Today for me was all about Networking and NVGRE Gateways. Here are some of my highlights from day 2:

• There are no changes in the NVGRE packet which means WS 2012 and WS 2012 R2 can co exist.
• You have to have separate hosts/clusters for NVGRE Gateways to reside.
• Microsoft NVGRE Gateway will have automatic failover.
• For high availability you will have two gateways in cluster and one will be active the other standby.
• In the Preview build of VMM 2012 R2 there are some limitations like you can have only one gateway that resides only on one Hyper-v Host
• I was on the Pete Zerger and Anders Bengtsson session for Orchestrator – very funny session with a lot to learn.
• Met Mark Russinovich – great guy, very friendly.
• Azure is also constructed in stamps. Every stamp is controlled by Azure Fabric Controller. On top of the Fabric Controllers there is API and on top of the API is the Azure portal.
• There will be Service Templates for all System Center components even for VMM.
• Microsoft Gateways and the hosts where they reside must be Windows Server 2012 R2.
• In preview the Hyper-V host that will host the gateways is marked in VMM trough PowerShell. In RTM there will be checkbox.
• Demo was shown of automatic failover of NVGRE Gateways without downtime of the network.
• The logic for Multitenant dividing of the traffic happens on host level.
• Each Tenant has its own Public NAT address.
• GWs can be domain joined or not domain joined but for failover you will need domain joined.

Tomorrow will be my last day at TechEd 2013 as I have to leave early on Friday morning.