Key Home Takeways from my First day of Tech ED India 2010

I have just returned from the Hotel Lalit Ashok, Bangalore, where Tech ED 2010 event is happening this year. I am going to talk about the key home takeaways from the first day of Tech Ed 2010. It was a fabulous start with visual studio 2010 launch event however as I am not a developer I will talk more about architecture track where we discussed about different cloud patterns and practices which was followed by discussion on dynamic data center took kit session. Post lunch we saw a session on system center service manager which let enterprise admin to follow the ITIL practices and automatically generate an incident based on the alerts from SCOM. Also a self service portal can be created where a user request resources/applications and after approval from his manager those resources/applications will automatically get deployed via SCCM. There was another session on provisioning virtual machines using system center virtual machine manager via creating a hardware and software templates. SCVMM lets end user to self provision virtual machines as per his requirements. Then we jumped into another session where we saw the capability to manage linux and unix servers from SCOM. It’s a great feature which comes with SCOM 2007 R2…so you got default management packs for unix and linux flavors which enable you to generate alerts in SCOM and manage heterogeneous environments in your datacenter. One of the last sessions before demo extravaganza was for protecting virtual machines from DPM 2010 where we specifically deep dived into Cluster shared volumes [CSV]. We saw the DPM backing up virtual machine irrespective of live migration of storage migration happening on them. Best practices of using hardware vss provider for protecting CSV luns was discussed and we also saw a demo where we can recover a VM on a hyper-v host other than from which it was backed up. During breaks I also managed to visit Citrix partner demo tent where 2 Citrix employees where kind enough to show me Citrix xen desktop and Citrix xen server solution and the discussion got stretched as we compared hyper-V VDI and Citrix VDI solution from a 100 FT view. The nice thing about xen server is that the free edition contains features like live migration and Xen motion [synonymous to storage migration/V-motion]. You just need to install the xen server on a bare metal machine and then you install a client app on any other machine [synonymous to VMware Virtual center and MS SCVMM] to manage the xen server and this is again free of cost however yes the High availability features needs to be bought but still I think that’s a great technology which Citrix is providing to SMB users for free. Citrix already is delivering HDX [High definition experience] technology which Microsoft is about to roll out in 2008 R2 sp1 known as Remote FX. New HDX media stream and HDX plug and play capabilities ensure that whether users are watching windows multimedia or connecting multiple monitors, scanners, phone or other device they get same experience of local pc on a hosted virtualized desktop.

In the end the demo extravaganza was fun, where some very cool technologies and features were demoed including windows phone 7 and surface computer. We saw some cool features of power point 2010 where you can do a lot of magic by embedding your videos in power point and editing them directly from power point and same for the images. We saw how we can play with websites HTML code using IE 8 developer tools. Another cool feature was chatting/emailing in office communicator/outlook in Indian local languages. We saw some great features of search in Bing and how its beat Google in those features. It was great fun and that’s all for now. Looking forward to day 2. Thanks and good bye till I catch you tomorrow.

Gaurav Anand