我和Jae在10月8日至10日参加了TechEd香港的活动，TechEd香港是一个由微软赞助，向IT专业人士集中展示微软最新技术的活动。今年的活动有一千多人参加。

Mark Russinovich，微软的一位技术专家（著名的sysinternals的创办者之一），在活动的第一天做了一个关于IT专业人士现今面临的挑战以及微软的技术将如何帮助他们的主题讲座。他用了20分钟展示了微软提供的几种虚拟化技术并且做了一个非常酷的演示，不停机地将一个虚拟机从一台主机上迁移到另一台上。他通过一开始打开的虚拟机中的一段视频演讲来证明了这种迁移的无缝性。整个迁移过程只用了几秒钟就完成了并且视频上没有显示出任何性能的下降。这是一个非常令人惊奇的成功，只花了几秒钟迁移过程就完成了。同样很快地他又把虚拟机迁移回了原来的主机上。遗憾地是，我和Jae不得不在10点半的时候离开演讲的房间，去准备我们组的展台，所以我们错过了Mark下面的演讲。

 

在这次活动中，微软中国研发集团服务器与开发工具事业部分配到了一个展台，我们将和其他的组一起分享这个展台。按计划，系统管理与服务研发部组会在第一天使用这个展台。来我们展台的人流比我们预想的多（不知道是不是被我们附赠的小礼品吸引来的）。大多数在我们展台前停留的人都有一些使用System Center Configuration Manager的经验，我和Jae向他们介绍了我们组和产品。以下是我们谈话中的一些重点：

 

1. Software Distribution是用户使用最多的一个功能。几乎所有的人提到他们用System Center Configuration Manager的主要原因都是用来在他们的组织里部署软件。补丁管理是第二大常用的功能。其中一部人提到他们想用System Center Configuration Manager来部署操作系统。
 
2. 用户对R2中对虚拟应用程序的支持非常感兴趣。Jae将会在第二天的演讲中谈到更多关于虚拟化的细节。
 
3. 当被问到他们对我们产品的感受是，几乎所有的人都会说我们的产品或多或少有些难用。很多设置需要被正确地配置，这是让用户接受我们产品的最大问题。有一位用户 到，用Altiris来部署操作系统会更容易。另外，好消息是他们正计划转向用System Center Configuration Manager 2007,以便更好地利用包括Desired Configuration Management在内的我们产品的其他功能。
 
4. 一位客户提到，他们在公司内管理应用软件的安装很困难，希望能有一个更好的工具来帮助他们。例如，当公司内某些人员更换了组，System Center Configuration Manager应该能立即为他们安装新的应用软件。另一个例子就是，他们想要一种功能，能基于某些规则来发现用户机器上没有安装的软件，并且能自动帮他们安装。在这方面，Desired Configuration Management能帮到一点忙。
 

在结束前的一点建议，如果你计划在香港做一些演讲，那边的听众会很安静，非常的安静。甚至连这次活动的主题演讲者也遇到这种情况。我曾经在美国参加过Mark的演讲，他是一个非常出色的演讲者，毫无疑问他的演讲可以使得听众们兴奋地大笑，同时听众们也会提出很多问题。然而，在几次试图引起香港听众们的兴致失败后，他放弃了。简单地说，香港的听众们不喜欢在演讲中提问，一旦演讲结束了，他们会走到讲台前直接向演讲者提问。

 

参考资料:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc161883.aspx

 

骆华俊，Jae Kim (金杰)

 

 

Jae and I attended TechEd Hong Kong (Oct 8-10, 2008).  TechEd HK is an annual event that Microsoft sponsors to showcase new MS technologies with a focus on IT professionals. More than 1,000 people attended this year's event.

Mark Russinovich, a technical fellow from Microsoft (co-founder of the well-known sysinternals), gave a keynote speech on Day 1 about the challenges that IT professionals are facing now and how Microsoft technologies can help. He spent 20 minutes showcasing various Virtualization technologies that Microsoft offer and gave a very cool demo on migrating a virtual machine from one host to another without incurring any down time.  He demonstrated the seamless nature of the migration by first launching a video presentation from within the Virtual Machine.  The migration took only seconds to complete and the video did not exhibit any performance degradation.  This was an amazing accomplishment.  It took only a few seconds for the migration to complete.  So fast in fact that he migrated it back to the original host.  Unfortunately Jae and I had to leave the room at 10:30am to set up a booth for our team, so we skipped the rest of Mark's speech.

Server and Tools Business China was allocated one booth for this event and we shared it with other teams within the organization. As scheduled, our organization, Management and Services Division, owned the booth for the first day. The traffic to our booth was higher than what I expected (not sure whether it is because people were attached to little gifts that we distributed along with). Most people who stopped by our booth had some experience on Configuration Manager.  Jae and I explained our team and our product to them.  Below are some of the highlights of our conversations:

  1. Software Distribution was the top feature that people were using. Almost everyone mentioned that the main reason they used Configuration Manager was for deploying software to their organization. Patch management came as the second. A few of them mentioned that they wanted to deploy operating systems with Configuration Manager.
  2. People were very interested in virtual application support in R2. Jae covered more virtualization details in his presentation on Day 2.
  3. When asked how they felt about our product, almost everyone said the product is somewhat hard to use. A lot of settings were needed to be set correctly, which posed great challenge for them to adopt the product. One person mentioned it was easier to deploy operating systems using an Altiris solution. Good news was that they are planning to transition to System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to take advantage of great feature sets comes with our product including Desired Configuration Management (DCM).
  4. One customer mentioned that they had a hard time to managing installed applications within their organization and wanted to have a better tool to help them. For example, when people change groups, Configuration Manager will immediately install new set of applications for the user. Another example was that they wanted the capability to find out what applications were missing on client machine based on some policy and will automatically get them installed when detected. Desired Configuration Management might help a little bit here.

A closing word of warning if you ever plan on participating in a speaking engagement in Hong Kong - the audience there tends to be quiet.  Extremely quiet.  Even the keynote speaker stumbled into this during his opening talk.  I've attended Mark's presentation before in the US.  I can tell you that he's a fantastic speaker and has no problems getting a room excited with his talks generating laughter and many questions from the audience.  After a few failed attempts to engage the Hong Kong audience, however, he gave up.  Plainly said, they don't like to ask or answer questions during the presentation.  Once the presentation is over, however, they'll approach the presenter at the podium to ask their questions. 

Additional resources:

 

Huajun Luo and Jae Kim