The new pre-sales Hyper-V Server website is live. Many partners there, some with giveaways that appeal to IT Pros.

Speaking of which - when will event organizers realize that you can't put IT Pro seats in the breakout rooms touching each other? I mean, what percent of all T-shirt given away at IT Pro events are XXL?

My point exactly.

Jeff Woolsey's Deployment Best Practices session was standing room only, and more than half the seats were "overbooked" by the individual sitting in it.

Among his Best Practice recommendations:

• Because of Hyper-V perf improvements and consolidation, you now must plan ahead for and keep an eye on saturating your NIC (the MAP will help you with the planning on this)
• Use a dedicated NIC for parent partition, and one or more NICs for VM networking
• Cluster production virtualization servers - see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx for setup instructions. BTW cluster setup is much easier in WS2K8 than in WS2K3 - it's a three-step wizard!
• Run server core on your virtualization server, unless you need Full install. It's a good idea to run server core as the base OS for your VMs as well
• Run Anti-virus (AV) inside your VMs. If you run a Full install on your parent partition, and run AV there, do not scan the .VHD files (provided you are running AV inside the VMs).
• Use Bitlocker to protect against "single point of data-loss" - particularly on branch offices, or anywhere the physical server isn't on par with your data center physical security. Since BL helps protect your data when the machine is decommissioned, it can save a lot of headaches and mitigate risk if you just BL all the data disks and VM resource files. Read more on my blog post, and download the white paper.

The booth was mobbed too, I couldn't even get a steady shot because of all the traffic:

Seems this virtualization thing is big, as in... well, really big.

Lots of long-awaited exciting announcements: