For 3 days this week I’m adjusting my body clock to be able to attend the Microsoft Jumpstart for VMware professionals, a FREE 3 day series of webinars put on by Microsoft to explain the Redmond way of Virtualisation and how it might fit in better than we think with the VMware way of doing things. From what I’ve heard , over 1300 IT professionals attended the LiveMeeting based session yesterday , with similar numbers for Today ( Management ) and Tomorrow ( VDI ) Forecasted.

Apart from the odd time of day , I’m really impressed with the logistics of the course – sign up and connection was very straightforward, with a good level of interaction , via polling screens and Question and Answer.

What they hadn’t done , was to encourage conversation via social media , so being a fan of “talking at the back of class” – I started using the #msjumpstart hashtag To help report to those who might not have had time to join the whole session and hopefully to provoke some discussion around it.

The Presenters , Corey Hynes and Symon Perriman did a pretty good job of presenting objectively without too many “we’re better than VMware” comparisons , though I felt there were a few weaknesses of Hyper-V that were somewhat played down.

A good mix of slide decks , free conversation and live demo’s made up the majority of the first day , which was based around an introduction to the platform , showing off some features and attempting to translate common vSphere terminology into “Hyper-V speak” and vice versa. What I noticed were a number of things that as a VMware administrator, I take for granted as being an intrinsic part of the solution , that seemed to be a little bit more of a big deal to the Microsoft side. I think its because for an average windows admin , large scale clustered installations are much less common in a pre hypervisor world.

Storage seemed to be something “best left to the Storage guys” – I’m not quite convinced that’s the best message to use in order to break technology silos down. Again, I think many Windows admins ( myself included ) had very little exposure to storage design and technologies pre virtualisation , thankfully with the new breed of Storage Technology that’s hitting the market its is a lot easier for Average Joe Admin to provision some storage for his infrastructure , be it VMware , or Microsoft based.

If you’d like to sign up to take part in the jumpstart , then head over to https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032479939&EventCategory=2&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

 

I believe recordings of the sessions are going to be available at the Microsoft Virtual Academy http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/

The slide decks and recording are also available at : http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/hyper/m/hypercrmar2011/default.aspx

 

I look forward to Days 2 & 3 – if you’d like to join the conversation during the jumpstart , search for the hashtag #msjumpstart