Power Of Community–Virtualization Reality–Halifax Leg

On the continuing Eastern leg of the Virtual Reality community tour – I drove from Sydney to Halifax yesterday morning in order to make an up time, avoid the fog (which closed the airport) in order to talk with professors and IT staff at Nova Scotia Community College. The meeting was setup by my friend David Jelico – a prof that is very passionate about Technology and teaching students a balanced approach to surviving a career in IT. Topic was about private / public cloud and how the college could incorporate it into their curriculum as well as embrace some of the technology themselves.

As is always the case with David – his passion shines through and lots of lively conversation ensued with a full Q&A back and forth with everyone in the room. Nothing like keeping “the Microsoft guy” on his toes, eh?

After grabbing a bite to eat between sessions at “The Q” (best damn rib and BBQ joint in Halifax hands down) we hopped the ferry to cross over and setup for an evening event at the NSCC Waterfront campus – overlooking the beautiful harbour. If I had to choose a campus with a view – this would be the one.

The event itself was a bit modified. We had lower numbers then previous cities, so I modified the content to be better suited to a smaller crowd and focused on engaging and talking with the guys and showing / building the environment collaboratively with them. I say “building” mainly because I had a hardware issue that made it so I had to completely rebuild one of my Host Hyper-V servers which was left in a default install state. The demos were extended to literally build the second Host and enable it to work as the second node cluster for the highly available VM system.

After the event – I offered up a round of drinks for good measure at my favourite local establishment “The Old Triangle” where it happened to be jam night – bring your own instrument for traditional down home kitchen party. I kind of regret not picking up the Bohran to play a tune myself – but I was otherwise engaged in talking with Rob about his plans to setup a Canadian Home Grown Hosted Datacenter service using the full suite of MS technology (System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Opalis, System Center Operations Manager, Hyper-V and more). I look forward to sharing his story with you here as they build it out and how they use these technologies to offer up hosted infrastructure to their Canadian customers.

I’m writing this post the day after – enjoying a rare day in the sun on the wharf downtown in Halifax. I was working at a Co-Working space called “The Hub” earlier today, but the sunshine was calling and I had a lunch meeting with a friend so I took advantage of some mobile technology and charged laptop in order to write with a view of the ocean.