Tech Ed EMEA IT: Day 3 - Server 2008 R2

We were in early today, looking forward to a session on SharePoint with Bill Engolish. Sadly, that was cancelled so Andy and I sat in on the Server 2008 R2 overview session presented by Iain McDonald. That was very interesing, and we learned a bit more about BranchCache. It doesn't look like it will replace WAN accelerators like Riverbved, because it doesn't appear to function at their low level. However, it does a similar thing at the file level. The client requests a file from the remote server, which instead replies with hashes. The client PC the requests those hashes from the local cache, improving performance. The cache itself is built on request so does not need to be pre-populated (which is good). I think WAN accelerators have nothing to fear from this, but for smaller organisations or ones which aren't able to put the accelerators in (perhaps their servers are hosted, for example) BranchCache looks like a very promising technology.

Something I saw and got excited about is DHCP failover. We don't suffer much with DHCP outage, but because the only way to sync up two DHCP servers is to export and import it's very hard to do resilient services. DHCP failover should solve that, and it looks good.

Also, more on the >net on server core front. The key 'takeaway' is that it is a subset of .Net 2, .Net 3 (WCF and WF, not WPF) and .Net3.5 (WF additions and Linq). That makes sense - why include elements related to the GUI. However, subset obviously means compatibility pitfalls and I am still very interested to see where this goes.

We spoke to a few guys on the IIS stand yesterday about SharePoint on IIS7. I need to talk to the SharePoint guys about the same thing. The IIS chaps were optimistic that what I wanted to do would work, but there had been no effort put into testing of the scenario as yet. As far as I am concerned, at the very least I want to be able to run my WFE servers as server core for security reasons. I'd really like to be able to deploy the app server roles to core as well, which falls in line with a single-purpose server, virtualised strategy.

I'm writing this as I wait for the MED-V session to start. The brief intro to this given during the Windows 7 session made it sound exciting and I really hope to come away from this feeling energised. Whilst it's been a solid conference so far, there's not been much to give me a buzz - perhaps this is it. I'll take notes and try to post my thoughts later.