Session Abstracts
Virtualization & Cloud Keynote:
Microsoft’s End-to-End Virtualization Strategy and Your IT Infrastructure
Speaker: Edwin YuenMicrosoft offers a rich set of technologies and guidance to enable comprehensive virtualization across cloud, server, and desktop scenarios. These solutions allow IT to manage virtual and physical servers in a familiar, common environment that reduces system complexity and improves operating efficiency. Virtualization and management technologies allow an enterprise to dynamically provision resources and workloads through streamlined processes, improve business availability during planned and unplanned downtime events, ensure a robust disaster recovery process, manage and leverage the consumerization of IT and end user devices, and drive the optimal utilization of resource across all platforms and devices. Discover how Microsoft’s end-to-end virtualization strategy – from the desktop to server to cloud – can profoundly impact nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure and change how you manage and optimize your organization.
Virtualization Sessions:
A Look into VMM 2012
Speaker: Michael MichaelVMM 2012 is designed to deliver industry leading virtual machine management, deployment, and configuration for services in private cloud environments. It features deep investments in server application virtualization, service design, and service modeling all of which can be used to build an on-premises private cloud. This session will include an overview of key VMM 2012 capabilities like Image Based Management, Host Role Deployment, Service Design, Image Composability, Application Elasticity, and Fabric Management. This session will also cover VMM 2012 features that can be used to create a unified management experience for public and private clouds, including migrating workloads between these clouds.
An Intro to PowerShell and Why You Need It
Speaker: Brandon ShellJoin us to learn why PowerShell is important in the VDI world as we dive directly into practical use and provide an intro into PowerShell. The session will cover the basics and provide all the information you need to start using PowerShell to make your life easier. This session will use SBC related scenarios that will provide practical and actionable examples you can start using right away.
Application Virtualization Notes from the field
Speaker: Justin ZarbPremier Field Engineering globally have worked with a number of Microsoft Enterprise customers in the App-V arena. Application Virtualization has excellent benefits that enable an organization to dynamically manage their application deployment and reduce the amount of time required to regression test their applications. The session details various techniques that PFE help customers to utilise when looking at Microsoft Application Virtualization and how they approach proactive reviews of their App-V estate. Objectives: 1. describe an outside-in perspective on one of our new and popular technologies. 2. provide insight into what customers are dealing with regards to App-V components.
Best Practices for Virtualizing Mission Critical Applications (MS Exchange, SQL)
Speaker: Christopher KusekWhether you’ve been virtualizing forever or are just now dipping your toe into the waters of Virtualization, attend this session where we remove the stigma around virtualizing your mission’s critical applications. Look at the real hard facts around taking your Tier 1 applications into your Virtual Infrastructure and start realizing the benefits which have made VMs so successful.
Designing Hyper-V Architecture for Enterprises
Speaker: Dung K. HoangConsolidating workloads in a virtualized environment, is like putting all your eggs in the same basket. If not well designed, physical servers may become a bottleneck in processor, network bandwidth, IO capacity and can also be a single point of failure. Join this session to hear about challenges in Hyper-V design and also get guidance and best practices to build a resilient virtual infrastructure for large scale deployment. The session covers design considerations for server, network, storage and management framework for Hyper-V.
Evaluating Virtualization Approaches
Speaker: Anil DesaiThe term “virtualization” can apply to a broad range of varying technologies, ranging from storage to networks to servers to applications. The primary goal of these approaches is to simplify management, increase efficiency, allow for scalability, and meet reliability requirements. With recent improvements in virtualization technology, the challenge for IT professionals is in deciding which approaches are the most relevant, given specific requirements.
The focus of this presentation is on understanding the technology behind various virtualization approaches, including presentation-, application-, session-, user state-, desktop-, and server-virtualization. The topic will begin with information on understanding business, technical, and service requirements. These details will then be used to compare a wide variety of different approaches to solving common IT problems. Attendees will receive information that will help them choose which approaches make sense in their own environments.
Going Minimal #1 – Initial Configuration of Windows Server 2008 R2 Core and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
Speaker: Joachim NasslanderWhen you run a virtualization platform you don’t want any unnecessary overhead. Running Hyper-V in the Core installation option of Windows Server 2008 R2 will help you minimize overhead. This session will get you started with initial configuration, enabling roles and features and hardware configuration such as NIC-teaming. It’ll also give you the arguments and insights to why a GUI-less Windows is the right choice for a virtualization platform.
Going Minimal #2 – Management of Windows Server 2008 R2 Core and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
Speaker: Joachim NasslanderContinuing from the first session we’ll take a look at how to manage our Core-servers. This includes setting up Hyper-V, various types of both local and remote management. Once it’s configured we’ll take a look at how to administer Hyper-V with PowerShell, MMC and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
How and When to Use Non-Persistent Virtual Desktops
Speakers: Patrick Rouse & Rob MallicoatIn this session, you will learn how to deploy Virtual Desktops that are assembled at runtime so user’s data, applications and personal settings are available on any virtual machine. You will also learn how to avoid common pitfalls of this approach, and what users are NOT good candidates for non-persistent desktops. Topics that will be covered include:
• What is a non-persistent virtual desktop
• Storage – SAN, NAS or Local
• Disk Types – Fixed, Dynamic, Differencing (what’s the difference)
• User Profiles – Local, Mandatory, Roaming or Hybrid
• Applications – Installed or Virtual and how to choose
• Application Compatibility – How to deal with apps that are not compatible with Windows 7
• User types – Task, Knowledge, Power, Mobile, IT, Developer
• Peripheral devices – How to deal with different peripheral devices and which ones are particularly troublesome
• SID Uniqueness – When do you need unique Machine SID (Security Identifiers)
• How to rapidly deploy thousands of new Virtual Desktops when a master image needs updating
• How to keep your VHD Templates up to date
Hyper-V R2 SP1 & SCVMM Deep Dive – Tips, Tricks & Best Practices from the Field…
Speaker: Matt McSpiritIn this demo-heavy session, join Matt McSpirit, Partner Technology Advisor from Microsoft UK, and author of the Virtualboy Blog, as he walks you through the key considerations, tips, tricks and gotchas around installing and configuring Hyper-V R2 SP1 and SCVMM. From installation considerations, architectures, Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX through to cluster networking, VMM high availability, VM templates and more, this session will arm you with plenty of food for thought for embracing Hyper-V and SCVMM in your environment.
Managing Enterprise Scale Hyper-V Clusters
Speaker: Guido GrillenmeierThis is a session that does NOT compare the features of Hyper-V to those of ESX. It also does NOT compare the performance of Hyper-V to that of other hypervisors. We know they all have their differences, but Hyper-V is certainly an attractive option. This session concentrates on the challenges of actually operating a Hyper-V implementation at enterprise scale in production for more than two years already and how we solved them. What is it like to handle more than 100 Hyper-V servers forming more than 15 clusters across the globe, hosting more than 1000 server VMs? Details that this session covers include best practices for deploying Hyper-V in a cluster, incl. various little traps that you can avoid falling into. Similarly System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) brings along its own challenges when planning to leverage it in a global Hyper-V deployment. This includes handling of networks in a cluster and deployment of multiple disks per VM. The session is a result from production use of Hyper-V and not from running it in Test-Labs.
Managing Hyper-V with Windows PowerShell
Speaker: Kirk MunroUnlike most Microsoft server platforms, managing Hyper-V with Windows PowerShell is not as straightforward as it should be. Hyper-V management tools do not include a module or snapin with well-designed cmdlets to facilitate PowerShell-based management and automation. Without cmdlets available, what are your options? There are actually quite a few options available, most of which are free, but some of these come with a significant learning curve. In this session Kirk Munro, the world’s first self-proclaimed Poshoholic, will show you how to sort through the various options that are available and get the most out of your Hyper-V management experience with PowerShell. He will demonstrate how to perform essential management tasks such as provisioning VMs, modifying VM configuration, and changing settings on the hypervisor itself. Topics covered will include Hyper-V management with PowerShell using WMI, freeware modules and solutions, and commercial cmdlets in Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.
Microsoft App-V 4.6 SP1: The New Sequencer
Speaker: Tim Mangan
Join MVP Tim Mangan as he shows what is new in the latest Sequencer for App-V. Don’t be fooled that this is “just a service pack”. 4.6SP1 represents the most radical rework of the Sequencer since it was created 10 years ago! There are several new workflows, templates, and the exciting Package Accelerators. Virtualizing apps has become the norm when migrating environments to Windows 7 or to VDI, and this release aims to help make it easier for you. Session consists of an introduction to the sequencing and the release, demonstration, and plenty of time for Q&A.
Protocol Communication in Remote Desktop Services
Speaker: Christa AndersonIn this session, you’ll get a technical overview of the components that make up RDS and how they communicate. After this 300-level session, you’ll understand what’s happening under the hood within several key scenarios: delivering sessions on a shared RD Session Host server, delivering pooled or personal VMs on a RD Virtualization Host server, user discovery of resources, and WAN access to shared resources. You’ll also understand the key differences between RDP 7 and RDP 7.1 with RemoteFX, and learn the details of how RemoteFX varies on RD Session Host and VMs. Knowing this will not only win you friends, it will help you design and troubleshoot your deployments.
RemoteFX Architecture
Speaker: Karthik LakshminarayananMicrosoft RemoteFX is a comprehensive set of technologies designed to enable a next-generation, full-fidelity user experience for remote desktops and VDI. From a content standpoint, RemoteFX enables a compelling Windows 7 user experience over the network that includes support for rich media such as Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Media, Flash, 3D, and Aero. It integrates with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services and VDI architectures and supports a broad range of both ‘soft’ and hardware-accelerated RemoteFX clients. Join us and you’ll understand:
1) how to enable a rich desktop experience in VDI environments;
2) how it all works and get a deep dive into the architecture;
3) your RemoteFX deployment options including a broad range of both soft and hardware accelerated clients.
Storage Considerations for Virtualization
Speaker: Anil DesaiKey considerations related to successful virtualization deployments revolve around provisioning highly-reliable, cost-effective solutions to meet business and technical needs. The challenge for IT is in consolidating and optimizing infrastructures while staying within budgets. The primary concerns – including storage capacity, performance, and reliability – can drive the success or failure of virtualized deployments.
This presentation begins with recommendations for designing a storage environment based on business and technical requirements and a solid understanding of application workload requirements. Strategies for collecting storage statistics through historical and real-time performance monitoring can provide valuable insight into real requirements. Based on this data, IT departments can compare different storage approaches, including centralized network-based storage, and cloud-based options. Important features to consider include data de-duplication, thin provisioning, high-availability, clustering, and disaster recovery. Attendees will learn methods by which they can best plan for, implement, manage, and monitor storage for virtualization in their own environments.
The Case of…..Featuring “The App-V Sequencer”
Speaker: Justin ZarbThis is a deep dive of troubleshooting techniques used when Microsoft PFE and the GTSC have investigated customer issues with Applications. See the step by step techniques used to see real world customer problems and the investigations and resolutions that were used to get the application functioning correctly. Learn some of the techniques used, and the importance of understanding the sequencer, windows and your applications. Objectives: 1. Attendees are able to identify common troubleshooting techniques for the most application issues with the App-V sequencer. 2. Attendees take away steps and methods to resolve specific application issues from the field,
the root cause and resolution.
Transform a Dynamic Datacenter into a Private Cloud
Speaker: Arno MihmMicrosoft provides rich virtualization capabilities with Windows Server 2008 R2 out of the box, but how do you best harness the power of virtualization? Learn which architecture and building blocks are most important in a Windows Server Hyper-V environment to build a dynamic infrastructure, includes hardware design, storage and network considerations. We’ll cover best practice on Hyper-V and Management stack implementation/deployment and how you can transform a dynamic datacenter implementation to a private cloud though leveraging Hyper-V, System Center and a Microsoft developed reference architecture.
Windows Server Hyper-V as Virtualization Host for DVI
Speaker: Arno MihmIn this session, we will drill down into the new virtualization capabilities with Dynamic Memory and Microsoft RemoteFX in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, and determine what key questions need to be asked and answered around required components, networking, capacity and end user experience for a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment.
Cloud Sessions:
A Look into Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS)
Speaker: Andrew PageLearn how Global Foundation Services (GFS) – the team that powers Microsoft’s Cloud – ensures reliable, highly available services while continuing to drive operating costs down. Today Microsoft cloud infrastructure team supports more than 200 online and cloud services, 1 billion customers, and 20 million businesses in more than 76 markets worldwide. The GFS team is responsible for building and managing our cloud 24x7x365 by maintaining a robust process for acquisition, cost and energy consumption, incident management, service support, and change management. Come hear about Microsoft’s approach to modular data center design, driving data center efficiency, operations excellence, data center sustainability, and they secure the cloud infrastructure.
An IT Pro View of Windows Azure
Speaker: Joey SnowThis session will look at The Windows Azure Platform from an IT Pro perspective. We will provide an overview of the Windows Azure Platform featuring the recently announced changes to the platform, and we’ll demonstrate the practical measures IT Professionals need to take to deploy, manage and monitor applications running in Windows Azure.
Automating BPOS Exchange Administration with PowerShell and C#
Speaker: Jerry CamelBPOS Exchange provisioning is a process that is becoming more and more popular and customers are already asking for BPOS to be integrated into Enterprise IDM solutions. We will take a look at the BPOS Exchange administration cmdlets along with techniques on using them from C#. We will keep an open architecture that allows for future proofing our compiled code against changes to the PowerShell commands and we will discuss ideas on incorporating the technology into an XMA.
Business in the Cloud, Identity Strategies and Technologies to Get Your Business Off the Ground
Speaker: Brian PuhlMicrosoft is more than just a cloud service provider, we’re a customer too! Come join the discussion as we talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Microsoft’s adoption of cloud services. We’ll look at the roles that AD, ADFSv2, and FIM – as well as others, like PKI and RMS, are providing the technical foundation for adoption of BPOS and 3rd party SaaS services, and how MSIT is using these technologies to move mission critical applications securely to cloud services like Windows Azure.
Hyper-V Cloud Automation (A session full of Demos)
Speaker: Dung K. HoangYour organization is now responsible for deploying a first Hyper-V Cloud in your datacenter. In the next few weeks, you plan to build a couple of clusters, configure a dozen of networks and virtual switches, carve out several dozens of storage volumes and provision hundreds of virtual machines. So you have two options: either hire an army of workers to complete those tasks or automate all those processes and stand up the environment at lightning speed. Join this session to understand how you can automate deployment of virtual infrastructure and see some cool automation scripting techniques to perform all those tasks above with one-liner PowerShell scripts.
Microsoft Office 365: Directory Synchronization
Speaker: Mike KostersitzThis session focuses on what the Dir Sync tool is used for, and what will be available in V2 of the tool. We will demo the tool and discuss when a company should use it in a deployment, depending on the size and needs of the company.
Microsoft Office 365 vs Google Apps: Cloud Collaboration Smackdown
Speaker: Jarrod Roark
Are you confused with the cloud email and collaboration offerings and the marketing material from the vendors? Come to this session to learn the good, the bad and the ugly about the main cloud collaboration solutions from Jarrod Roark. Jarrod works as Director, Advanced Infrastructure at Bennett Adelson and has hands on experience with both solutions.
Office 365: Identity and Access Solutions
Speaker: Mike KostersitzThis session provides a preview of the identity and access solutions in Microsoft Office 365. The session will focus on how authentication works for both web apps and rich client apps, how to enable single sign-on (SSO) using corporate AD credentials and AD FS 2.0 to Office 365 services, and the different SSO deployment options for Office 365 services.
OpenID and OAuth Through the Looking-Glass
Speaker: Eve MalerThis session will evaluate the web-friendly technologies OpenID and OAuth through SAML and web services metaphors. We will compare technical approaches, consider their overall business value for various use cases, and examine future directions.
Optimizing Cloud Performance
Speaker: Steve RileyThe rapid growth of public and private cloud computing, simultaneous with the explosive proliferation of portable content creation tools and ubiquitous wireless connectivity, are placing enormous pressures on network transport and storage. To get the most out of the emerging “distributed recentralization” now occurring, IT departments, network operators, and businesses of all sizes will need to consider technology options that accelerate data transmission and reduce data amounts. These technologies bring many benefits, including improving user experiences, retaining more customers, and saving money on bandwidth and storage costs. Steve Riley will performance and availability challenges of cloud computing and describe the business and technical advantages achieved through optimization and acceleration techniques.
Pushing SharePoint Online to its Limits
Speaker: Dave ChennaultSharePoint Online is a game changer. You can build and deploy complex and compelling applications with guaranteed 99.9% uptime provided you know the edges and scope of what SharePoint Online can deliver today. This session will be presented from a system architect and a system developer perspective. We will give you concrete guidelines and code samples that we have learned through our participation on the Office 365 TAP, Beta and SharePoint Online Beta. We have been working directly with the product team and will share our experiences and knowledge in this technical session. Forget PowerPoint, slide decks. Expect to see a lot of Visual Studio and a examples of what you can do with SharePoint 2010 Online. Note: some discussion may be limited due to NDA restrictions in place between the speakers and Microsoft.
Security in BPOS and BPOS Federal
Speaker: Einar MykletunMicrosoft Business Productivity Online Standard (BPOS) is a set of online services designed to provide integrated communications with high availability, comprehensive security, and simplified IT management. In this session we examine the security safeguards Microsoft built into their offering, as well as areas where security improvements can be made. We also take a closer look at Microsoft BPOS Federal, which caters specifically to federal government agencies and contractors, and those that require the highest levels of security. Microsoft has gone to great lengths in order to make BPOS Federal amongst the most secure cloud based software solutions in the market today, and we enumerate some of these distinguishing security and compliance features.
SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server: Compare and Contrast
Speaker: Bill BaerSharePoint Online is the premier hosted SharePoint solution provided by Microsoft. In this session, you’ll learn the difference between the service offerings, how each can map to your business, and how to differentiate between those offerings as your organizational objectives change.
Taking Identity from the Enterprise to the Cloud
Speaker: Pat PattersonIntegrated Windows Authentication leverages Active Directory’s Kerberos functionality to provide single sign-on within an enterprise’s Microsoft web infrastructure, but how can we extend that out of the enterprise and into the new world of software-as-a-service and RESTful APIs? This session will explain how SAML and OAuth can be used to bridge the gap, allowing desktop applications to access web services such as the Force.com REST API.
Wading Through the Cloud Security Swamp
Speaker: Steve RileyHow should a company evaluate its own risk profile? What questions do you need to ask your cloud services provider? How about the whole idea of transferring risk and indemnity? In this session Steve Riley will survey the cloud security swamp, clarify what’s real and what’s hype, and help give you some kind of realistic basis for making risk judgments and deployment decisions.
When Will the Cloud Be for Everyone AND Everything?
Speaker: John EngatesAs cloud computing emerges, Rackspace coined a phrase that the cloud is “For Everyone, Not Everything.” This phrase underscored that in spite of the excitement around this new platform, not all applications are capable of running optimally on cloud, but all firms have some applications that will run more effectively and/or cost efficiently on cloud. The phrase is true today, but will not be true in the future. As cloud service providers continue increasing the capabilities of their cloud platforms, eventually all applications will be able to run effectively. This session will discuss examples and timing of this transition to cloud being “For Everyone AND Everything.”
Windows Intune: PC Management and Security in the Cloud
Speaker: Joseph DadzieYour employees depend on you to keep their PCs running at their best, whether they are in the office or on the road. Windows Intune delivers cloud-based management and security capabilities using a single Web-based console so that both your users and IT staff can operate at peak performance from virtually anywhere—all that’s required is an Internet connection.
You can’t Handle the Cloud (Diagnosing Office 365 Cloud Readiness)
Speaker: David SmithThis session will walk you through the 3 step process: Plan/Prepare/Migrate. Then we’ll cover cloud alignment, and gap detection and risk assessment. You’ll learn whether to remediate or not and if so how, and take a look at anti-patterns, including what not to do and why.
