Edugeek @ Microsoft UK - Windows Education Workshop

[EduTech]

Please download the full post attached; There is alot of important information about Server R2 and Windows 7 you might want to be aware off

 

Well after the early start on Friday Morning travelling down to Reading the day turned from me being very tired to being very pleased with the whole event.

 

Myself, Chris (Dos_Box), Ric (Ric_) attended the conference on behalf of Edugeek, the Turn-out was very good just over 50 attendees in the end I believe and I think most of them were Edugeek Members.

 

A few Edugeek Members sat with us through-out the conference, SoulFish, Robf, AngryITTechnician and GrumbleDook to name a few Thank You to you guys for showing your faces and for the great conversations.

 

The Whole day was very “geeky” with various employees from Microsoft Talking to everyone as well as Dave Coleman from Twynham School and Alan Richards from West Hatch School both talking about their experiences when Deploying Windows 7 in their schools.

 

Alan Richards was infact the first Person to Deploy Windows 7 Fully in a school in the UK (possibly worldwide) so well done to you!

 

After the conference itself a group of us or the Edugeek Crew as GrumbleDook calls it went out for a few drinks and a lovely meal courtesy of Dos_Box himself cheers for that! It was very nice J apart from GrumbleDook moaning all the way their because he has a very LARGE appetite ;-) poor bloke bet he was starving! Dribbling everywhere hehe.

 

After the meal we went back to the Hotel for more Drinks, and didn’t leave until around 1am thanks to everyone who stayed behind for a drink and a chat!

 

Dos_Box even brought me a “White Russian Cocktail” never had one before and it was very nice indeed!

 

Anyway I won’t go down that route! It was a great night well it was until it was time to go to sleep then I had to put up with Ric Snoring all bloody night ;-) going to buy myself some ear plugs next time!

 

Links to Presentations

 

Ray Fleming Presentation

 

James O'Neil's Presentation

 

Gareth Hall Presentation

 

Asif Jinnah Presentation

 

Alan Richards Presentation

 

Links to Blogs

 

Ray Fleming Blog: Microsoft UK Schools News Blog

 

James O’Neil’s Blog: James O'Neill's blog

 

Alan Richards Blog: Alan Richards ICT Blog's Blog - Windows Live

 

David Coleman: SharePoint in Education

Edugeek at Microsoft.pdf

Edited August 22, 2009 by EduTech
Changed Attachment

[kmount]

Good write up, well done.

[Little-Miss]

awww, why dont they do anythink in Brum! We've got hotels and stuff!

[PiqueABoo]

Thanks, good job.

 

There's a line in there about W7 and MS saying if it's your h/w is good enough for XP it's good enough for Vista. Should that be good enough for W7? And what do folk who've been playing with W7 really think the spec should be?

 

A comment on the stuff about 2K8 R2 HV and live migration.. that's obviously desirable, however the non-live migration on a decent 2K8 HV failover cluster is very quick e.g. I've seen it (suspend, move, resume) happen in < 30 secs. That might be too much in seriously big server farms, but it's not so critical at school scales. It's the CSV multiple VMs & VHDs on one volume I really want because that should make it *much* easier & efficient to configure/manage than with 2K8 (all those LUNs for each VM etc.).

 

And MS actually use MDT themselves. Please take a hint everyone.. it will mean there's somewhere else to ask questions next time I get stuck with it!

[EduTech]

@ Little-Miss I am from birmingham and i managed to attend didn't cost that much on the train hehe

 

@ Piqueboo Oops yes that is supposed to say the later, i'll get that changed. (it is actually rather annoying because it is so long it cant be a normal post as i have to keep editing the PDF. I should of probably read through it again but i wanted to get something online so everyone had a good idea of how it went.

 

If anyone spots any errors let me know, i think i got everything pretty accurate according to my notes but you know what i am like hehe always get something wrong

[Little-Miss]

Ahem Edutech...i know where you live......

 

That is very true, but little ol' me is a bit of a scardey cat and the thought of me meeting a bunch of strange men in a strange city........

[EduTech]

yeah i know that but was just making sure..

 

strange men!! what you trying to say eh? we are all nice as pie i told you the only person you have to be careful of is Tony (GrumbleDook) he likes putting his Tiger Claws into people... especially me bloody hurts too

[arichards]

Hi All,

 

I hope all who attending got something from the day. I really enjoyed meeting some really interesting people. Disappointed though that I didn't get chance to grab and EduGeek T-Shirt.

 

I plan on doing a blog series early September about our experience deploying Windows 7. If you want to know when it starts I will post the link here and on twitter: @arichards_Saruk

 

One correction to the post though is that my blog has moved:

 

An IT Managers Blog - West Hatch High School - Community Collaboration

[EduTech]

Thanks arichards i'll replace it with your new link.. Edit: Post and Attachment Updated

 

If you PM me your address i'll see what we can do about getting a T-shirt sent out to you.

 

James.

Edited August 22, 2009 by EduTech

[Little-Miss]

oooer James...what have you been up to?!

[tmcd35]

Thanks, good job.

 

There's a line in there about W7 and MS saying if it's your h/w is good enough for XP it's good enough for Vista. Should that be good enough for W7? And what do folk who've been playing with W7 really think the spec should be?

 

I think Officially the min spec is the same as Vista. That said MS were boosting that Win 7 runs on "7 year old machines", "runs on Netbooks" (Atom procesors, 1Gb ram), and "haven't found a minimum machine it won't run on". Ray Fleming, our host for the day, loves to hear stories and one of them would be if you find a machine that your want/expect Win7 to run on but it doesn't.

 

For my part I'd guess a min at P4-class Celeron 700mhz+, 512mb Ram. Realistically I'd place the bar at Full P4 1.2Ghz, 1Gb Ram. Personally by the time I'm ready to deploy 80%+ of the school will be dual-core and 2Gb Ram.

 

A comment on the stuff about 2K8 R2 HV and live migration.. that's obviously desirable, however the non-live migration on a decent 2K8 HV failover cluster is very quick e.g. I've seen it (suspend, move, resume) happen in < 30 secs. That might be too much in seriously big server farms, but it's not so critical at school scales. It's the CSV multiple VMs & VHDs on one volume I really want because that should make it *much* easier & efficient to configure/manage than with 2K8 (all those LUNs for each VM etc.).

 

Hey, it's free, it's built into server 08 r2 as standard, so why not use live migration? Indeed knowing this was coming in Hyper-V R2, and knowing that Hyper-V is built into server 08 free is why I've been slowly taking the school down the MS virtualisation route rather than using ESXi.

[Hollie1985]

@ littlemiss they do have Microsoft events in Brum, is there anything specific you wanted to see/hear? i can look out for you i know there is one coming up in the next few weeks Hollie