June 8, 2007
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TechEd 2007: Day Five and Good Bye TechEd

By  Technology, Travel  0 Comments December 10, 2017

This is it, the end of TechEd 2007… for me at least. I won’t touch on the bag check mess this morning as I covered that in a previous post. I attended two sessions today, both repeats from earlier days. The sessions were:

  • SVR315 Server Core: Running a Minimal Server
  • CLI311R Building the Perfect Master Image: A Universal Image Strategy

Server Core is a welcome addition to Windows Server. I have a few servers back home that are perfect candidates. For systems such as domain controllers, DNs servers, etc., I think you’re going to see Server Core become the de facto way to implement these boxes. The lower resource requirements as well as an improved security posture are two factors for this.

According to the speaker, most third-party agents such as backup agents work in Server Core today in their shipping versions. I’ll be interested to test that out for the agents we’re using.

The Universal Image session was recommended to me by an individual I ran into from the University, and it was dead-on. With all of the BDD2007 sessions I attended, this was the last component needed to be able to go back and really implement this in our environment. Originally I had put much more emphasis on scripting application installs on top of a few base images, but it is so easy to fall into the trap of building monolithic images, that we wound up doing more of this than we probably should have. Recently I had reduced our image count somewhat and used scripting for installing hardware specific items. But I think it is time to swing the pendulum back even more and see if this will help simplify and streamline how we deploy systems. I have a feeling that some of the glitches we run into are related to building images on top of images as we’ve been doing.

Now I’m off to lunch, and then my vacation begins. I’m relocating over to Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. Kristin will fly in later this afternoon and then we begin six days at Walt Disney World! After a week of TechEd, it’ll be good to give my brain a rest, turn off email on my phone, and relax a little.