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  • Hands on Labs – on site and almost ready to rock and roll

    Date: 2009.09.04 | Category: tech•ed 2009 | Response: 0

    Hi There

    First day on site – and first post! My name is Kyle Rosenthal – and I am the content manager for HynesITe, the group that puts together the Hands on Labs(HOL) and Instructor led labs(ILL) for TechEd – here in AU, North America and now in Europe. This is our 5th TechEd Australia – starting all the way back at TechEd Canberra.

    So – what goes into the deployment of the Hands-On area? A lot of time and effort! Basically we will be deploying to the HOL/ILL area on a total of 5Tb of data – to 180 machines – in 3 days.

    This starts at my place generally for TechEd AU – Once a year my wife’s patience is tested as I take over the kitchen table and suck a year’s worth of power in one week.

    This year is sort of different – we have moved to a new house and I have invested in a new table. :)

    However – when Kim and Ted arrived – the kitchen table was back in use!

    The setup this year for us is Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, and our custom support front end that will assist you the attendee in getting to your lab as quickly as possible. This does mean that in the process of getting ready  for the event we will start, save, snapshot and export about 300 virtual machines. In addition we then will touch all the lab manuals that help you to get through your lab.

    To do this we have 8 machines in the back end that form our core infrastructure, with gigabit network everywhere.

    So we loaded up the car and headed to the coast, the drive from Brisbane to the Gold Coast meant another hour’s worth of work time available for Kim and Corey – one in the front seat and one in the back seat – with laptops in use. This meant that in true geek style when a file needed to be transferred between their laptops – no usb device was needed. So – if you happened to be beside the Pacific Highway and saw an Ad-Hoc wireless network named “Driving” appear and then disappear – that was us.

    Now we are complete and on site ready to start the next stage of the deployment.

    Office in setup

    Ted at work

    More as we start our roll out.

    Cheers
    Kyle

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