There were three main session types at TechEd Europe 2014. Here’s an overview. Continue reading
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TechEd Europe 2014- Session Types
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TechEd Europe 2014- Top 10 Practices for OS Deployment with ConfigMgr 2012R2
WIN-B328
An interesting session from Dell Tools Strategist Greg Ramsey. I’m keeping up my practise of 5 highlights even though this was a “Top 10” talk 🙂 
- KISS- Start simple and work your way to complexity. My experience of an overly-complicated SCCM deployment definitely supports this theory.
- From SCCM2012 SP1 onwards there is an option of hidden task sequences. Make use of this to hide development, alternative OS versions etc to most users- especially if you have self-service rebuilds.
- Automate your process to import drivers and create driver packages to eliminate human error. This definitely makes sense and will also help get new drivers into the build quicker rather than waiting for someone to go through a manual process
- If done right, SCCM is great. If done wrong there’s lots of opportunities to turn your desktop into a paperweight.
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“Continue on error is not your friend” says @ramseyg #SCCM #TEE14 #TEWINB328
— Chris Bradshaw (@aldershotchris) October 31, 2014
More details from Greg can be found on his blog.
TechEd Europe 2014- Windows 10 Deployment
WIN-B338-R
A session on deployment options for Windows 10 with Michael Niehaus from Microsoft. Here’s my top 5 notes:
- New in Windows 10 is the end of the requirement for wipe and reload in the enterprise and introduces the possibility of doing a managed in-place upgrade in a corporate environment.
- There’s good compatibility between Windows 7/8 and Windows 10- if your hardware and apps run in Windows today you’ll probably be fine in Windows 10 (the noted exception was 64-bit Windows on a Pentium D, but that must be a decade old configuration).
- Enterprise Mode in Internet Explorer 11 is allowing companies with IE8-specific apps to migrate to a modern browser.
- Three deployment  choices are offered- Wipe and Load, In Place Upgrade (mentioned in 1.) and finally Provisioning which transforms a Windows 10 device into an enterprise managed one- perfect for CYOD solutions and especially in the mobile device sphere.
- The Upgrade option, which can be provided through a simple task sequence driven option in SCCM Software Centre, also includes a rollback option- if something goes wrong then the previous OS will be restored.
Windows 10 Deployment Options
TechEd Europe 2014- Foundational Session
FDN03 – Optimizing Your Datacenter with Windows Server, System Center, and Microsoft Azure
Another big session that generated loads of notes in my OneNote and here are my Five Highlights..
- CPS- The Azure-in-your-datacentre offering. This takes all the best practice and lessons learned to provide an optimised on-premise cloud.
- CPS has a single point of support- Microsoft. No multi-vendor issues.
- Everything can be software defined these days. Network controllers, load balancers, storage……
- 20% of Azure workloads are Linux
- There’s no such thing as a happy storage customer- they always want more/faster
TechEd Europe 2014- SQL Server Management
DBI-B220 – Introduction to SQL Server Management for the Non-DBA
A very interesting and entertaining session to round off Tuesday. This covered the things IT Pros need to do when they need to run SQL Server- backups, restores, checking for corruption, and more.
Here are my 5 key points from the session. This was definitely one of those sessions which I could have listed many more from!
- Keep the number of TempDB files down. 8 is a good number, and set growth to 1GB increments
- Corruption Will Happen. Check for it. Deal with it.
- Backup regularly. Try a daily full backup and transactional backups every 10-15 minutes for starters.
- Good Indexing can speed up your queries. Too much slows down your iNSERT/UPDATE/DELETEÂ tasks
- Keep your statistics up to date
DBI-B220 Talk at Tech-Ed Europe 2014.