Hi Cluster Fans,
In a few weeks the cluster team will be presenting at TechEd Europe from November 8-12 in Berlin, Germany. Additionally, several partner teams and Cluster MVPs will also be delivering high-availability sessions. Throughout the week, the team will be staffing the cluster booth, so please stop by to ask us whatever you want to know about Failover Clustering, Network Load Balancing and other High-Availability technologies.
Thanks!
Symon Perriman
Program Manager II
Clustering & High-Availability
Microsoft
Cluster Team Events
VIR309 - Disaster Recovery by Stretching Hyper-V Clusters Across Sites
Tuesday, November 9 | 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Virtualization
Speaker(s): Symon Perriman, Edwin van Mierlo
As servers are consolidated into VMs, the availability of those VMs is becoming increasingly important in providing disaster tolerance and business continuance. This session covers considerations of multi-site clustering, where virtual machines can be configured on a Hyper-V Failover Cluster that reaches across sites. This session also covers conducting live migrations across datacenters, and considerations of Cluster Shared Volumes with replication software.
WSV203-IS (R) - Failover Clustering 101: Everything you Wanted to Know but were Afraid to Ask
Thursday, November 11 | 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Friday, November 12 | 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
Session Type: Interactive Session
Track: Windows Server
Speaker(s): Symon Perriman
Want to learn about Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering for the first time? We will show you how to build a highly-available File Server and Hyper-V cluster in just a few simple steps, while answering any and all of your questions. We will cover planning, licensing, virtualization, support, validation, hardware, networking considerations, building a cluster, deploying workloads on a cluster, and deploying virtual machines on a cluster. No prior clustering knowledge is needed!
WSV306-IS - Failover Clustering with Hyper-V Unleashed in Windows Server 2008 R2
Wednesday, November 10 | 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Session Type: Interactive Session
Track: Windows Server
Speaker(s): Symon Perriman & Cluster MVPs
This is a free-form session that will demo, whiteboard and discuss what’s on YOUR MIND! Share the pain you have using Failover Clustering with Hyper-V, ask difficult questions or let us know why some customers avoid clustering even when there is a need to implement a high availability solution. Get the answers you need, directly from the world’s leading clustering experts.
WSV313 - Failover Clustering in 2008 R2: What’s New in the #1 High-Availability Solution
Friday, November 12 | 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Windows Server
Speaker(s): Symon Perriman
Learn about what makes Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering the top Server High-Availability solution! Clustering has changed in every area since 2003, so in this technical session you will learn about Hyper-V, Live Migration, validation, flexible hardware requirements, easy deployment, migration, Cluster Shared Volumes multi-site clustering and easier management. A live demo will deploy a 2008 R2 Failover Cluster from scratch. Clustering knowledge recommended.
WSV403 - Failover Clustering & Hyper-V: Planning your Highly-Available Virtualization Environment
Wednesday, November 10 | 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Windows Server
Speaker(s): Symon Perriman, Joachim Nasslander
This technical session will discuss Hyper-V and Failover Clustering live migration, deployment considerations, licensing, upgrades, host clustering, guest clustering, disaster recovery, multi-site clustering, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, hardware and validation. What are the pros and cons of each virtualization solution? What's right for my customers and their scenarios? What about combining physical and virtual machines in the same cluster? This session will include a live demo of a Hyper-V Cluster deployment and live migration.
WSV01-HOL - Implementing High Availability
Session Type: Hands-on Lab
Track: Windows Server
This top-rated lab introduces the process for creating highly available services using Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster technologies, as well as basic administration tasks with new clustering PowerShell Cmdlets.
Partner Team Events
DAT210 - Mission Critical: High Availability Overview
Tuesday, November 9 | 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Database Platform
More information coming soon.
DAT211 - Mission Critical: Comparing High-Availability Solutions
Tuesday, November 9 | 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Database Platform
More information coming soon
DAT212 - Mission Critical: Improving High-Availability
Wednesday, November 10 | 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Database Platform
More information coming soon.
DAT303-IS - Performance Scalability and Reliability on Mission Critical Applications with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2
Wednesday, November 10 | 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Session Type: Interactive Session
Track: Database Platform
Speaker(s): Lonnye Bower, Nitasha Chopra
Join us on a walk-through of the steps we took to improve performance of a SQL Server 2008 R2 Tier 1 Mission Critical Core Banking application by more than 30% . Learn the processes we followed that resulted in:
· A world record number of transactions per second (tps), compared to other database platforms, for an ISV Partner application (specifics about the ISV and the application will be shared in the session as the details are pending public release)
· Improving performance to push SQL Server to execute over 120,000 batches per second (YES! That's 120K batches per second!)
· Overcoming the issues we encountered during the exercise
You will garner tips and tricks used by Microsoft’s SQL Performance Group and SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) to optimize mission critical customer applications. You will also be able to review the different hardware architectures (based on the Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series) involved in the exercise and the limits that were pushed by each. At the end of this session, you will receive several simple takeaways to help you obtain better levels of performance out of your enterprise implementations.
MGT201-LNC - Managing Your Virtual Environments
Thursday, November 11 | 1:20 PM - 2:05 PM
Session Type: Lunchtime Session
Track: Management
Speaker(s): Kenon Owens, Michael Michael
Grab your lunch and bring your questions. Join Management and Virtualization Experts for a 'No Holds Barred' Question and Answer Session on how Microsoft can help you manage your virtualization environment in the datacenter. This session will highlight some of the new capabilities of System Center and Windows Server 2008 as we answer your questions candidly on topics including: Disaster Recovery and Availability; Virtual Machine Sprawl; how Virtualization can assist in my Service Oriented World; Server Application Virtualization; and Transitioning to Private and Public Clouds.
PRC05 - Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 High Availability and Disaster Recovery - Be Prepared
Monday, November 8 | 9:00 AM - 3:30 PM
Session Type: Pre-Conference Seminar
Track: Unified Communications
Speaker(s): Vladimir Meloski
Microsoft Exchange Server is a business-critical system for many organizations. This workshop will provide you with knowledge on how to respond to the challenges of managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 high availability, and how to address any disaster recovery scenario. You will also learn about deploying healthy and performance optimized Exchange Organization.
The topics will include:
· Planning for high available network and site environment
· Planning for hardware and storage technologies
· Planning Active Directory for Exchange Organization
· Planning and deploying high availability for mailbox server roles, using Database Availability Groups
· Planning and deploying high availability for non-mailbox server roles, using software or hardware Network Load Balancing and Client Access Arrays for Client Access Server role, as well as strategies for Hub Transport, Edge and Unified Messaging server roles
· Planning for site resilience, and the steps needed to switchover successfully to an alternative disaster recovery site
You will find out how to implement efficient backup and restore strategies, for both mailbox and non-mailbox server roles, using Windows Server Backup and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, but also discover how you might choose to run backup-less Exchange Organization and use raid-less and JBOD storage technologies for mailbox server roles. You will learn about the techniques on how to test and verify your high availability and disaster recovery strategies, including scenarios from disk to site failure. After completing this workshop you will know best practices for implementing high availability, and for providing healthy, reliable and optimized Exchange Organization.
UNC303 - Microsoft Lync Server 2010 : Voice Architecture and Planning for High Availability
Thursday, November 11 | 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Unified Communications
Speaker(s): Jamie Stark, Sundereshwaran Raman
The Lync Server team has made a significant investment in high availability with the upcoming release. In this session we review the new Survivable Branch Appliance offering for branch office resiliency, the new features for data center-based multi-site failover, and intra-site architecture for high availability.
UNC321-IS - Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 High Availability: Ask The Experts
Thursday, November 11 | 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Session Type: Interactive Session
Track: Unified Communications
Speaker(s): Ross Smith IV, Scott Schnoll
Do you have questions about high availability or site resilience in Exchange Server 2010 SP1? Ross Smith IV, Principal Program Manager, and Scott Schnoll, Principal Technical Writer, will be on hand to answer your questions.
Curious about design considerations? Wondering about networking requirements? Thinking about deployment options? This session is intended to be highly interactive and completely Q&A driven, so bring your questions and join in the fun.
UNC401 - Microsoft Exchange Server 2010: High Availability Deep Dive (including changes introduced by SP1)
Thursday, November 11 | 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Unified Communications
Speaker(s): Scott Schnoll
Go beyond the basics of Exchange high availability and gain a solid understanding of what's going on under the hood in an Exchange 2010 database availability group. This session dives deep into the inner workings of continuous replication, Active Manager, best copy selection, quorum and witness, lagged copies, DAG networks, DAC mode and built-in monitoring and management scripts.
VIR302-IS - Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware
Thursday, November 11 | 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Session Type: Interactive Session
Track: Virtualization
Speaker(s): David Greschler, Edwin Yuen
This is a must-see session for anyone who is comparing VMware with Microsoft's virtualization offerings. We will review Microsoft's technology compared to VMware, focusing on what differentiates the two technologies. The session will also cover effective strategies for integrating Microsoft virtualization into datacenter environments, and review one company's experience with implementing Microsoft virtualization. If you need to know how the Microsoft virtualization stack compares to VMware's, this is the session for you!
VIR321 - Advanced Storage Infrastructure Best Practices to Enable Ultimate Hyper-V Scalability
Tuesday, November 9 | 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Session Type: Breakout Session
Track: Sponsor Sessions
Speaker(s): Txomin Barturen
This session will address how Microsoft and EMC technologies work together to deliver scalable and reliable enterprise deployments of Microsoft virtualization. Working together, Microsoft and EMC tested the scalability of up to 16 node Hyper-V clusters on the EMC Symmetrix storage platform. Topics to be covered include optimization and characterization of Microsoft Hyper-V for large scale highly-available deployments, as well as performance and optimization of the EMC Symmetrix. Technical details and lessons learned from the tested solution will be covered.