Lots of Learning & Team Spirit at IT Virtualization Boot Camps in Mississauga

Yesterday, we wrapped up the second IT Virtualization Boot Camp brought to you by Microsoft TechDays Canada and your local user group - IT Pro Toronto.  Both on Saturday and on Monday, we had a full house with 40+ attendees taking part in a hands-on journey to a highly-available virtualization infrastructure on the Microsoft platform.  On top of that, all proceeds from registration fees for the event went to benefit IT Pro Toronto and allow it to continue to serve IT professionals in the GTA.

For those of you who attended the IT Virtualization Boot Boot Camps this past weekend, you can find the PPT decks for the Saturday session here and the Monday session here.  

The 6-hour session included a competition with each of the 10 teams taking part in a series of challenges.  The team garnering the most points throughout the day walking away with some pretty nice prizes. The competition was fierce but at the same time each team won as they were able to

• Prepare Windows Server-based computers for virtualization
• Configure an iSCSI storage server
• Create a Windows Failover Cluster
• Make Hyper-V virtual machines highly available
• Use Live Migration to move running workloads between hosts with no loss in client connectivity
• Integrate non-Microsoft-based virtual machines into your cluster
• See how Windows Failover Clustering can help to make dealing with hardware failure easier

To help the attendees along their journey, the teams had the ability to call upon the assistance and experience of Mitch Garvis (Twitter: @MGarvis) and Sean Kearney (Twitter: @EnergizedTech), as well as my colleague Ruth Morton, who helped to make sure all teams were on track to complete the challenges and also kept an eye out to make sure the all teams played fair – which they did!

After the great start to the IT Virtualization Boot Camps in Mississauga, we are already planning to have them take place in Vancouver (February 10 & 11), Calgary (March 11 & 12), and Saskatoon (March 30 & 31).  We are also working on getting them organized in other cities and will post the registration links on the blog as soon as they are finalized.

If you want us to bring the IT Virtualization Boot Camp to your locale, connect with your local user group and ask them to let us know.  We would love to have you learn hands-on about the capabilities of the Microsoft Virtualization Platform and our Private Cloud strategy