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The virtual event agenda is the following:

Private cloud discussion with Microsoft executives: Insights and news

• Satya Nadella, President, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft
• Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Management and Security Division, Microsoft
• 8:30AM PST | 16:30 UTC

Executive panel and Q&A: Guidance and best practices

• Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Management and Security Division, Microsoft
• Jacky Wright, Vice President, IT Strategic Services, Microsoft IT
• Rand Morimoto, Chief Executive Officer, Convergent Computing
• 9:00AM PST | 17:00 UTC

Envisioning Your Private Cloud: A scenario based demonstration from the Microsoft Technology Center in Redmond, WA.

• 9:30AM PST | 17:30 UTC

Once again, the registration link is here - enjoy!

To keep things short, the end of November had both our communities covering events in 5 cities – Timișoara, Oradea, Cluj, Iași and Bucharest – and speaking to a total of about 400 attendees.

Among the speakers, we’ve had 6 Microsoft MVPs, and we’ve covered topics ranging from new technologies coming out in 2012 (Windows 8, SQL Server “Denali”, .NET Framework 4.5, the System Center 2012 suite and Hyper-V 3.0), to technologies already in use today (HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, EF, Unit Testing, MVC, WCF streaming and Office 365).

The feedback we’ve got was extremely positive, so we’ll definitely do this again in the future. Until then, I’ll leave you with a few other links (impressions, photos and some session slides):

• Adrian Stoian writes about the experiences in Timișoara and Oradea on his blog
• Our CodeCamp friends in Iași posted some pictures from their event as well
• Mihai Tătăran’s session on building Windows 8 apps with HTML5 and JavaScript
• Radu Vunvulea’s slides on Windows Phone multitasking and local database (a session which unfortunately he didn’t get to present in Bucharest, as his flight from Cluj was cancelled)
• Andrei Ignat session on MVC/EF is here
• Andrei Rinea’s WCF streaming slides and code are here
• All the sessions in Iasi are gathered in a post on the CodeCamp.ro blog
• My slides on Hyper-V 3.0 overview
• …and a couple of photos from the event in Cluj:

If you want more resources on Windows 8, I definitely recommend you check out the Build conference website, where you’ll find 275 recorded sessions on technologies coming in W8.

Also, for those of you who haven’t had a chance to get to the events, I just wanted to point out a thing we also mentioned to the attendees, which is that we’ve published all the video recordings from the ITCamp conference earlier this year. If you weren’t there or just wish to view some of the sessions again, head on to our ITCamp channel on Vimeo.

I don’t want to end this without sending our thanks to all our sponsors and partners for these events: Microsoft Romania, Yonder, Ullink, Small Footprint, Endava, Pras Consulting, OradeaDevs, Avaelgo and Transcent.

A huge thank you to all the speakers and attendees as well – we couldn’t have done all this without you!

The STEP program was launched in 2009 as an effort to not only drive global awareness and value of Windows products, but to help influencers build community and advocacy around these key technologies. The goal has always been to make our launch efforts a true, “for the community, by the community” effort. Since that time, the program has expanded to support Windows, Office, MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack), Desktop Virtualization, Windows Intune and Internet Explorer to help support the growing needs of the IT-Pros.

This program helps to expand reach beyond typically-attended Microsoft events like TechEd to more local efforts. The nexus of the program lies in the IT pro-ready content on The Springboard Series on TechNet. This “how-to” content helps IT pros to Discover and Explore, Pilot and Deploy, and Manage Windows, MDOP, Office, and IE. Content is currently available in 10 languages and the site receives over 3.5 million visitors each month.

Some benefits of the STEP program include:

• Since 2010 STEP members presented 350 events to over 130,000 IT Pros in 39 countries on 15 languages.
• STEP members were invite to participate at MMS, TechEd US, TechEd EMEA, on Talking About Windows, the Springboard Series Tours (US and EMEA) tour,  as well as on the Springboard Series Virtual Roundtables.
• STEP members are regularly featured on the Springboard Series on TechNet, the TechNet homepage and community pages and in the Springboard Series Insider Newsletter.
• STEP members are sought after for many speaking opportunities.
• STEP members have access to members of the Windows product team for troubleshooting and questions.
• STEP members have regular opportunities to participate in product panels and focus groups.
• STEP members presented at MVP summit alongside Microsoft SMEs.

I’d like to publicly thank everyone at Microsoft who had a say in this for the amazing opportunity I’ve received, and of course to everyone who has ever attended my events/seminars – this wouldn’t have been possible without the people out there who I got to share my knowledge with over the years! I’m sure the STEP membership will empower me to keep doing what I was doing up to now anyway, but this time on a whole new level.

You can check out the Springboard page on TechNet, the Springboard Series blog and the official Springboard twitter feed for more information.

First off, the fact that we now have Hyper-V on the client version of the OS made me dump my old dual boot setup and install Windows 8 Client as the main OS on my laptop. I’m very satisfied with how it runs so far, so it’ll probably remain that way until the Beta/RC versions come out.

But even cooler are the new features added to Hyper-V 3.0 – and here I’m thinking of things like:

• 160 LPs (logical processors) and up to 2TB of RAM support on the host
• 32 vCPUs (virtual-CPUs) and 512 GB of RAM support inside guests
• NUMA architecture support inside the guest
• Multiple concurrent Live Migration tasks (along with Live Migration queuing support in Failover Clustering)
• Live Migration without Failover Clustering
• Live Migration with no shared storage
• Hyper-V Replica (a feature which was announced a few months ago, Hyper-V Replica allows replicating a virtual machine to another Hyper-V host without the need for expensive storage hardware and replication software – it even works with local storage!; this brings in new Disaster Recovery scenarios which were very hard to achieve previously)
• Support for NFS storage (using SMB 2.2)
• Storage Live Migration without the need of a shared storage solution and a clustered setup
• Online Snapshot merge (the root cause of many issues with Hyper-V in the past was that the snapshot merge could only be done while the virtual machine was offline, and it usually took a *very* long time)
• VHDX format (the 2TB limit on VHDs is now raised to 16TB with VHDX)
• Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX) – enables Hyper-V to take advantage of the storage features on backend storage systems, i.e. when performing file copies, an ODX-enabled SAN will handle the data transfer itself with zero to minimal CPU utilization
• Dynamic Memory now allows you to specify a minimum memory value in addition to the startup and maximum values, as well as enables changes while the VM is running allowing you to increase the maximum or decrease the minimum memory
• Fiber Channel support inside guests
• Extensible Virtual Switch (the new virtual switch has a number of additional capabilities such as bandwidth shaping, while also being extensible and allowing a number of new features)
• Virtual machine priority on Failover Clustering setups (allows VMs to be started according to their set priority in case of a cluster node failure)
• Hyper-V now works fine with a wireless NIC as well (no more wireless connection sharing workarounds)
• In-box Metering – support for tracking virtual machine utilization (CPU, memory, network and disk space), currently only available via PowerShell cmdlets and not exposed in the GUI (this is amazing if you want to add a billing component to your virtualized infrastructure setup, for instance)
• Speaking of PowerShell, Hyper-V 3.0 now comes with a complete set of native PowerShell cmdlets – basically allowing you to script anything you can do via the UI
• Support for backing up virtual machines in Windows Server Backup

Windows 8 itself brings a number of new features as well, some of which do contribute to the overall Hyper-V experience, such as NIC teaming (finally!) and the native ISO and VHD support (no need for 3rd party tools to mount ISOs anymore).

All in all, I’m extremely excited about all the changes in Hyper-V 3.0, and I can’t wait to start “spreading the news” in my upcoming events and workshops.

If you want to test out Windows 8 (Server/Client), a Developer Preview version of the Windows 8 Client OS is available for free. In case you want to run it inside a virtual environment, this blog post should help you out. Also, as Ben Armstrong mentioned on his blog, while the Windows 8 Developer Preview does run under Hyper-V – there is a known problem with running the Windows 8 Developer Preview on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2.  If you are planning to do this you should have a look at this hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2526776

In building Windows 8 we worked to enable Hyper-V, the machine virtualization technology that has been part of the last 2 releases of Windows Server, to function on the client OS as well. In brief, Hyper-V lets you run more than one 32-bit or 64-bit x86 operating system at the same time on the same computer. Instead of working directly with the computer’s hardware, the operating systems run inside of a virtual machine (VM).

Hyper-V enables developers to easily maintain multiple test environments and provides a simple mechanism to quickly switch between these environments without incurring additional hardware costs. For example, we release pre-configured virtual machines containing old versions of Internet Explorer to support web developers. The IT administrator gets the additional benefit of virtual machine parity and a common management experience across Hyper-V in Windows Server and Windows Client. We also know that many of you use virtualization to try out new things without risking changes to the PC you are actively using.

Below is a short overview on how Hyper-V works in Windows 8 (video taken from the Building Windows 8 blog entry):

Download this video to view it in your favorite media player:
High quality MP4 | Lower quality MP4

Also, as a nice perk, Ben Armstrong confirmed that Hyper-V under Windows 8 client will also support sleep/hibernate. This will finally allow me to use my laptop as a demo machine without having to use dual-boot (W7/W2008R2) for that.Yay!

As a reminder, you will still need to license any operating systems you use in the VMs. Head on to the full blog post for more details.

After releasing a public beta in May this year, Microsoft has now released version 6.0 of its capacity planning tool, the Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP), which is the follow up of version 5.5, released beginning this year.

Version 6 includes assessment and planning for evaluating workloads for public and private cloud platforms, identifying the workload and estimating the infrastructure size and resources needed for both Windows Azure and Hyper-V Fast Track. MAP 6.0 also provides an Office 365 client assessment, enhanced VMware inventory, and Oracle schema discovery and reporting.

Version 6 can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.

Via cloudcomputing.info

The discussion was a very interesting one, and the audience was very excited about opportunities they didn’t even know existed until then. I also promised all the students I’ll publish the slides – so, without further ado:

We’ve received an amazing response from both the speakers we’ve invited, the sponsors we’ve contacted, and from all of you out there who have registered for the event (we’re way past the 200 people mark).

Quoting from the event website:

ITCamp 2011 in numbers:

• 2 conference days, with 2 parallel tracks each day (Dev and ITPro)
• 19 speakers (among whom we have 10 Microsoft MVPs and 4 international speakers)
• 21 technical sessions and over 5 hours of networking/discussion breaks

Don’t miss ITCamp if:

• You want to be up to date with the latest IT technologies
• You appreciate the chance to interact with highly skilled professionals in your area of expertise
• You are an IT manager, team lead, programmer, database or systems administrator and you work with the Microsoft Application Platform
• You want to find out more about useful stuff meant to improve your existing skillset
• You enjoy presentations held by experienced speakers, who are well known across the country or even across the world
• You wish to attend trainings that are both cost-efficient and packed with useful infoYou intend to expand your customer or collaborator/partner portfolio

The event starts tomorrow, and will take 2 whole days. You can follow what’s happening there on Twitter  (@itcampro or #itcampro) and Facebook (facebook.com/ITCamp.ro).

So what’s the deal with Microsoft Connection Days? TechSoup Romania has teamed up with the ITSpark community in a Microsoft-sponsored event designed to bring NGO and IT people together, in an attempt to help the civil society use technology in order to achieve faster and more efficient results. This is one more thing that makes Microsoft’s investment in Romanian civil society an obvious commitment on their part.

I’ll be travelling along with the rest of the ITSpark team to Cluj-Napoca (April 5th), Bucharest (April 8th) and Timișoara (April 15th), and we’ll talk about Microsoft tools and their benefits for civil society. If you’re in any of those cities and are interested in attending, the details about the events are here (in Romanian).

See you there!

Again, download is available here (both as an installer and in VHD format).