There wasn’t any session that closely matched my core business. In the end I selected one solely based on the speaker:

Meet WAIK 2.0 and Volume Activation 2.0 (Rhonda Layfield)

I’m not very familiar with workstation deployment processes but Rhonda tried to change that. She covered most of the tools provided by MS in their Windows AIK (Automated Installation Kit):

• WinPE
• WPEUtil
• ImageX
• DISM: service images offline
• WSIM: deploying the image
• USMT

Breakout: NetApp

Too much background noise. Marketing.

Direct Access Part 1 (John Craddock)

Well, what can I say. I certainly didn’t expected a IPv6 “deep dive” (relatively speaking). IT was kind of fun nonetheless.

Moving to Exchange 2010 (Scott Schnoll)

Implementing Exchange 2010 will be the thing I’ll be putting in practice in the near future. So I chose this session over Direct Access part II. There wasn’t anything terribly new but certainly a nice review.

Introduction to OCS 14 (Francois Doremieux)

The interest in this session was a bit underestimated apparently as people had to sit on the stairs. The presenter expected a more developer oriented audience to apparently. There came no reaction at all when the speaker asked:

Who’s a developer? Please raise your hand.

There were some demo’s of the newest communicator but I guess there’s I can think of to remember.

Breakout: Social Networking with SharePoint (Mike Martin)

A “concullega” at my current assignment did a little presentation on a social networking solution they build on top op SharePoint. He had a hard time competing with the Public Address (PA) system in the exhibition hall.

Planning and Deploying VDI (Corey Hynes)

The key message Corey tried to pass was to check make sure your needs cannot be covered by ordinary Remote Desktop Services (RDS) rather than jumping to VDI.

The level of the presentation was just about right for me. We’re nearing the end of the conference after all.

A true geek moment when Cory showed off a youtube video he shot on Citrix Provisioning Server:

New voice capabilities and infrastructure in OCS 14(Francois Doremieux)

W14 was only announced last week @ voicecon? I had the impression the speakers was avoiding a number of subjects he could not discus yet. Important to remember:

• Survivable Branch Appliances
• PowerShell support

That’s it for this year

Here’s a shortlist of the items touched upon:

KeyNote: IT in a Transformative Time

You can watch see this KeyNote @ TechNet Edge.

Arlindo Alves

First of all Arlindo Alves makes some publicity for this own shop and introduces the material available for it pro’s:

• New TechNet website
• Communities etc…

Luc Van De Velde

Next we’re being introduced to the NUI (Natural User Interface e.g. voice) as oppose to the GUI.

Via the 1pad, a HP Compaq TC100 slate pc introduced in 2003, we end up in a discussion about the W7 acceptance rates.

You can’t go anywhere without hearing about “the cloud”; so on premise, private and public clouds lead us to the Azure.

Tony Krijnen, Daniel van Soest & Arlindo Alves

Arlindo called in his colleagues from the Netherlands for some help with a couple of demos:

• W7 deployment demo: manual vs. using the deployment toolkit
• Outlook 2010, Outlook Web App
• Windows phone 7
• Direct access: Especially the search connectors, which offer you an integrated search experience, looked interesting.
• Network Access Protection (NAP)
• Some Hyper-V stuff

Followed by a little Exchange Server demo to end the party.

Managing W2K8R2 and W7 with PowerShell V2 (Corey Hynes)

I still remember Corey from his presentation from last year. It’s one of those guys that give you the feeling they could talk for hours.

He quickly explains why you would want to use PowerShell for your management tasks. After quickly touching upon Sapien PrimalForms and the Core Configurator we look into one to one remoting, what are the differences between

invoke-command

and

new-pssession

and how can these be combined with the PowerShell modules available on a system:

• TroubleshootingPack
• ActiveDirectory
• ServerManager
• GroupPolicy

The next step is one-to-many remoting which can either be done by specifying multiple computer names separated by comma for the “-computer” parameter of looping through a input list or the results of an AD-query using a foreach statement.

Chalk Talk

We popped into a Chalk Talk session from the community after a quick sandwich. The part we attended to mainly covered cloud computing.

What’s W2K8R2 gone do for your AD (John Craddock)

John resorts to the start-demo script powershell script to show off some of the new ad cmdlets. We get to look at the AD Admin Center and the AD Best Practice Analyzer.

The remaining improvements brought to us by Windows Server 2008 R2 are

• AD Admin Center
• AD Best Practice Analyzer
• Managed Service Accounts
• Offline Domain Join
• Authentication Mechanism Assurance: higher (or lower) permissions depending on your method of authentication
• AD Recycle Bin

Building your virtualization infra in a ideal world (Kurt Roggen)

The first presentation of the afternoon is always seems the hardest to stay focused on. In this case it felt like a wall of sound was coming down on me. I had to make an effort to filter the message out of it.

Content wise we discussed the hardware features to pay attention to in a Hyper-V deployment. Guess most of it also applies when using any other Hypervisor.

Recovery of AD deleted objects and W2K8R2 Recycle Bin (John Craddock)

Wake up call! John starts with dumping and AD database and opening it with notepad. He goes on with deleting and restoring a user object in AD only to show us the problem with linked attributes:

• “Manager” vs. “Direct Reports”
• “Membership” vs. “MemberOff” In the process he reaches for a couple of tools to provide us with a couple of different views:
• LDF
• Sysinternals ADRestore
• REPAdmin Requirements for implementing the AD Recycle Bin introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2.

Managing your identities with ForeFront Identity Manager 2010 (Jorge De Almeida Pinto)

Never had the chance to work with this type of solutions myself but as an administrator who typically has to keep track of rather large number of accounts in different systems I certainly see a number of interesting use cases in it.

Using this kind of technology for syncing GALs for instance. Or having a consolidated workflow which tackles the process of generating the accounts in different forests, incident management tools, access badges etc etc…

The sessions in the IT Pro-track focused on Exchange Server 2010 exclusively and are presented by Ilse Van Criekinge and Scott Schnoll. Here’s the stuff that I found most interesting:

Managing Exchange 2010

I was waiting in front of the wrong“Room 2” together with a lot of the other attendees. So  Ilse had already started with her first session concentrating on the new and improved management features of Exchange Server 2010.

We had an internal presentation last week were most of the stuff was covered, she did mention a couple details that we didn’t mention explicitly:

Exchange Control Panel (ECP)

Remote Shell:

During a internal presentation the question was specifically raised whether it would be possible to use remote PowerShell from a x86 workstation given that the Exchange binaries are only available in 64bit versions. I don’t exactly remember who came up with that one, but it is possible.

Exchange Management Console (EMC)

There were 3 things that i didn’t explicitly mentioned:

Exchange High Availability

Scott starts with outlining the HA goals and vision for E2K10, then covers the evolution of the HA options in the history of Exchange Server.

Key takeaways in this session:

• Datacenter level events (switchovers) always require manual action (we had an animated discussion)
• GUI for DAG defaults to DHCP. If you prefer fixed IP-addresses you need to use EMS. Multiple ip’s for different subnets can be separated by a comma.
• Larger DAG = greater resilience. Don’t be afraid to go big.

We shortly touched the topic of transitioning to E2K10 but a dedicated presentation will follow on day 2 of the main conference.

Exchange Information Protection & Control (incl. RBAC)

These features might not be used very frequently in the deployments we see, it’s always good to know what’s possible:

Intro

The goal is to protect your organisation against information leakage and at the same time provide a balance between soft & hard controls.

MailTips

Mailtips have partial offline support via the Offline Address Book (OAB)! Group metrics, on the other hand are gathered overnight and cached.

Given the difficult political situation in Belgium it was not to hard to relate to the demo about mailtips in different languages.

Transport Rules

Ilse showed off Dynamic Signatures. Trying to get end users to standardize e-mail signatures is an eternal battle for every organization. I wonder is exchange administrators will be tasked manage convincing marketing and/or communications departments to not overdo it!?

Moderation

Set E2K10 server as expansion server when using moderation in a mixed environment.

We ended with a discussion and demo of Information Rights Management (IRM) and ethical wall.

Exchange 2010 Client Side

What’s new when talking about client access/Web services

• Multi browser support
• Outlook-on-the-middle-tier: all outlook clients connect to CAS also 2K3 etc. Provides a better end user experience during *overs, but not a 100%. CAS-array keeps the CAS server from becoming a single point of failure.
• Outlook Web App (OWA): suggested contacts replaces NK2 nickname cache. Multiple mailboxes easily accessible.
• Exchange Active Sync (EAS)
• AutoDiscover

UM: not covered because of time constraints. Ilse promised a blog about it.

Exchange Performance/Scalability

This presentation was less a “what’s new”-type of presentation and went a bit further into the technical details=

Product team scalability & testing

• Scale up vs. scale out; msx team recommends scaling out
• Disable hyperthreading bacause it monitoring & capacity planning challenges

Guidelines & Ratios

• CPU: more cores result in reduced gains because of the overhead associated with it
• Memory; too much memroy won’t hurt but does cost money
• mailbox scalability for HA; size for double failure
• network load balancing; RPC required! Not just http

Toolkit for planning

• LoadGen
• JetStress
• Requirements Calculator
• Profile Analyzer

My netbooks battery status at the end of the day was still 48% so I actually had a good experience with digital note-taking.

You can compile your own agenda here. The tools allows you to actually mark the sessions of your interest and then hide all the others:

I will obviously focus on Exchange Server related sessions and fill the blanks with some other stuff that carries my interest:

On top of that there are also a couple of sessions organized by various user communities during the lunch breaks. I might attend one or the other too:

I have the intent to blog about this event like I did last year. I’m thinking of bringing my netbook with me. It would be nice not having to type over my paper notes and save some time.

Bart kicked of the last day of this event with a session on PSv2. After outlining the PS mission (as integrated with the OS as bash, as programmatic as Perl/python, as …) he explained the deliverables for PSv2:

• Make it easier to use and learn
• Layer apps on top of PS
• Managed everything, everywhere

The demo’s of Graphical PowerShell, Debugger, new Cmdlets, modules, Native Code and remoting were enough to make me start thinking about installing Win7 on my personal laptop ;-)

Session 2: Sysvol replication – FRS vs. DFS-R (Rhonda Layfield)

Rhonda discussed the strengths and weakness of both FRS (File Replication Service) and DFS-R (Distributed File System – Replication), the benefits of using the latter for sysvol replication and the procedure to migrate from one to the other.

Session 3: Object Recovery in AD (Jorge de Almeida Pinto)

Prior to this session there was a general power cut. The speaker announced a delay of half an hour. But when we returned the presentation had already started. We missed the first couple of slides. Jorge basically covered the solutions for restoring accidentally deleted items from Windows 2000 up to Windows Server 2008 R2, including the new AD Recycle Bin feature.

Session 4: Exchange Server 2007 High Availability (Ilse van Criekinge)

Yet another presentation by Ilse. This time covering Continuous Replication. After uncovering the 4 High Availability methods in Exchange Server 2007 (LCR, SCC, CCR & SCR) she went into a more detailed comparison of SCC (Single Copy Cluster) and CCR (Cluster Continuous Replication).

Last but not least we got into a bit more details about lost log resilience, log roll, reseeding and the transport dumpster.

Session 5: Patching Sharepoint (Sam Hassani)

This session was way to specific for me as I don’t have any particular knowledge about the Product.

Session 6: Network Monitor (Rhonda Layfield)

Rhonda entertained us with with a session about net latest versions of Network Monitor 3.2 & 3.3 beta.

Back to work now…

The opening keynote was entirely devoted to Software+Services and the differences between on-premises, hosted and cloud computing.

Session 2: Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Virtualisation (Ilse van Criekinge & Arlindo Alves)

Arlindo kicked off the presentation with an overview of the Hyper-V architecture. Afterwards Ilse discussed Microsoft policy for virtualising Exchange Server (basically E2K7SP1 on W2K8 only).

Afterwards we we’re give a number of practical considerations:

• Performance: use passthrough disks, used fixed disks, monitor guest performance (not only the host), do not use differencing disks.
• Design: make your design as if it were a physical setup. Exchange is not “Hyper-V aware”
• Setup: setup is identical to a physical install
• Root config: separate LUNs, no snapshotting, no oversubscribing CPUs above 2:1 (virtual:physical), only install management tools in the parent partition and nothing else
• Guest config: don’t forget about the disk space needed for dumping the guests memory to disk
• Exchange Storage Config
• Backup: from within the guest
• HA & DR: either cluster the guest or the host, but not both!

After a demo of Live Migrating an exchange server (why not play a multimedia file from within a mailbox for this demonstration rather than using xcopy?) we were presented with a number of scenarios were MS believes virtualising exchange might come in handy.

More info on TechNet: Should You Virtualize Exchange 2007 SP1?

Session 3: Windows 7 Overview (Tony Krijnen & Daniel Van Soest)

I guess it’s not the first time Tony and Daniel present something together. Their brought us a very dynamic session which consisted almost entirely of demos showcasing the new features in Windows 7:

• UI improvements (shake it baby!)
• BrancheCache
• DirectAccess
• Security Improvements: User Account Control, IE8 Inprivate Browsing, Applocker, Bitlocker To Go, Network Access Protection
• Recovery Environment

Session 4: Take your Exchange Database anywhere (Ilse van Criekinge)

Yet another Exchange related session I was looking forward to. This time Ilse covered the Exchange 2007 Database Portability feature. She started off by refreshing the Exchange Database technology and continued with a bit of a comparison between the various continuous replication solutions available with E2K7SP1.

Using a real life scenario of dismounted store Isle ran us through the different options (Dialtone recovery) and tools (eseutil, isinteg) available. The demo ended with recovering the database file in a new exchange org.

Session 5: What’s new in R2 for network engineers (Corey Hynes)

Over to Corey again who showcased us the new features  in Windows Server 2008 R2:

• Hyper-V Live Migration
• Management & Operations: PowerShell V2, Server Manager improvements and Best Practice Analyzers
• Active Directory: ADAC (Active Directory Administration Center), Recycle Bin, Offline Domain Join
• Server Core: DISM, ocsetup, .net & asp.net

Session 6: Virtualisation Security (Kai Axford)

Kai Axford got us thinking out loud about how to secure a virtual infrastructure.

Some more pics:

Session 1: Streamlined Management (Daniel Van Soest)

Daniel’s session covered the improvements brought to us by W2K8R2. He started of with the Unified Management Framework featuring an extended Resource Monitor and Best Practice analyzers for AD, DNS, IIS and so on. Next subject was Server Core which will contain a basic .net framework allowing us to install PowerShell on Server Core. We continued with some  Remote Shell demo’s in the Windows Remote Management section. After tackling some problems with his microphone the coolness factor went crescendo with PowerShell V2:

• Graphical PowerShell via the PowerShell ISE (= Integrated Scripting Environment)
• New AD Cmdlets (See the Pipelining AD blog)
• PowerShell Remoting (The N° 1 disappointment when a initially learned about PS as I was heavily using PSTools at that time for managing servers remotely)

Last but not least we covered the AD Recycle Bin feature as the most important  AD in 2K8R2 improvement.

Session 2: Clustered Shared Volumes (Arlindo Alves)

After a quick break Arlindo discussed this new Windows fail-over clustering feature which allows for concurrent access to cluster disks. Arlindo covered these topics (unfortunately the Internet connection proved a bit flaky during the demos):

• cluster validation tool
• migrate/upgrade scenario’s
• PowerShell support (might replace cluster.exe in the future)
• New High Availability Roles: DFS-Replication & Remote Desktop Services
• CSV are specifically targeted at Hyper-V (all other roles are not supported)
• Network Prioritization is back
• Quick migration vs. Live Migration
• CSV vs. Backup

Session 3: Virtualisation in Server 2008 R2 (Corey Hynes)

Right after lunch Corey Hynes discussed the entire range of virtualisation solutions available in R2; Hyper-V, VDI, Presentation virtualisation etc AND showed us a couple of Windows 7 bluescreens.

Session 4: BrancheCache (Vikram Ghosh)

I had a hard time staying “concentrated” during this session. The least interesting one of the day from my point of view.

Session 5: DirectAccess (Kai Axford)

Kai definitely didn’t have any problems with the audio equipment, as a matter of fact I believe he could do very well without any amplifier at all ;-) He came all the way from Texas to present the DirectAccess feature which aims to replace the VPN technology.

The remainder of the crappy pics (taken with my Nokia 6300 mobile phone):

Let’s hope the demo gods are present tomorrow.

I sincerely hope they use a more blogger friendly solution next time.

Preconference

Day 1

Day 2