That was a better and smoother Jump Start but it is not the first time I attended online though. The event started yesterday from 11PM to 3AM today in which it lasted five hours. It focused on the four chapters/modules such as Monitoring the entire environment with System Center tools, Migration from VMWare to Hyper-V, VM Management stuff or whatever and the Automated Deployment with Orchestrator.
Now, before I start explaining about what I did yesterday, I may have to tell you my experience in virtualization. The first virtualization program would probably be Virtual PC from Microsoft and it was quite new back then until there were competitors trying to take Microsoft down or something like VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels, etc in which I then started to use VirtualBox. For Virtual PC 2007 SP1, you get the higher resolution, custom resolution, widescreen support for guest OSes and other stuffs to make it on par with its competitors but for now, it seemed that Microsoft was apparently working on something even more superior to Virtual PC such as Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7, Hyper-V for Windows Server series including Windows 8. Can Hyper-V be the most superior one from Microsoft? Sure, you can close the virtual machine window to pause or directly shut it down or something but I don't know if you can keep the virtual machine running in the background in Hyper-V. It may be a great deal for Hyper-V to keep the VMs running in the background as Hyper-V is probably stored on the servers and people may want to access those VMs remotely. Then, for Parallels, VirtualBox and VMWare, you can bring the virtual machine desktop environment to the host desktop environment like you can get two taskbars at the same time for example and you can have the windows from two OSes at the same time as well. It may be cool but you have to know which OS desktop environment are you using. This may be useful for all computer users regardless of the competitive OSes.
Using the latest System Center tools from Microsoft, you're able to save cost that way and it may be why this course and Jump Start existed in the first place. You can manage the whole environment of physical and virtual machines with System Center and you can manage the VMs that are running Hyper-V or VMWare. However, you have to be careful when trying to migrate to Hyper-V. First of all, the virtual machine configuration may not be part of the migration process and especially if you're migrating the VMs to the newer physical machines for like better performance. Second, you have to plan carefully and get ready the clusters in case the process may fail. And in case you don't like to do any tedious scripting to do the automated deployment, you can use System Center Orchestrator tool to do the thing. You drag and drop the stuffs provided that you have the Integration Packs installed and ready and then establish the paths on where you want the instructions to be followed step by step but be careful on what you're doing as you have to TEST before you RUN FOR REAL! Each set of instructions is known as a RunBook and when you start it, it will do all the instructions you've specified for you. Other factors involve the parameters you're going to specify like the computer name, the location on where you want to store VM stuffs to and other stuffs you want them to be in the VMs. For example, if you want to install the OS on multiple VMs simultaneously, you can use this Orchestrator to make a RunBook of making a VM with the specific OS and then commence the deployment. Lastly, there may be free tools to convert from VMWare to Hyper-V but keep in mind that there's no other way round.
During the event, I contributed in the correct way and I got the response in the good way. Also, there is even the IT Camp where you can go to Microsoft to attend various events there. Jeez, how is that the public event anyway and how is this a real camp? So far, there are three of them in Singapore but one of them is already full as I already checked during the event. We'll be looking forward to more IT events like this.
