Mat's thoughts on the keynote with Bob Muglia

Today the first session was the keynote with Bob Muglia one of MS's Senior VPs.
The key things I took away are:

• Demo of System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) that showed its ability to do pre-OS (what we tend to call bare metal) install by configuring both the BIOS (to enable virtualisation) and RAID. Both core functionality for server distributions.
• SCCM will soon have the ability to multicast, better aiding network distribution without clogging the pipes.
• Early benchmarking of Hyper-V shows it to be pretty competitive with a v1 release with VMWare ESX which has had a couple of years headstart. Obviously they didn't state who paid for the benchmarking and it's independence or not, but interesting all the same.
• System Centre Virtual Machine Manager was released as a Beta. A very interesting product that can manage both Hyper-V and VMWare virtual environments from the one console. The only product current available to do this on the market now.
• Whilst Hyper-V can move virtual machines, it does require downtime albeit brief. VMWare today can do this with none. Microsoft have a live migration working in the lab and will be introducing it in the future.
• Next up, Cross Platform extensions for SCCM were announced that allow for the management of SUSE/Red Hat/Solaris/HPUX etc. Again allowing for an investment in one product (SCCM) to enable companies to manage their entire infrastructure environment.
• Finally, that we are all heroes for doing the jobs we do, tying into the Windows 2008 launch in Feb and the use of David Bowie's song. I for one have always known I'm a legend ;-)