The World According to Mitch

Tuesday evening was the inaugural meeting of the IT Professionals Community of Greater Toronto (www.itprotoronto.ca).  The event was hosted at Nexient in Mississauga.

The evening's presentation was entitled 'Virtualization Fever… Catch It!'  Although the main focus of the evening was on the advantages offered in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, I decided to present the past, present, and future of virtualization.  I was able to demonstrate the advantages of virtualization using Hyper-V over both Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Virtual PC.  There was even some mention of competing technologies such as VMWare, a respectable product to be sure.

Of course so much focus of late has been on Windows Server 2008, what with the recent Heroes Happen {Here} launch event so most of our audience knew at least something about Hyper-V, but this was an opportunity for someone who is not a Microsoft representative to show the advantages while still discussing the downsides and the competition. 

Because there were so many questions about consolidation planning I decided to delve into another Microsoft product called System Center Virtual Machine Manager, a product which I really consider to be the bees knees for planning, consolidating, and managing your virtual environment.  Unfortunately it is not yet compatible with Hyper-V, chiefly because one released in November and one went into beta in February.  We are waiting with bated breath for either a patch to the current or the next release of SCVMM which should be Hyper-V compatible… stay tuned!

Speaking of Hyper-V (as we were on Tuesday!) the Release Candidate 0 for same was released on Tuesday.  If you are running Windows Server 2008 you can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDD94DDA-9D31-4E6D-88A0-1939DE3E9898&displaylang=en.  Hopefully a few of the issues with the old will have been repaired in the new 🙂

One of the attendees (cloaked in secrecy) wrote a couple of great blog posts about the meeting… One had me laughing out loud (even though it depicted me as the great and powerful wizard pulling the strings :))  Check out his two posts at:

http://ye110beard.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!952F95CB5DE3F349!653.entry

http://ye110beard.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!952F95CB5DE3F349!652.entry

True to YellowBeard's word ITProToronto does indeed meet at Nexient Learning (30 Eglinton Ave. W, 2nd floor, Mississauga) the third Tuesday of every month.  We are trying to not be cloaked in secrecy though, so you can leave your invisibility cloak at home :)  We hope to see you there on April 15th, 2008, when the topic will be Unified Communications!