I spent Tuesday at a Microsoft Technet event at the Odeon Cinema in Cardiff, along with a couple of other people. The event was slightly chaotic, but, admirably high on technical content and low on sales bluff. The event was largely to evangelise Windows Server 2008, although cover a lot about Vista as well.
On the server front most time was spent (or seemed to be spent - time can do strange things at these sorts of events!) on the new Windows 2008 core (an almost command-line version of Windows Server), Bitlocker (one of the presenter's pet topics I think, but virtually irrelevant to most people) and Hyper-V virtualisation - it's the latter that I'll return to in a moment.
Windows Core is an interesting idea - you only install what you need, so there is a smaller '
attack surface', and virtually no GUI - you administer most things remotely. You still need to do some admin locally by command prompt, and I wonder whether this concept is too alien to most Windows admins? Even the presenters seemed to have problems with it.
We spend quite a lot of time looking at Vista deployment. Vista take up in the audience was about what you'd expect (ie not high). The message from the presenters was crack on and deploy Vista, as upgrading to Windows 7 may be even harder. I'm not sure that this is the right message! IMO one of the key reasons people aren't rushing to upgrade is not that it's hard, but people just don't like it and don't see the need for it. Vista may well have lots of improvements under the bonnet (better security, better IO performance), but why didn't Microsoft just add these with a more incremental upgrade to the interface (like Apple do with OS X?) Most users seem to like the XP interface a lot better!
Back to Server 2008 now, and more specifically, Hyper-V, Microsoft's visualization software (if you are non-techie and have got this far, virtualisation allows you to run many virtual servers on one physical server - easier to manager, less electricity etc). I realise that what I'm going to say next is will probably seem like heresy, as VMWare has been adopted by with almost religious-like enthusiasm across the sector, but I was really impressed with Hyper-V, and we'll be investigating it very carefully. We may well even consider migrating from VMWare to Hyper-V. It's worth adding that we haven't tried it yet - its only at release candidate stage, and when we try it we might decide it's no good. But, assuming that it works reliably, and provides adequate performance, it's actually a highly attractive proposition for us. Since we've adopted VMWare I've become concerned that we've actually made our infrastructure more complex rather than simplifying it, because we've added an extra layer that we need to learn and support. Maybe not a problem for larger departments where staff can specialise in VMWare, but we don't have that luxury. In my experience, a simple infrastructure is a reliable one, and in the end, reliability is what users really value.
Hyper-V looks like it will allow us to do what we need to do (i.e. quickly deploy new servers, get better value from our hardware), but within a familiar, easy to support Microsoft interface. I'm sure on a technical level VMWare will be 'better', but I'm not sure that that is relevent. I remember a few years ago that there we lots of debates about Netware and e-Directory being better than Windows and Active Directory. That may or may not have been true, but in the end was irrelevant to most people - all users wanted to do was login and access their files quickly and reliably, and both, if managed well, allowed you to do that.
We're also going to have a look at Terminal Services in Server 2008. It looks like it will allow users to run applications rather than a whole desktop via terminal services (like with Citrix). Could be useful for a few remote users.
All in all, a very productive day (but I never want to hear about BitLocker again!!!)
The slides and blog links are available here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/bb945096.aspx
Students can buy Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows for the much reduced price of £38.95, via a special offer from Microsoft. Apparently the offer will end on 30th April - not sure whether a new deal will replace it, so if you are a student and need Office it's probably worth taking this offer up. There is more information here:
http://www.theultimatesteal.co.uk/Unfortunately this doesn't include the Mac version.
HEFCW have just published "Enhancing Learning and Teaching Through Technology: a Strategy for Higher Education in Wales" a "ten year strategy for the enhancement of learning and teaching
through technology for higher education (HE) in Wales from 2007/08 to
2016/17".
http://194.81.48.132/Publications/circulars_5137.htmWell worth looking at, even if you aren't from Wales.