Hey MVPDays Fans,

I wanted to write to you tonight with some exciting news about the upcoming sessions for @MVPDays Virtual Conference.

The show begins at 8:00 AM MST and runs until 5:00 PM MST. – Oct 25, 2017

If you are interested you can sign-up here:

(It’s 100 % free to register)

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/mvpdays-virtual-conference-oct-2017-tickets-37262524213?aff=eac2

You can check-out the schedule here:

https://mvpdaysv-conference2017-1.busyconf.com/schedule#activity_599e25749180ff5735000495

Let’s take a look at the second and third of 4 blocks of sessions for this virtual Conference.

Our first speaker is Thomas Rayner follow him on twitter @MrThomasRayner

Thomas Rayner

Thomas Rayner is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional with over 15 years of experience in the IT industry. Thomas was awarded the prestigious title of Honorary Scripting Guy by Ed “The Scripting Guy” Wilson in 2016. His background is in cloud and datacenter management, specializing in DevOps, systems and process automation, public, private and hybrid could, and PowerShell. Thomas is a Pluralsight author, prominent speaker, best-selling author, and instructor covering a vast array of IT topics. He’s very active within the technical community and a variety of Microsoft technical and strategic teams. Thomas is the former President of the Edmonton Microsoft User Group.

By day, Thomas works for PCL Constructors on their DevOps and Automation team. Thomas enjoys working with a wide variety of different products and technologies, particularly emerging and disruptive technologies and automation-related products. His position with PCL affords him the luxury of facing interesting challenges every day.

Session – Regex for Complete Noobs

Regular expressions are sequences of characters that define a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings. Regular expressions are extremely useful to extract information from text such as log files or documents. If you don’t know basic regex, you’re missing out on a hugely important tool. Get some knowledge in you, and check out this session on regex.


Our Second Session comes to you from Clint Wyckoff @ClintWyckoff and myself Dave Kawula @DaveKawula

You can follow Thomas on twitter @mrthomasrayner and myself @davekawula

Clint Wyckoff (Senior Global Technical Evangelist at Veeam Software)

Clint Wyckoff is a Senior Global Technical Evangelist at Veeam Software. He is an avid technologist and virtualization fanatic with more than a decade of enterprise data center architecture experience. Clint is an energetic and engaging speaker and places a large emphasis on solving the real-world challenges IT professionals face. Additionally, he is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Cloud and Datacenter Management as well as a VMware vExpert for 2015 & 2016. Clint is also a Veeam Certified Engineer (VCME) and Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP). As a passionate technologist, Clint values active participation and community relationships. As a Co-Founder of vBrisket, LLC. and Co-Chairman of the MVPDays Roadshow, he’s consistently sharing the experiences he’s faced as well as actively building the modern IT Community. Check Clint on Twitter @ClintWyckoff, @vBrisket or via @MVPDays and #MVPHour

Session – Absolute Beginners Guide to Storage Spaces Direct – Fundamentals

In this session, we will discuss the core components of Storage Spaces Direct. This will include reviewing the two architecture choices in aggregated (Hyper Converged) or dis-aggregated (Scale out File Server SOFS). You will also learn key concepts to correctly configure the core networking stack using some of the latest features of Windows Server 2016 like RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access).


Our third session will be delivered MVP Robert Cain

Robert Cain (Owner at Arcane Training and Consulting)

Robert C. Cain (http://arcanecode.me) is a Microsoft MVP, MCTS Certified in BI, and is the owner of Arcane Training and Consulting, LLC. He is also a course author for Pluralsight and co-author of 5 books.

A popular speaker, Robert has presented at events such as the SQL PASS Summit, IT/Dev Connections, TechEd, CodeStock, and numerous SQL Saturdays. Robert has over 25 years’ experience in the IT industry, working in a variety of fields including manufacturing, insurance, telecommunications and nuclear power.

Session – Powering Azure SQL from PowerShell

In this demo packed session, you’ll learn how to migrate your on premises database to SQL Azure using PowerShell. You’ll learn how to create online storage, package your database, upload, then import it in SQL Azure all with PowerShell.

Azure is seeing phenomenal growth. More and more companies, from large enterprises to small start ups, are taking advantage of Azure to host their IT operations. As an IT Pro, you will be asked to migrate your local SQL Server Databases into SQL Azure.

In this session you’ll be introduced to the PowerShell cmdlets for migrating to the Azure SQL infrastructure. You’ll see how to:

Create resource groups

Create Azure storage containers

Create your Azure SQL Server and database

Connect to the Azure SQL DB from SSMS

Package your on premesis SQL Database

Upload your SQL Database to Azure

Import your SQL Database into Azure SQL

By the end of this demo packed session you’ll understand how to use PowerShell to migrate your SQL Databases to SQL Azure.


Our, forth session comes to us via MVPDays Alumni Edwin Sarmiento

Edwin Sarmiento (Managing Director at 15C Inc)

Edwin M Sarmiento is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Microsoft Certified Master from Ottawa, Canada specializing in high availability, disaster recovery and system infrastructures running on the Microsoft server technology stack. He is very passionate about technology but has interests in music, professional and organizational development, leadership and management matters when not working with databases. He lives up to his primary mission statement – “To help people and organizations grow and develop their full potential.”

Session: Designing a SQL Server Always On Availability Groups Topology Without Losing Your Sanity

So, you’re tasked to implement SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups but don’t know where to start. You have a lot of different topologies to choose from but they’re all the more confusing. Creating effective design architecture is key. In this session, we will look at the different topologies – from simple ones to advance – that you can implement and how to build them. At the end of the session, you will walk away with the knowledge on how to build the right SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group topology that will address your high availability and disaster recovery


Our fifth session in this block is comes to us from a good friend of mine Mike Maadarani and also MVPDays Alumni.

Mike Maadarani (SharePoint Architect at MCM Consulting)

Mike Maadarani is an Office 365 MVP, and a SharePoint Architect who has been providing strategic SharePoint solutions for the past 16 years. With over 22 years of IT industry experience, Mike spent the last few years managing and delivering SharePoint solutions to a wide range of mid to large scale projects. He is an evangelist and visionary where he can and provide the business and technical leadership required for delivering successful global SharePoint projects.

Mike is a Search and ECM expert and has deployed large SharePoint ECM and Collaboration implementations in North America.

Session: Tips in migrating SharePoint 2016 or Office 365, to avoid Migration Headaches.

Migrating data into any platform is a difficult task, especially if you are moving into Office 365. If you are migrating to either SharePoint On-Premise or O365, you will need preparation, good planning, and detailed execution activities are keys to avoid migration nightmare. This session will help you learn a methodology, adopted based on many previous migration, to help you deliver a successful migration project with happy users. We will learn the steps you need in your pre-migration analysis, migration checklists, post migration support, and any issues you might face during and after completing the migration efforts.


Our Sixth session in this block is comes to us from Amit Vasu MVP who is also an MVPDays Alumni.

Amit Vasu (Sr Consultant – Office 365 / SharePoint at Independant)

Amit Vasu is Sr. SharePoint consultant, working on SharePoint and related technologies since 2003. Amit’s main area of focus is Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management with SharePoint and related technologies. Amit also frequently participates in the SharePoint community events including SharePoint Saturday, SharePoint code camp and local user groups. Amit was awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in 2014.

Session: OneDrive for Business – Hub for Modern Collaboration

OneDrive for business is not just your personal drive but lot more than that. In this session we will go over how OneDrive play key role when collaborating with internal and external users using various Office 365 services like SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. This session will provide real life collaboration scenarios e.g. sharing (internal/external), co-authoring, files on-demand and copying/moving content to various Office 365 services using OneDrive.


There you have it that will cover us up until the third break at MVPDays Virtual Conference.

As you can see we have brought in some real first-class talent for this show and we hope you can join us.

Stay tuned for the rest of the posts on the upcoming content for MVPDays V-Conf.

Thanks and happy learning,

Dave