Now for the free stuff.  Attendees received a small bag (man purse?), a notepad, a pen, and a 1GB flash drive.  Citrix XenServer is also now free with XenMotion (live migration) and XenCenter (let’s see how VMware responds to this ).  Picture of the free stuff below.

Free Stuff

Score with Virtualization

Date: 2/24/2009
Time: 9:00 am EDT – 3:00 pm EDT
Location:
555 12th St NW
Washington, DC
Hosted by: Citrix Systems Inc.
Venue: ESPN Zone

Agenda

9:00am Registration, breakfast and partner networking
9:30am Opening remarks
10:00am Virtualization Today
10:30am Dynamic Demos
12:30pm Lunch with roundtable discussions
1:30pm Customer panel with moderator intro and Q&A
2:30pm Closing remarks, evaluations, and raffles

More info here: http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/events/event.asp?eventID=1685694

They pretty much talked mostly about the benefits of virtualization and Microsoft System Center.  They showed live demos on how to use System Center and its interoperability with VMware ESX Server.  They also showed demos for application virtualization and there are hands on labs if you want to try out the products.

For the free stuff, you get a T-Shirt, a voucher for prep course collection #6319 and exam #70-652 ($316 value), and a Microsoft Virtualization Evaluation Kit (will be mailed to you).

Here are the sessions:

Session I: Server Virtualization and Management
An inside look at Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager from an architectural and a real world point of view. Complete with live demo’s of real life scenarios, and even a look at SCVMM managing VMWare ESX servers.

Session II: How Microsoft IT builds Dynamic Data Centers
A look at the current and future Microsoft Data Center. See how Microsoft IT, one of the world’s largest IT organizations, uses Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V to provide dynamic, scalable, and real-time adjustment to business needs.

Session III: Understanding Virtualization at the Desktop Level
The future of the Enterprise Desktop is very exciting, and Microsoft Virtualization technologies like Softgrid (App-V), Med-V, MDOP, VECD and Terminal Services are in the middle of it all. This session will provide an understanding of the directions of the industry, and highlight the capabilities of the technologies available, as well as look at what the future will bring.

I’m planning on going to the one in New York on November 3 if my manager approves it.  If not, then I’ll take a day off so I can attend the event .

I know this post is a bit late.

Anyway, we attended the Tech Ed 2008 IT Professionals in Orlando, Florida last month (June 10-13) and it was a lot of fun! Lots to do and learn. There were a lot of people who attended (close to 9,500 according to Microsoft).

This is my first Tech Ed and I’m really glad I was able to go to this one. There were a lot of sessions to choose from, plenty of labs, free stuff from vendors (if you let them scan your badge to get your information so they can spam you later), etc. I attended mostly sessions and labs on unified communications and security and most of them were pretty good.

There was also an attendee party at Universal Studios on Thursday night (June 12) and that was a lot of fun as well. They pretty much reserved the theme park for that night just for the Tech Ed attendees.

Some pictures below. Next year’s Tech Ed is in Los Angeles, California, I hope I’ll be able to go this one as well!

Overall, the event was pretty good, there were a few technical glitches during the keynote but nothing major. All of their demos were running in Hyper-V.

I attended the infrastructure session which covers Windows Server 2008 and I have to say that I’m now very excited to really play around with the new features in this new version of Windows after attending this presentation. I really didn’t know much about it before the event.

Here are some of the new features in Windows Server 2008:

1. Server Core installation option (Finally!!! This is a minimal installation of Windows Server 2008, no GUI. This is a very nice option if you want a server to perform a dedicated task, like a print server for example. It requires less disk space, better performance, better security, and less things to manage and patch)
2. Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODC)
3. Terminal Services enhancements (TS RemoteApp, TS Gateway, TS Web Access, TS Session Broker, TS Easy Print)
4. Group Policy improvements (Ability to search, filter, and add comments)
5. Network Access Protection

They also gave away some free software:

• full version of Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 32-bit
• full version Visual Studio 2008 Standard
• 1 year evaluation of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise 32-bit and 64-bit
• community technology preview of SQL Server 2008 Developer 32-bit and 64-bit

It looks like I’m gonna be pretty busy this weekend.

Also see: http://www.calazan.com/microsoft-launch-event-2008/

Ok, I have to admit that I actually didn’t know that such a day existed until I found this site, which is the official System Administrator Appreciation Day website.

According to the site, this idea to have a special day for SysAdmins was created by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator in Chicago. He was inspired by a print ad for a Hewlett-Packer laserjet printer showing lines of employees bringing gifts for the IT guy who made the purchase.

The first SysAdmin Appreciation Day was celebrated on July 28, 2000. It has gained support from organizations such as the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), Friends In Tech (FIT), Sunbelt Software, and “In The Trenches,” a podcast for SysAdmins.

The System Administrator Song

Related articles:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1460166.stm
• http://mcpmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=367

Click here to register.

We went to their launch event last year for Vista and Office 2007 and it was pretty good. They gave away a full version of Office 2007 Professional to those who stayed until 2:00PM or so. I remember this one guy fighting with the employees there because they wouldn’t give him a copy of Office 2007 since it was too early, lol.