Microsoft's Tech.Ed 2009 conference, happening this very week in Australia, is noteworthy not just because it draws IT-savvy tech pros from around the globe, but because each attendee received a netbook with Windows 7 installed.

Over at 4sysops, the blog for Windows administrators, James Bannon has a fascinating interview with several of the Microsoft evangelists responsible for coordinating the event and, more interestingly, deploying Windows 7 on such a large number of systems.

In this excerpt, Jorke Odolphi, who was responsible for Tech.Ed's technical infrastructure, discusses some of the deployment challenges:

JB: What were some of the technical issues you encountered?

JO: The key thing we found was the performance available on the netbooks. We found that when deploying the image, which is around 8GB in size, the multicast push was slower than we expected as the available CPU and disk I/O caused bottlenecks. No matter how fast we could push the image down the wire, the netbooks could only write that image at a speed which they could handle, so we encountered some quite significant slowdowns. We also ran into power issues caused by attempting to image 500 netbooks at a time.

Definitely some interesting reading for CIOs and IT managers who are gearing up for large-scale Windows 7 deployments.

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