Live from Microsoft Tech Ed: Final Day

So I guess I’m on the even days plan here at Tech Ed, today being the fourth and final day of Tech Ed…  Yesterday I got the chance to walk around the exhibitor hall and collect swag  take a look at the exciting offerings on the floor.  Microsoft had three very large sections with breakout booths for all their product offerings.  I stopped and chatted with a few experts in the Server 2008 R2 virtualization offerings, and watched a couple System Center demos as well.  Speaking of System Center, did you know F5 has a management pack for System Center?  I talked to several booth visitors yesterday who own System Center and F5 BIG-IP that had no idea…they left the booth pretty excited.  I also talked to some Exchange 2010 guys about the and they spoke very highly on our solution.

Do you like free?  I walked by the NetWrix booth and 10 Free Tools for IT Professionals screamed out to me.  See, I’m a cheapskate and I really like free things—as long as they bring value.  I’ve written some basic powershell scripts to do the work of some of these tools, but they look like a nice set to add to your toolbox.  Several of them have additional features at cost if it makes sense in your environment.

Need some serious eye-candy for your operations center, leadership team or for demos?  The dashboards (particularly the 3D Cockpit at left) are most  impressive.  Smart eVision offers a three month free online trial if you are interested.

I didn’t win this Ducati motorcycle that SunBelt Software gave away.  I suppose that’s ok since a) I was given the ticket, b) I don’t have a motorcycle license, and c) I doubt I could talk my wife into letting me have one anyway.  Still, that would have been turned into a nice cash prize.  Oh well.  I can still leave Tech Ed, and New Orleans, a little bit wiser in the ways of several of Microsoft’s technologies.  I can also thank Ryan for taking me to school on the many ways our own F5 technologies plug in to the Microsoft solutions, enabling them to scale and improving their performance.  Agility indeed.