TechEd Orlando 2008

Originally blogged on June 14th...
It was a busy week for me here in Orlando at the TechEd 2008 IT Pro Conference. I passed 4 certification exams over the week, including 70-620, 70-642, 70-643 and 70-647. Only 70-640 left to take and then I get the title of MCITP: Enterprise Administrator. In the meantime, I am a Microsoft Certified Professional and Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist. Lots of buzz around Windows Server 2008 as expected and Hyper-V is due to release very soon. I heard a rumor from an MS employee that it was going RTM by the end of the week (yesterday) but was not able to get anything but a blank stare and a "we cannot confirm or deny" comment from the MS folks at the Hyper-v kiosk. My last session of the week was given by Steve Riley. He is a very dynamic speaker and brought a lot of substance to his talk which is more than the marketing hype I sometimes feel like we get from some of the speakers. He spoke about security and using Vista and Windows Server 2008 and creating an infrastructure with IPv6 public IP addressing and effectively exposing the enterprise so that users can gain access from anywhere. The model makes use of Network Access Protection and smart cards as well as Bitlocker on all machines to provide security to the enterprise yet provide hardened security. I also found it interesting that he doesn't recommend anti-virus software on web servers or SQL servers but recommends a secure IPsec connection between them. The belief is that installing AV on the server exposes it to more risk than not having it on there. This week was a lot of fun as I joined up with a group at the conference (we call ourselves the Krewe) and we met up at the parties, went out for dinner and drinks throughout the week. Mike Bender had some Got W2kOcho??? shirts and they made us pretty popular during the conference. The shirt is perfect to take back to San Jose. The Krewe was a fun group to hang with, especially when large amounts of alcohol where consumed and the regular tweets on Twitter were priceless :) I am looking forward to connecting up with them next year in Los Angeles.