We’re currently running the free VMware server using Windows 2003 Server as the host operating system on our original Dell 2950 server. We have 8-10 virtual servers running on that box now, none of which are demanding resource-wise (gratefully).

Three weeks ago we bought a second 2950 like the one we bought last year, a Dell/EMC AX150i iSCSI SAN, and a bunch of expensive ESX 3 software from VMware. We’re going to hook the two 2950s to the SAN, load ESX on them, and convert all of our existing virtual servers as well as 3 older physical servers to the new virtual environment. We have hired some consultants to help us and hope to have it in production by June 4. We’ll keep you posted …

Miles McPherson from The Rock Church in San Diego presented this week at the Beeson Institute. My favorite line from his talk: “There is no spiritual gift called ‘sitting in church.'”

BusinessWeek has a nice overview of the unconference idea that we’ve stumbled into for the church IT community. “Roundtable” is a much better word, in my opinion, than “unconference” or “camp” (as in BarCamp or PodCamp). I’m glad we’re doing an unconference and calling it a roundtable – that’s the best of both!

The Beeson Institute for Advanced Congregational Leadership is having one of its sessions at Church of the Resurrection this week in our Student Center. Mike Breaux, teaching pastor at Willow Creek, presented today.

Demolition Day has arrived for the humble annex. Turns out you can use a backhoe to bring down a building.

In the upper left corner you can see our camera crew recording the whole thing from the roof of our West Building. I’m sure they’ll find some creative use for the video!

The IT organizations of Intel and Dell are waiting for SP1 to upgrade to Vista. I know we’ll run Vista eventually, but I also know it won’t be in 2007. We’ll look closely at it in November when we need to decide whether to budget for it in 2008. If it doesn’t seem like a good move, we’ll wait and look at it again in November 2008.

What are your Vista roll-out plans?

I’d like to get together for lunch with my KC-area church IT homies sometime in the next couple of weeks. How about the 10th, 17th, or 31st? Leave a comment …

Who out there is paying attention to Microsoft’s Silverlight technology announcements? Is it as big a deal as Scoble suggests?

Today I realized I had never posted a roll of the church IT blogs I read. So I went through and cleaned up the subscription list in my feed reader (IE 7), exported the list as OPML, and then imported it into blogrolling.com in order to quickly create the new blogroll you see on the right.

Then I realized, this could be a really cool way to link church IT blogs, using the same approach as the Methodist Blogroll. So, here goes …

Church IT Blogroll Instructions
Benefits:

• We will maintain the blogroll and update it regularly
• As links are added, updated, and deleted, it will update on your blog automatically
• A great way to keep track of the church IT blogging world and build the fledgling Church IT Roundtable/Church IT Association

Requirements:

• Your blog is focused on church IT and/or church web sites
• You update it regularly (if we see no posts for a few months, we’ll take you off)
• You provide an RSS feed of your posts (because the feed is what we’ll actually put on the blogroll)

To get on the blogroll:

• E-mail me (clif.guy at cor.org)
• We’ll check out your blog and add you if you meet the requirements

To add the blogroll to your own site, paste the following code in your blog template:

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php
?r=9407d5ed585629e658efc2318e1add48″></script>

In my wee-hours haze last night I linked something totally unrelated to Andrew’s video. It’s here.