Server 2008 launch: Sydney down....onto Melbourne!

Yesterday marked the start of the Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 - Sydney was the beginning.

The was plenty of buzz at the event with Deeps running around with a video camera interviewing people, there was a Twitter feed and a Flickr feed too.

The Windows Server track rocked - we totally changed the format of the way events usually are done by us - we focused on demos....lots of demos and only used PowerPoint when there was something that couldnt be conveyed in a demo. I kicked it off with an Active Directory migration to Windows Server 2008 from a Windows Server 2003 domain, followed with Server Deployment using WDS and WAIK and finished with Policy changes including GP Preferences.

Philip Duff continued on with an awesome Windows Server Virtualisation session that included live clustering across iSCSI.

Amit Pawar followed him with a live demonstration of a Terminal Server being configured, including TS Gateway and Remote Apps and even included Softgrid - and then he connected to it live over the internet with his 3G connection!

I followed him again and used the same demo environment from the previous two sessions and did a session on Branch Office which included a demo of RODC promotion into the domain (actually this was the only demo that I had fail - and I think I know why it happened too!) and showed a DFS Namespace and DFS-Replication partnership being setup and had a discussion into the core changes of SMB 1.0 and SMB 2.0 that enables faster file transfers and less interruptions. Actually on that one - watch out closely for the APC article that will discuss the Vista SP1 Performance changes. James Bannan has done a fabulous job on getting you the data to understand just how much faster it is!

Jorke Odolphi finished up the track with IIS 7.0 and showed you just how easy it is to get PHP running on a Windows Server!! :)

So now its onto Melbourne - if you havent registered be quick its nearly full - and so are the other cities. The feedback has been excellent! As one customer said to me in an email "...it was a day well spent!..."

 

BTW - For those of you who attended and saw my spectacular failure of the RODC demo saying that the forest was at Windows 2000 Forest Functional mode when Id set it to Windows Server 2008 - I have a sneaking suspicion that I hadnt run the adprep /rodcprep against that domain!! Doh!! Will check it in Melbourne :)

Update 3/3/08: Im in Melbourne and Ive just booted up the images....the message that was on the screens referred to the forest functional mode not the domain functional mode. To introduce RODC's into an environment the forest must be at Server 2003 forest functional and mine was indeed at Windows 2000 forest functional.