One of the most heralded features in Windows Server 2012 (previously known as Windows Server 8) is support in Hyper-V for virtual machine replicas. If you're familiar with VMWare it's similar to Site Recovery Manager, for Xen you're probably looking at Remus, and Kemari for KVM (bear in mind that none of these products are necessarily exactly the same, but close enough). Virtual Machine replication across sites is very attractive. You get a lot of flexibility with minimal effort.

Despite being a topic that I've discussed extensively at work, over the last 12 months I've made no less than 4 attempts at organising my thoughts coherently into a blog entry. I hope that I've finally got it. In my mind System Administration falls under 2 general families; Enterprise and Jack of All Trades. To me enterprise administrators manage large systems, and are generally focused on their specific trade - be it systems or network.

I'm openly paranoid about many things. Probably a secondary reason I'm basically bald at 25. The future of my profession is one I'm very paranoid about. It's one I love, despite all my moanings, and as the world starts it's seemingly inexorable move back to the mainframe^Wcloud, I fear that as time progresses we'll be in a world where there are few of us outside of large cloud companies. How much longer is on-premises server hardware still required?