SQL Server Days 2013 – Last chance to claim your Early Bird discount

SQL Server Days 2013 is bigger than ever and approaching fast, take advantage of the Early Bird discount and register now.

SQL Server Days 2013 brings a full day pre-conference with no less than five separate in-depth tracks and a main conference with 25 technical sessions tailored to your needs as a SQL Professional. A taste of some of the topics :

• SQL Cloud Pre-Conference on How to become the DBA of the Future by Thomas Larock & Dandy Weyn
• SQL DBA Pre-Conference on Real World SQL Server 2012 Configuration and Tuning by Kevin Kline
• SQL Developer Pre-Conference on SQL Traces to Extended Events by Mladen Prajidic
• SQL BI Pre-Conference on Languages of BI by Stacia Misner
• Microsoft Big Data Pre-Conference on Big Data vs Many Data and PDW by Mark Stacey
• Main Conference with 25 technical sessions focused on Business Intelligence, SQL Data Platform and Big Data
• Best practices from the field and plenty of your peers to talk to
• And so much more, check out the full agenda here.

All sessions are delivered by top speakers from around the world including Marco Russo, Mark Stacey,Thomas Larock, Dandy Weyn, Mladen Prajidic, Koen Verbeeck, Pieter Vanhove, Kevin Kline and Stacia Misner.

Check out the SQL Server Days 2013 website for the complete agenda and registration.

It has been a few weeks since the official Microsoft Management Summit 2013 had place in Las Vegas. So it’s time to provide the Belgian System Center Community a nice off-line event to share in-depth System center knowledge/presentations.

During this event we will be joined by Wally Mead, Senior Program Manager for System Center Configuration Manager (aka The Godfather of ConfigMgr).  He’s been in the Configuration Manager product group for the past 20 years, working on all versions of the SMS/Configuration Manager product.

Wally will provide you with 2 in depth sessions. The other sessions will be presented by the Belgian Enterprise Client Management and Cloud & Datacenter MVP’s and other SCUG members with in depth technical knowledge with surrounding System Center technologies.

We are currently in the process looking for a "cloud & datacenter" Program Manager that will be Wally Mead’s Counterpart for the datacenter track.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to socialize with fellow System Center administrators and consultants to exchange knowledge, meet with one of the most popular Microsoft speakers of all time and have a nice lunch with 2 Belgian ConfigMgr and 5 Cloud and Datacenter MVP’s.

We hope you will join us for an event designed to stimulate new thinking and forge lasting relationships among a remarkable group of IT professionals.

Note: This event will not be recorded so make sure you attend in person to learn about all the new features in System Center!

We will have a lottery where we will give away a TechED Europe 2013 ticket !

Reserve your ticket for Best of MMS 2013 here on Eventbrite:

Below you will find the prelimanary agenda ( subject to change ) :

Today we announced the general availability of our Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) support! With this release Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Network move out of Preview and are now ready to use for your production apps.

With Azure Virtual Machines you can deploy and run durable VMs in the cloud, provisioned from prebuilt templates or alternatively upload your own custom-built VMs.  All this in a matter of seconds!  Azure Virtual Network allows you to securely bridge between your on-premises infrastructure and your infrastructure in the cloud. This gives you the flexibility to run your workloads where you want, but manage them all in the same way.

Whether you want to securely extend your on-premises network to Windows Azure or you want to create a virtual private network with persistent private IPs..

Let’s look in more detail into what we have announced today:

• For memory intensive scenarios, we are now introducing two high-memory compute instances: 4 core x 28GB RAM and 8 core x 56GB RAM. With these VM sizes you can run even larger workloads on Windows Azure, for example SharePoint Server or SQL Server workloads.
• We have added several new VM image templates to the Image Gallery, such as SQL Server 2012, BizTalk Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 images. These images also come with hourly billing, so you don’t have to pay for an upfront license.
• We have updated the SLA for Virtual Machines and Virtual Network.  For VMs that have 2 or more instances deployed in the same availability set, we have a 99.95% SLA for external connectivity.  For Virtual Network, we guarantee a 99.9% Virtual Network Gateway availability.
• As of this announcement, Virtual Machines and Virtual Network are now supported by Microsoft Support staff, so you can confidently run your production apps on Azure.

On top of all these great features, we’re also announcing significant pricing reductions to our Windows Azure PaaS and IaaS VM pricing. You can expect to see from 20% (Virtual Machines) to 33% (Cloud Services) price reductions! These new prices are effective as of June 1.  And as of today, we’re also adding 50 hours of free memory-intensive-instance hours to our member offers and 90-day trials.

For a more detailed description of the announcement, you can check out Scott Guthrie’s blogpost.

If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Did you know that you already have a lot of free Azure resources as part of your MSDN, MPN or BizSpark membership?

If you want to learn more about our Windows Azure IaaS capabilities, don’t forget to listen in on our dedicated IaaS webcast on April 30. If you want to experience this great technology hands-on, join us for our Azure IT Camp on May 6.

Microsoft IT Camps are free, hands-on technical trainings for IT professionals led by Microsoft experts. Don’t miss the opportunity to elevate your skills by learning more about Windows 8 and Windows Azure through our free IT Camps!

Register now for a Windows 8 IT Camp on

· February 25^th in the morning or afternoon or evening in Kortrijk

· February 28^th in the morning or afternoon or evening in Genk

Or dive deep into Windows Azure on

· February 26^th in the morning or afternoon in Genk

· February 27^th in the morning or afternoon in Kortrijk

· February 28^th in the afternoon in Mons

- More info on our IT Camps page.
- Try Azure for 90 days for free!
- Download the Windows 8 Enterprise free trial.
- Explore free, online, technical courses through MVA.