Microsoft is there this year, large booth, opening night keynote. NEXT year they won't be there, at least not in such a large way.

They say on their literature bags may be searched, but I've been walking around with my big vmworld 2011 backpack all week, never searched once. To the original question, I am a network admin at a non-profit religious denomination, not really in "the industry". I registered online, worked on my cover story, but in the end I didn't need it. They didn't even ask for my business card when I picked up my badge, just drivers license.

We do Veeam backups of our virtual infrastructure nightly. Once a week, a copy of that is taken offsite. Also, every night our Equallogic SAN's replicate with eachother. They are in three separate offices in North America. In the event one building burns down, is blown up by a nuke, or similar, we can fire up our entire virtual infrastructure in the failback location within a couple of hours (minutes really). Since we only have 3-4 non-virtualized servers, and none of them store important data, we're pretty well protected I think.

I believe you are wrong there. It says for their wholesale customers, they are allowed to bill based on connection speed, but not total monthly bandwidth usage. This means a small ISP would pay for a 100Mbit link, or 2 Gbit link, etc... It is billed in 100Mbit increments. ISP can use as much as they want, but they will only get that amount per second they paid for. This makes sense to me, you pay for the size of the pipe you need, doesn't matter how much data you put through the pipe.

I have one. Wireless just shuts off randomly every day, and under heavy load. Not all of them do this, but if you get one, there is no known fix. Does it both on stock firmware and DD-WRT. Netgear forums are littered with reports of it. I'm getting an Asus RT-N16 today to replace it.

I got a call from Bell the other day asking me to switch back to them. I said no. The guy asked why, and I said it was because Bell was an evil greedy company that didn't care about customers and I would never use one of their products ever again. After about 10 seconds of dead air, I said goodbye :) Bell is a horrid company. At work I switched all our cell phones off them to the slightly less evil Rogers, and our internet off them too (though our fiber connection does go through their network, couldn't avoid that, but at least they just get a fraction of the money, not all of it. Soon our phone lines will all be switched to VOIP too at work, no more Bell.

We condidered it last year, for about 800 machines. We didn't go with it because it needed multiple servers, and some of those had to be 32 bit servers. The SQL I believe it was, not totally sure but I think it only ran on a 32 bit sql server, which we don't have any of. Went with Kaspersky, been working great.

I'm not sure you understood what I meant. If Rogers is offering a streaming video service through their internet service, they have to count that towards your data cap just as they would for netflix. They can't give their own service an unfair and artificial advantage like that. They certainly would love to, and thats what the whole net neutrality debate is about. This came up when Bell first started throttling customers. One of the reasons the CRTC ruled with Bell initially was because they also throttled customers using Bell's own services.

I'm surprised to hear that part about your ISP's own offerings not being included in the cap. I believe in Canada, that practice is illegal. If they are going to cap you they can't discriminate their traffic or a competitors.