TechEd 2012: The key insights for Windows admins (so far)

Every year, Microsoft gathers IT pros and developers in Orlando to explain its current and new technologies to those highly invested in it. The conference is Microsoft’s largest user event and covers a lot of ground.

Here are the key insights for Windows admins I’ve gleaned from attending this year’s conference.

[ J. Peter Bruzzese lays out Microsoft’s 2012 Windows client and server technology road map for 2012. | Learn all about the forthcoming Windows 8 Server in InfoWorld’s “Windows Server 8 Deep Dive” PDF special report. | Stay abreast of key Microsoft technologies in our Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]

Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V, and Azure Microsoft’s emphasis, as made clear in its first day’s keynote session, was Windows Server 2012 (aka Windows Server 8), accompanied by a heavy focus on cloud computing through Azure. Microsoft is calling this “the era of the cloud OS,” and in my own consulting work, I see the transition to cloud-based servers — Microsoft is focused on where the action truly is. From what I saw at TechEd, Microsoft Azure is one of the best cloud offerings in terms of ease-of-use and feature set, especially when you tie in the fact that System Center 2012 tools let you manage both onsite and in-cloud systems.

Microsoft showed a slide claiming Windows Server 2012 supports 320 logical processors and 4TB of memory. On the virtualization side, it supports 64 virtual processors and 1TB per virtual machine. In a speed demonstration, the presenter moved a 10GB file in seconds (I think it was gigabytes, although he said “terabytes” at times) using Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V courtesy of a new feature called offloaded data transfer (ODX), which can leverage native SAN capabilities within an array. The audience was quite impressed.

Another interesting demonstration on Hyper-V 3.0 performance showed Windows Server 2012 delivering nearly 1 million IOPS from a single virtual machine, which the crowd welcomed with big applause. That compares to EMC VMware’s claim of its ESX virtualized servers delivering up to 300,000 IOPS from a single VM.

Windows 8 The keynote on day two focused heavily on Windows 8. Microsoft defended its controversial Metro front-end user interface in Windows 8, pointing out that Windows 7 is still built on the UI released in 1995 (with Windows 95). The world has changed, as has our use of technology; thus, said Microsoft execs, the company needed to do something new and different.

In a savvy marketing move, Microsoft employee Linda Averett assisted Antoine Leblond, corporate vice president of Windows Web Services, with the demonstrations. She had pictures of her grandchildren on her system for the crowd to see and suggested that users of any age will find Windows 8 easy to work with, especially because you can choose the form you prefer: laptop, tablet, and desktop with or without touchscreen. Averett demonstrated how semantic zoom (a method of presenting and navigating large sets of related data or content in a single view, such as a photo album, app list, or address book) lets users work with their laptops using the same swipe strokes and pinching moves as they use on a tablet.

The coolest demo of the second-day keynote was when Averett took a USB key to boot Windows 8 on an older PC running Windows 7. It’s called Windows to Go and will come only with the enterprise version of Windows 8. However, the biggest cheers came in response to the demonstration of Windows 7 running in a VM on a Windows 8 system. Why the cheers? Because Hyper-V is included directly within the client.

System Center 2012 As a Windows admin myself, I’ve focused on the System Center sessions in this year’s TechEd. I saw several great demonstrations on how easy it is to deploy and update software through System Center Configuration Manager. It’s much more straightforward than SMS ever was, years back. System Center Endpoint Protection (for virus and malware protection) is built into Configuration Manager, so you can push out the software to clients easily.

Of particular interest in the demonstration: Microsoft had it working with a Mac. The Mac had the System Center client piece and checked in, saw there was a policy that wanted to push Endpoint Protection to it, and installed a Mac version of Endpoint Protection.

More to come, starting with SharePoint Most of the week is still in front of me. Day two is over, and I’m tired already — which doesn’t bode well for me, considering my own session “Getting SharePoint and Exchange to Play Together” isn’t until tomorrow!

There will be plenty on all of these tools as they leave beta and become shipping products throughout the year, so stay tuned for more to come, especially with regard to Windows 8 features.

This article, “TechEd 2012: The key insights for Windows admins (so far),” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.