TechEd 2008 Review
Well I am back from TechEd and although I had a great time down in Orlando I have to say I feel a little disappointed with Microsoft. This was my first ever TechEd and due to the fact that I am working in the virtualization space I decided to go to as many Hyper-V sessions as I could. Now we all know that Microsoft are way behind VMware when it comes to virtualization but I think someone should inform Microsoft that it is just them that are behind. All week I found that I was attending different sessions and looking at the same slides. This became the running joke of the the week that Microsoft only have 2 slides on Hyper-V this was always followed up with, “We can’t say when this will be released as we are waiting for other’s in the company to release there code first.” Maybe the different parts of the same company should start talking to each other.
Although Microsoft had a number of different levels depending on how technical you are they still just showed you the same slides and give you the same information. Even when I went to speak to the engineers at the different booths I always felt that I was getting conflicting information depending on who I spoke to. When it comes to Hyper-V I really don’t think that I am any better off than I was a week ago, I will have to wait for the DVD’s to arrive and review more of the information that I was given and hope I never see the 2 slides again. As for Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) I really can see a future for this tool especially in an environment that has a mixture of ESX and Hyper-V servers and hopefully XenServers in the future. There are a couple of things that I didn’t like about it and I still have a few unanswered questions but at least I managed to learn something in this space.
All in all I would hope that Microsoft will improve there content for Hyper-V for future events however I have a feeling that I will be attending TechEd next year for the same reasons as I did this year looking for more information on Microsoft’s plans for virtualization.
Away from the sessions TechEd was great, it was great to meet new friends and even better to meet up with old ones again. Who ever organize these events for Microsoft did a great job in moving so many people around Orlando and the event party at Universal studio’s was a fantastic evening.
Pictures from my TechEd week can be found here.
