With everything that’s been going on, I realized I haven’t updated anyone on what’s been going on and let you know of some great opportunities to take some training I’ll be delivering.

MVP Renewal
First and foremost, I was renewed on July 1st as a Cluster MVP for the period of 7/1/11 to 6/30/12. I’m very honored. Trust me when I say that I never assume that it will happen, and it’s definitely NOT automatic.

SQL Server Foundations – 2 Day Online eLearning Event August 30 and September 1
I’ll be delivering a six session, two day training webinar in conjunction with Penton Media and SQL Server Magazine to cover some of the basics folks need when dealing with SQL Server. I am very excited to do this, as I often just deliver training that is only cluster and/or high availability related. It won’t be death by PowerPoint – I promise! This will be a fun couple of days.

The sessions break down as follows (full abstracts at the link below):
TUESDAY, AUGUST 30
Session 1: Core SQL Server Engine Concepts, 11 am ET
Session 2: SQL Server High Availability Part 1, 1 pm ET
Session 3: SQL Server High Availability Part 2, 3 pm ET
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST:
Session 1: Implementation Strategies, 11 am ET
Session 2: Successful SQL Server Administration Techniques, 1 pm ET
Session 3: Practical Backup and Restore, 3 pm ET

The cost is a really good deal – $218 for all six sessions. With everyone having tight training budgets, this is a really economical way to get training without having to deal with a travel budget!

I believe it is like the others I have done with them in the past where you can view them later as well. You can ask Penton to make sure.

For full details and to register, click here.

24 Hours of PASS
Hot off the presses! Just announced today is the latest incarnation of 24 Hours of PASS, the Summit Preview version. I will be doing the session “Multi-Site Failover Clustering With SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2, and Denali” at 19:00 (7PM) GMT/15:00 Eastern US (3PM)/12:00 Western US on September 7. Click here to register.

Pre-Conference Seminar at PASS Summit
I’m very psyched about this. I was flattered when PASS picked my abstract out of the many they received. – it’s a big deal! I will be doing DBA-499-P Deep Dive into AlwaysOn: Failover Clustering and Availability Groups (click on the link for a full abstract) on Tuesday, October 11. This will be a full day of Denali high availability training focusing on what’s new in failover clustering as well as talking about the new AlwaysOn availability groups feature. The day will have lots of demos and unlike the webinars, it will allow you to be more interactive instead of just a Q&A session at the end.

The lineup for the two days of pre-conference seminars at PASS is quite frankly awesome. Lots of good stuff, and I don’t envy the decisions people will have to make to choose what to go to. Of course, I recommend choosing mine for the second day and something else for the first. But I may be a bit biased …

The cost for the each pre-conference is $395 in addition to the cost of Summit itself. What are you waiting for? Go register!

PASS Summit Spotlight Session
Besides the pre-conference seminar, I’ll be doing a spotlight session (DBA-408-S) entitled “Implementing SQL Server Denali Using Windows Server Core” (click for the abstract). Windows Server Core is a variation of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that allows you to have a GUI-less server. Denali is the first version of SQL Server to support this variant of the underlying OS. If things like command line and PowerShell get you excited, this is the session for you.

Whew! That’s a pretty action packed schedule for the next few months which doesn’t include any of the day-to-day work or private things that I deliver. I haven’t figured out what I will be doing after PASS Summit, so stay tuned. I am eying SQL Saturday 96 in Washington D.C. on November 5th, though.

Hope to see you at one or all of these!