Tech Ed EMEA IT: Day 4 - Guru Central

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, November 6, 2008

So, we’re on the penultimate day of TechEd EMEA and I have to say that exhaustion is starting to creep in. However, the day had a great start with sessions by Steve Riley and then Mark Russinovich.

Steve was talking about security implications of virtulisation and his views were stimulating. He was talking in depth about what to consider when virtualising machines and why Microsoft took the architectural approach that they did for the Hyper-V stack when security was considered. I could post more, but I would urge you to go and find the video of the session when it’s available as Steve himself gave a much better delivery of the material than I ever could.

Next up was Mark Russinovich, of sysinternals fame. I’ve been using tools produced by sysinternals for a long time, but almost always from the standpoint of figuring out how to make apps run with the least possible security. That means filemon and regmon, now replaced by Process Explorer. What Mark was showing was how to use ProcExp with some of his other tools to analyze why applications crash and how to drill right down into crash dump files to identify the offending code. It was a very cool presentation and his delivery was both engaging and amusing. If you get the chance to see him speak I would highly recommend it.