A Great day in the Land of Virtualization

Well today has been great. My inaugural Operations day for Premier Field Engineering "Virtual Server and Beyond " has come to a close. I can honestly say it went really really well. I must admit it was hard work putting it all together but I had a really great Colleague Sarah Lidington working with me plus my other colleagues Mark Empson, Ben Pearce,Justin Zarb ,Duane Thomas ,Ben Caird , Vas Modinos and Lee Marsden. We also had some great participation from some Live Interactive Demos running on the following kit.

 Vendors Hewlett Packard, AMD and NetApp, really came through for us and I really thank them for their help and participation. Hewlett Packard brought in some DL385’s, AMD -brought some Servers to plug into some Net apps storage devices. We installed Windows 2008 with some early copies of Veridian, and multiple instances of .vhd's that included SQL2005 Exchange 2007 (64 bit), Windows 2003 R2 64 Bit, Windows NT4, amongst others. The Interactive demo kit was received really well, by our Premier Customers . It showed our future releases working very well on a range of Platforms even on early Beta Code.

Some great highlights of the day were presentations from Justin Zarb and Andrew Bennett on Softgrid\Softricity.  This really initiated a tremendous amount of questions around this Technology area.

Also it was fascinating to hear about how we setup our Microsoft Virtual Labs Program. You can watch a video of him here, and also listen to a recent podcast of him here.

All the participants however delivered a brilliant sessions... I was really proud !. I personally found the most informative session on "The future is bright the futures is Virtualization" as delivered by Duane Thomas of Premier Field Engineering.