Thursday at Microsoft Management Summit 2011 did not have a keynote, but was definitely not short of compelling content for attendees. The day was full of labs, breakout sessions and the final hours of the Expo. The Veeam booth was still busy, and our raffle for the Xbox 360 with Kinect made Darol Harshman’s suitcase a little heavier for the return.

Veeam’s Alec King presented session BK13 which was a case study of managing a VMware infrastructure with System Center Operations Manager. Serge Berat of Belgacom Group presented on how the Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware is used in their environment. The slides of Alec and Serge’s presentation are available for download as a PDF. This figure below sums up what Serge is doing with the nworks MP:

We also had a special opportunity to record a podcast during MMS. Symon Perriman from Microsoft joined Veeam’s Doug Hazelman and Rick Vanover to discuss the event and some of the new initiatives related to virtualization and the Microsoft private cloud. Symon is a technical evangelist for server, virtualization and cloud technologies at Microsoft. Symon also explained a new program that Microsoft is starting called the Microsoft virtualization for VMware professionals jump start series of online training materials. This is a valuable set of online training options, including sessions delivered by Symon, that will help educate the virtualization community on Microsoft’s virtualization and System Center management strategy.

MMS 2011 wraps up Friday with a half day of labs for attendees. The Veeam team had a wonderful time at MMS and enjoyed Las Vegas. Hope to see you next year at MMS 2012!