Cretec's Blog

The event will take place on Friday, February 12, 2010. It is a live event being simulcast to multiple locations. It will also be recorded and made available online a few days after the event. You do have to register to attend and to download the event.

All the details and registration are outlined on the registration page(s). There are multiple Live locations so watch the links for tickets to the the location you want to attend.

Though this is a community event and run completely by volunteers, they sure are doing things right. From the great speaker and topic lineup to the online element and simulcast they have thought of everything. Of course as you would expect at any community event, they will have plenty of stuff to give out to the attendees.  They are serving lunch and will likely have snacks as well.  Then at the end of the day, they have a bunch of stuff to be handed out for drawing prizes.

Check out the prizes so far… They will have a Windows Server 2008 R2 with 5 Client Access Licenses, Windows 7 Ultimate, Office 2007 Standard, Xbox 360 Game Console, Zune Docking Station, some Xbox games and accessories, many, many books, T-shirts, hats, backpacks, and lots more to come.  Not all locations will have all prizes but rest assured, there will be plenty of giveaways at the LIVE events!

Go HERE for more details and registration information! 

Through out the virtualization era that we are in the heart of as I write this, the supporting technology has grown at an amazing pace. When hypervisors first started to get a foothold in the data center not much was expected to change. It was a great way to consolidate systems that were wasting otherwise good hardware resource in a very inefficient manner. Sure there was planning, but only to the level of what should go on the host, not so much as an infrastructure.

The technology grew and the possibilities of managing the virtual work load became possible, so did the possibilities. However for a large part these gains were wasted and although it gave many IT decision makers reason to move the hypervisor from the test/dev into production they were generally not used to their full potential. Work load management in the hypervisor has come so far and has capabilities that allow it to tie into the whole infrastructure not just the silo that, if not planned, virtualization becomes.

Good friend and former co-worker, Ken Oestreich, wrote an interesting article on his blog titled "If you think Converged Infrastructure & Fabrics are niche, guess again". He really gets into the facts about how big name companies like Cisco, HP, IBM, and Egenera are behind the technology and maybe more importantly why the new and future technologies are going to need it for their growth.

By creating a fluid or dynamic hardware infrastructure you create a truly dynamic system, not a hybrid that you get with a hypervisor alone. I may no longer work for Egenera, but the ideas that they pioneered and now Cisco,HP, and others have picked up on, are going to help drive the future of the data center, the cloud, and drive future ideas.

I recommend reading the full article.

Well it did not take as long as I thought for me to land somewhere. I am going to be a product consultant for virtualization. The interesting point is that up until now my virtualization experience has been based on VMware, a little XEN, and data center virtualization. Now I get to take a real inside look at Hyper-V and get a true understanding of how it works and it's benefits, strengths, and weaknesses.

Again coming from my background of hands-on experience with VMware as well as Sales experience, this will be quite interesting. I am a geek by nature and I am excited to learn even more of the virtualization space!