TechEd EMEA Day 2

Hello again from Berlin.  As many of you probably saw on TV (or in the streets), it was an amazing celebration for the fall of the Berlin Wall.  As for TechEd, day 2 has been amazing.  I think that the thing everyone I’ve spoken to at the show is how friendly everyone is at the show.  TechEd EMEA has always been one more of most community friendly shows and this years show really feels like friends and colleagues getting together, not just a show where you see others who might use the same technology. 

I think the decision to move the show to Berlin really worked out.  The weather is a little cold for most people (though not me, growing up in Minnesota) but everyone has been very positive and it makes the show not just enjoyable but really fun (and I’m sure the beer availability helps out too :) ).

Today, I had my session with Jeff Woolsey of Hyper-V, doing Hyper-V R2 and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2 overview.  It was a packed crowd, with literally every seat in the room taken.  Like I do for most of my session, Jeff and I asked the crowd, before we started, how many people run VMware and how many people run Hyper-V.  The number of hands raised were very close, almost identical.  This is a dramatic difference from two years ago, especially from my first TechEd EMEA where literally everyone used VMware and I could count the number of Hyper-V users on my finger (out of an audience of 400+).  It really made my proud of the work everyone at Microsoft Virtualization has done over the last three years.

For those who are at the show and want to learn more about Virtual Machine Manager, I’ll be doing an Interactive Session on Thursday, 1330 in Interactive Theater 4 – Green.  I’ll be doing more demos from my demo rack and going into details on advanced VMM features.

I’ll write my wrap-up of TechEd EMEA on Thursday.  Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter (@edwinyuen), as I’ll be actively tweeting from the show. 

Also, we are still running two promotions now, one for TechEd attendees and one that is open for everyone.  The TechEd attendee contest is our twitter promotion for our resident SMB Expert, David Mills.  Just sign up to follow David (@dmills_ms) and all new followers are entered to win a Archos 5 Media Player.  We’ve already given two players away and there are still two more players to give away.  For more information, see the details here and here. 

The other promotion is our blogging contest.  Through our System Center Influencers program, we will be awarding $100 Visa gift cards each month for the next 6 months, to the best blogs related to that month’s topic.  Not part of the System Center Influencers program?  Just send e-mail to SCNETSUP@microsoft.com to join.  More details for this contest here.

That’s all from Berlin today!  I hope to actually get to see more of the city before I leave and I look forward to talking to everyone at the show.