Following the recent success of a well attended online training, my team has started enhancing the content and publishing it to the Microsoft Virtual Academy. The first course, Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals – The Platform, is now available for online learning. The new course contains four modules:

1. Virtualization Overview
2. Differentiating Microsoft and VMware
3. Hyper-V Deployment Options and Architecture
4. High-Availability and Clustering

The course title may be a bit misleading. The content is certainly highly relevant not just for individuals with VMware background. From the course description:

Virtualization has become a key component of any modern datacenter, offering such advantages as easier deployment, resource pooling, server consolidation, application compatibility, high-availability, reduced costs and centralized management. The Platform course offers a deep-dive into the important technologies that contribute to the core virtualization infrastructure, and is the first track in the three track program covering Microsoft Virtualization. Learn about Microsoft’s virtualization offerings and strategy, datacenter planning, Hyper-V architecture, VM management, virtualized networking and storage, numerous other Hyper-V features, as well as advanced management with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. Understand high-availability and disaster recovery considerations to keep your VMs up and running using Windows Server Failover Clustering. Explore how Hyper-V is both different and similar to VMware virtualization through technical and terminology comparisons. By the end of this track you will have the tools you need to plan, design and deploy your virtualized datacenter or Private Cloud infrastructure.

More courses in the “… for the VMware Professional” series are coming soon. Among them are the following:

• Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals – Management
• Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals – VDI

My favorite interview was one Joey had done with Aashish Dhamdhere. Joey and Aashish talk about recent innovations in Windows Azure and how they relate to the daily work of the IT pro.

Watching the video will give you a good head-start for TechEd this year. While there have been innovations in Windows Azure since then, the video is a great way to get the gist of Windows Azure for the IT pro.

Topics covered are VMRole, Remote Desktop into Windows Azure, Admin Role and many other.

Video: WMV | 3GP | iPod | Zune
Audio: WMA | MP3

My favorite interview was one Joey had done with Aashish Dhamdhere. Joey and Aashish talk about recent innovations in Windows Azure and how they relate to the daily work of the IT pro.

Watching the video will give you a good head-start for TechEd this year. While there have been innovations in Windows Azure since then, the video is a great way to get the gist of Windows Azure for the IT pro.

Topics covered are VMRole, Remote Desktop into Windows Azure, Admin Role and many other.

Video: WMV | 3GP | iPod | Zune
Audio: WMA | MP3

Not only that but the EMC CEO expects that most applications will be virtualized by year end:

Tucci said: “This is the year when most if not all applications get virtualised… all IT professionals will understand the opportunity of where cloud meets big data [and] the hybrid cloud will become the defacto choice [for enterprise].”

Read the full article and what the EMC CEO had to say about data growth here.

For the sake of this post, let’s assume we all know and agree on what cloud computing is. BTW, there’s a great definition of cloud computing by the NIST. Take a look if you haven’t already.

What I hope IT professionals get from this short post:

• Confidence that current skills is all required to discover the opportunities of cloud computing
• The cloud is not meant to make you or your job redundant, it is meant to help you and the business you support grow.
• The cloud is the next step in the evolution of computing and you want to be part of it (and be it just for you to be home earlier)

Skills

The benefits of cloud computing and cloud based solutions from Microsoft in particular (disclosure: I lead an IT pro evangelism team at Microsoft) are obvious and plenty. Highlighting the most overlooked and obvious one: Your current skills.

This morning I read an article claiming “New IT skills will be required as cloud computing takes off.” Thankfully that is true. Don’t we all want to learn and keep our skillset up to date, always looking for opportunities to improve? While the author of the before mentioned article is generally right, reading it I had the feeling he describes cloud computing as only disruptive. I disagree with that.

Discovery and Evolution

One aspect of “the cloud” is disruptive in the sense that it enables scenarios like instant access to resources and virtually limitless scalability for any company or business of any size and flavor, without huge upfront investment. But it is also part of the evolution of computing and IT infrastructure. Let’s be more specific.

We spend a lot of time at Microsoft thinking about how we can continue introducing innovations in computing without disrupting your daily business, always keeping the current skills of our customers in mind. No different with Office 365 and Windows Azure or our solutions in Private Cloud.

With our clouds (forgive this nebulous term) you can put your current skills to work immediately. There is no steep learning curve, no new tools. You are good to go.

Regardless if you are the IT guy for your 10 people business or you work for a larger organization’s IT department, you can use your current skills to enable the benefits of the cloud for your company. Don’t let anyone tell you different! Many of the Microsoft tools you work with on a day to day basis are also available to manage solutions that span your local environment and the cloud. Other products, currently not supporting local and cloud based scenarios, are under development and will extend their reach into the cloud soon. There will be sleuth of new tools coming your way too. They all will use concepts you are familiar with and help you help your teams, companies and enterprises to be more successful.

Bring your proven tricks, learn some new

There is no doubt the cloud is not just more of the same old stuff. There’s a whole new world out there. But you already have the skills to take advantage of most of the new
“…abilities”. Start using of some of the new features and do what you have always done best – learn the new tricks while you’re doing the great job you do since you started your career.

At your own pace you will learn additional aspects of cloud computing. Getting more air cover so to speak. To help you, many teams at Microsoft started putting together resources aiming at helping you with your discovery and the evolution to the cloud.

One of the best places to start is the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

The Microsoft Virtual Academy or MVA (we love acronyms you know) is a new online portal help you to improve your technical IT skill set and help advance your career with a free, easy to access training portal. You learn at your own pace, focusing on Microsoft cloud related technologies. To make things fun we added a recognition system. You can gain points and get recognition. As of today we have over 15,000 students registered. This portal will be growing together with you. We constantly expand the MVA with new courses.
The academy highly depends on your feedback and input. We want to add more courses based on your requests. Please take a few lessons and give feedback.

Cloudy and rain in Seattle.

On May 24-26 Microsoft Learning is hosting a free 3-day Jump Start tailored for IT Pros interested in learning more about preparing for and deploying Office 365. This is the first public training for IT Pros on Office 365.

The course will be streamed live from 10:00-am-4:00pm on all 3 days, and the recordings will be published later on TechNet Edge for later viewing.

The team will deliver an overview of Office 365, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online.  Top subject matter experts for each technology will be presenting the content. You can find more info in this MSL blog post.

Register HERE: http://bit.ly/Office365-JUMP

Agenda

Day One — “Office 365 Platform” | May 24, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT
Microsoft Office 365 Overview for IT Pros
Deploying Clients for Office 365
Administration & Automation using PowerShell
Identity and Access Solutions
Directory Synchronization

Day Two — “Exchange Online” | May 25, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT
Exchange Online Overview for IT Pros
Exchange Online Administration
Staged Exchange Online Migration
Hybrid Options with Exchange Server & Exchange Online
Exchange Online Archiving & Compliance

Day Three — “Lync & SharePoint Online” | May 26, 2011 | 10am-4pm PDT
Lync Online Overview & Configuration for IT Pros
SharePoint Online Overview
SharePoint Online Administration
SharePoint Online Extensibility & Customization
Office 365 Deployment Overview

Click the image for details.

Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 enables administrators to increase the power of the on-premises cluster by adding computational resources in Windows Azure. With the Windows Azure “burst” scenario, various types of HPC applications can be deployed to Windows Azure nodes and run on these nodes in the same way they run in on-premises nodes.

Microsoft just published a new technology paper providing a technical overview of developing and managing HPC applications that are supported for the Windows Azure burst scenario. The document covers aspects like application models, data location strategies and considerations, deployment scenarios, and on-premise/off-premise integration.

Download the Windows HPC with Burst to Windows Azure technology brief.

Find additional resources about Windows HPC Server and HPC on Azure here:

Windows HPC TechCenter

Microsoft High Performance Computing for Developers

Microsoft Technical Computing (TC) Labs

HPC Trekker (Author’s blog)

HPC on Channel9

HPC Homepage on microsoft.com