(A little late on writing this one, but travel is tough for finding time to post, yet alone write.)

And now for something completely different...

I had the opportunity to be the first on the Canadian IT Pro team to present to an academic audience in cities that coincided with various tour stops for the TechNet Innovations tour currently underway.  This is our first attempt at providing content and an event around infrastructure specifically tailored to the Academic Community (professors and in-house IT shops who support university staff and computing centres).  Because it was our first time - we had some challenges raising awareness of the event and getting people to come out.

The content that we chose to present was developed by Bruce Cowper around some content he had previously created for an MSDN academic session held at the Microsoft Mississauga office last spring/summer.  It revolved around Virtual Server 2005 and its scripting and automation capabilities. This was further enhanced around the conversation of Deploying a Classroom environment and how automation can be used for various virtual server tasks. As is common with content we refine/repurpose/create – relevancy of the conversation and real world experience make the session with a minimal emphasis on slides. This was definitely the case with this compact 25 slide deck and real world scripting demos!!  If you are looking for the demo scripts that were used - please refer to his recent blog post on a similar event he delivered to a user group meeting out west.

This session was delivered on the Dalhousie campus and there were representatives from Nova Scotia Community College, Saint Mary's and Dalhousie.  There was a mix of individuals who had used virtual PC before and one who has been exploring Virtual Server 2005 for a couple of weeks / months.   It was interesting to note that they all used some kind of virtualization in their classroom and had come up with a number of challenges ranging from Machine integrity and sharing/distribution to student as well as basic infrastructure of IP address allocation and “live” student VMs running on non managed student laptops. Imagine your IP address requirements tripling in a matter of minutes of class starting...

There was great participation by all involved and a lot of discussion around how to better leverage virtualization for deploying labs and classrooms back in their environment. They are all faced with challenges that virtualization solves with technologies such as undo-disks, ease of transportability of images, isolated networks, physical to virtual migration and the core of the presentation  - management of virtual hosts / guests using automation. All the participants felt that this was very valuable session and timely in delivery.

I'd love to have the opportunity to reach more individuals in the Academic community across Canada. Is this something that the Academic community is interested in pursuing?  A couple of individuals expressed interest in trying to get together as a community and share experiences and best practices with each other. It would be great to have the ability and the forum to share such information in the future. I am going to be bringing this concept up at the next event I have scheduled for Montréal on Friday and I am also going to be asking my other teammates to inquire at their events as well.

Are you part of the Academic Community here in Canada? What do you have to say - are you interested in infrastructure content as well as establishing some kind of forum for discussion? Sound off by posting a comment!