proulx, Director of IT at the Catholic District School Board of Eastern Ontario (OCDSBEO).  He suggested that I stop by to see what the CDSBEO is doing to simplify their environment and speed up the deployment of applications to their HighSchools and administrative staff. At our first meeting, I met with his team and we talked about what their plans were for the coming year and what they were doing to simplify application deployment and start exploring server consolidation. That was back in September 2007.

I was in touch on an off throughout the year and finally made it back to see how their year had gone.  I stopped by for a coffee to talk a couple of weeks ago and met with Ken Konick, James Vandine and Brian Whalen - three systems analysts with the board.  This time - we focused in on their use of x64 Virtual Server 2005 R2 for consolidation, System Centre Virtual Machine Manager for management and Windows Server 2008 x64 (both full and core installs) as Hyper-V server virtualization solutions.

PLEASE NOTE: as stated in the podcast - Hyper-V is still pre-release and is supported on a best effort basis until it is final LATER THIS SUMMER. Don't worry I told them that part....

At the time of recording - they were not aware that SC-VMM V2 was in Beta and that they could manage ALL their host systems with one console - let's just say they started downloading when I headed out back to Ottawa. :)

Have a listen - you can download the short 15 minute podcast here.

Rick 
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