Last week Mitch Garvin came to Calgary and did some serious talking up of 2012 server at a Canadian IT Boot Camp. The session was great – very informative, and while I was in and out a little during the day, I managed to sit enough of the course to be really impressed with 2012 server.
Impressed to the point of near depression.
I spend an inordinate amount of learning new technologies so that I can teach them to my students. I spend many hours a year self training on different technologies and then many MORE hours developing labs and curriculum. Needless to say, my employer doesn’t always understand how heavy this load is – and if the folks who develop new technologies for the areas I generally teach in (like Cisco, Linux, Microsoft and security utilities like Backtrack) would like to slow down a little on new releases and changing technologies, that would suit me fine. One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is the gradual acceleration in pace of development and releases in new technologies. After XP came out (particularly once SP2 was released), we saw a fairly long stretch where the support desktop landscape remained unchanged. With the spotty adoption of Vista in the enterprise, it wasn’t until Windows 7 was being picked up that I really needed to start changing my curriculum to the “new” operating system. Some of the changes that came in between in server moving from 2000 to 2003 was a relatively small change that was easy for me to adapt to. W2K3 to W2K8 and R2 were manageable within my experience to upgrade without having to go back to school. This isn’t the case with Win8 and 2012 server.
Microsoft has completely revamped the user interface in Win8, as well as many features under the hood. This is a complete rework of the standard desktop OS; in my opinion this is a fantastic move on Microsoft’s part. I’m old enough to hate change, but smart enough to recognize change when it’s coming and accept it. The PC market is in decline, Apple has been going great guns, particularly in the tablet market, and our enterprises are littered with “BYOD” scenarios. As difficult as I see the Win8 interface rework for Microsoft in the short run, it’s a move they simply HAVE to make if they want to maintain relevance. I installed Windows 8 on my laptop while speaking at the Techmentor 2012 conference in Redmond a few weeks before the official RTM of Windows 8 and 2012 server. Microsoft had been my bread and butter for years, and I’ll always be a Microsoft guy, but it was the first time in a long time that I felt excited about Microsoft. This was the push back I was waiting for, the big jump in innovation that (to me, anyways) had been lacking for quite a while from Microsoft. When Active Directory came out it was a big change, after that we had incremental changes in technology in the core of server and client OS’s. With Vista and Windows 2008 Server a lot of rework was done under the hood, but things really looked the same from a user perspective. This completely changes in Win8/2012 – I have watched the Zune and Windows phone come and not fare very well, and watched as more and more people bought iDevices – even going so far as to tell my step daughter, a (not very technical) drama student in Montreal, who had an endless stream of issues with her cheap Vista laptop running lousy hardware to “just go by a Mac”. It turned out to be good advice, she has called me one time since then (I wasn’t able to help her) for assistance – as advertised, it “just worked”.
My impression from Redmond, was that Microsoft hasn’t necessarily been missing the innovation boat, maybe more like playing possum, they have been spending a lot of money on R&D, securing the code, and coming up with new and smarter ways of doing things. The Windows 8 release is just the start of what I think will be a big year for the folks in Redmond. The Win8 phones look fantastic (I’m going to buy one as soon as they are released in Canada), the Surface has just been released, and 2012 server is coming out.
I am also loving Windows 8 on my laptop – it took a little while to get used to the new interface, but after a couple of months of using it, if I was given a choice between two identical computers with solid hardware, I would happily take windows 8 over any other operating system. It doesn’t slow me down at all from doing the traditional work that I could do on Windows 7, and I love some of the new features of integration between my computer and social networks, I feel like I am leveraging things like Facebook and Twitter at whole new levels, completely unattainable in Windows 7. As an example, I am writing this blog post using the built into Win8 “Windows Live writer” which automatically syncs to my blog. Cool. As for 2012 Server, same story, a complete rework, better remote management, more secure, and a major upgrade to the virtualization capabilities of the server. Our shop is mostly VMWare, but I’m thinking we don’t really need to be anymore. The downside of all this upside is that I need to spend some time (well… a lot of it) relearning all of the features, Windows Deployment, Virtualization, and management requirements of these new operating systems.
One of the challenges with teaching is that you tend to focus on the same fundamentals over and over, which don’t change much in the long run, but the high end features change dramatically, unfortunately you a) don’t teach these things to beginner students anyways, and b) you don’t get to work on these things in industry to get a real feel for quirks, problems and workarounds. I’m feeling a little obsolete – and need to crank up the learning process again. This leads directly into my next post: I was trying to figure out how to dual boot my laptop so I could run win8 and 2012 on it at the same time, while still having room for all my work, when I remembered the expensive Mac I have sitting in my office. I inherited this machine a couple of years ago, but never used it much, I do most of my work on my laptop, and didn’t really need to have a second work machine, so I converted it into a CentOS machine to work on my RHCE certification. I am super busy now, and haven’t had much time to pursue my RHCE, and re-certing an MCSE on Win8/2012 would be time better spent.
So that’s my plan, and I’m sticking to it.
itnetsup 