Microsoft TechEd 2012–Australia

I’m fortunate enough to be attending Microsoft TechEd 2012 on the Gold Coast, Australia.

The first session I attended was all about Windows Server 2012. Microsoft are pretty pumped about this release and had customer video testimonials talking about how different it was from anything we’ve seen before. My takeaways are that this means:

• A mix of private cloud, hybrid cloud and public cloud – they aim to provide one consistent OS for all these scenarios.
• Live migration in Hyper-V – which was demonstrated.
• Remote access to apps and resources from anywhere- all good until you leave your Windows 8 tablet in the back of a taxi.

The main pillars (Microsoft always have pillars!) of Server 2012 are:

• Transform the data centre

• Scalable & elastic

• Shared resources

• Always up, always on

• Automatedself service

• Enable modern apps

• Cloud scale

• Flexible & easy

• Hybrid & extensible – Windows Server / Windows Azure

• Rapid dynamic lifecycle

• Unlock insights into any data

• Complete data platform from Excel to SQL to Hadoop

• Integrated data reaching beyond your organisation

• Analysis and insights with familiar tools.

• Empowering people-centric IT

• Personalised experience

• Any device, anywhere

• Secure & well-managed



Other key takeaways for me:

IIS8 now supports CPU throttling which is great for web hosting providers.

Remote Desktop Protocol – RDP is now Remote FX and is written to perform well on a WAN. I’m a bit skeptical about this, Microsoft have never been great at designing for networks that are not on super fast ethernet in my opinion!

We saw some customer videos, after hearing about how Windows Server 2012 and beyond is big on PowerShell and you don’t RDP into individual servers and can work anywhere… these videos inexplicably showed people in data centres looking at servers. Video producers love blinking lights I guess.

Common phrases – “just in the box”, and “it just works”, all sounding a little bit like that fruity computer company who release their new iPhone in a couple of days.



Overall a good kick off session though, looking forward to the Keynote next.