We want to keep you guys up to speed on what's happening from Tech Ed 2013 in New Orleans this week. Keep an eye on our blogs this week for session updates! Keep in mind I'm doing a brain dump to notepad during the sessions, then I'll post the sessions in the evening- so bear with me if some of this is cryptic. Feel free to ask questions in the comments and I'll try to elaborate.

Here's my first post:

Tech Ed 2013- PRC03: Implementing Next Generation Infrastructure Solutions with Windows Server 2012

Let's start the day with a bit of Slash singing Guns n' roses' "Civil War. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VToOIWLM7Tk

Presenter: Corey Hynes

CEO holSystems @holSystems

microsoftvirtualacademy.com

the guys joked around and shared a few stats- 86% of people are using AD 2008R2, 75% of people use Server 2008R2 for File servers. 

Talking about Virtualization, Storage, Networking, Management, Web and App Platform, Identity and Access, and VDI

We'll hear a lot about Windows Blue this week.

Everyone agrees that printers are bad, and that we should ignore them. 

The foundation of the modern datacenter now includes the planning and configuration of Hyper-V (or other brands) and has completely changed how we architect the fabric of the infrastructure. Now we also have to consider mobility.

The big key is virtualization and mobility. We need to be able to reconfigure things and migrate things with no downtime. 

In storage, we;re looking to move the SAN forward and make it easier (reducing the need for SAN admins). Windows shares are the new LUN's

In Networking we're looking to Improve at all layers Hyper-V, SMB, and File server. Mellanox infiniband and SSD drives can improve this drastically- Seeing a cluster in Redmond pulling 32GBps to New orleans!

In management we look to get a richer experience for admins, bring back ServerCore, Powershell, and PSWA (Power Shell Web Access). Servercore and UI play nice now.

We now thinking that AD Managers should not the the people handling Rights management. It's thought that Dynamic access control lets us classify data and people and then the access can be automated. It's not simple to set up, but its pretty slick when it works This is called DAC (Dynamic Access Control). This is mainly pointed at file servers, but not necessarily web based things like SharePoint.

VDI is coming back with big changes; it's now scalable, RemoteFX and RDP just plain rock. It's manageable. Most of the awesomeness comes from the new Hyper-V bits. 

Customers need bigger, faster, and more available VM's; better flexibility to deliver, the ability to handle complex storage and networking requests. The challenges are keeping services up, decreasing expenditures for people, equipment. We need bigger and more capable servers, we protect and use existing investments and infrastructure, and must also maintain multi tenant environments. That's all in direct contradiction to each other in some cases. Let's not forget the need to manage Quality. When that all comes together, we can accomplish a lot with the new Hyper-V and some pretty robust server equipment.

Did you know Dynamic memory can increase capacity without downtime. If we give it a range it can flex up and down. Where this is important is VDI, not server virtualization. VM Mobility is simultaneous live migrations between clusters. Hardware offloading offers better performance and scalability HyperV now includes metering metrics that you can use to calculate costs, potentially for chargebacks.

Someone admitted they got rid of an iPad for the Surface. The whole room was against tablets because they want to work; Surface made work possible. So they love it.

Acer laptop has 4x6gGB in a RAID. Boots FAST. Dell getting no love here.

Okay- back to bolts. Let's look at shared nothing live migration. The VM's in the instructors setup is using dynamic RAM. So we can set the startup RAM higher than the operating RAM if we like. We can also easily set the memory weight per machine to decide who gets priority. The OS still can't take new processors on the fly, but RAM can be. Setting up the live migrations is as easy as a setting in the live migration tab of the HyperV settings per host. We can and should use Kerberos, but CredSSP is also available. Storage migrations can also be easily configured. Once the thing is set up for live migration, we can simply move the whole thing, or pick moving only the VM and leave storage where it was. A "Planned Virtual Machines" folder will come up in the VM Store on the target during migration, then implement.

We're all pretty excited about the windows 2012 file copy window and task manager :) Good job Microsoft!

Now HyperV over SMB… We've got a High Availbilty File server cluster with CSV keeping things hot. 2012 has a high availability wizard built right in, There's a general use wizards, then there's a scale-out server which is more for SQL servers, DFS replication, VM's etc.So that being said, we go move the VHD storage file to the HA server (while it's running). UNC paths are supported in any config option, so I can pick and choose what to move like leaving the snapshots where they were. With using the HA server we've achieved a truly resistant VHD by moving it to the HA cluster, but running the VMX from the HyperV server. 

Oh no! I deleted my notes, thanks for having a backup of that Evernote…

So we got some demos of moving VM's in here basically. Sure, impressive, but not worth a whole day class. That said I think i'll move to another class at break.