AMD's managing a heterogenous environment

Yep there is a theme here ;-)

AMD are all about the out of band management - Management that operates with hardware resources and components that are independent of OS control. Think like an iLo card in an HP Server.

They are part of the DMTF standards body that are working to make standards for these types of devices and the functionality they offer. This should ensure all the vendors products are interoperable. In this case the standard discussed is DASH - Desktop and Mobile Architecture for Systems Hardware. It leverages WS-Management which is another DMTF standard.

The kinds of things you can do are:

• Remote power on/off - wake for patching
• Remote boot
• Serial console redirect - change BIOS, watch boot sequence.
• HW and SW asset inventory - saves desktop visit if something fails.

Then some demos which were deathly dull, I have seen someone remotely power on/off a PC probably 5 times now!

Asset Inventory Service

I've seen a couple of sessions on this now so I shall summarise my thoughts.

Right now I'd say that this solution has only one place where we would consider it's use, and that's Royal Canin. Given the lack of network routing between the sites, this is a solution that would be able to deliver value very quickly (the installation would still need to be managed on a subsidiary by subsidiary basis though).

Microsoft have big plans for this product though, and some of the areas of interest are the software catalogue, which will be automatically referenced in Systems Center R2. To become a fully fledged service though, user authentication needs to be standards-based (I don't think the MS passport is an identity standard yet, but I'm sure Doug will correct me if I'm wrong) and the database will need to be accessible to enterprise business intelligence tools.

So apart from RC, I think this is one to look at again no earlier than version 2 (likely to be announced at Tech Ed later this year)

Analysing 12000+ IT Environments

This was a great session, full of lots onf information about how the Micrsoft Operations Framework and the Infrastructure optimisation surveys have helped companies do their deployments and move from Basic-Standardised-Rationalised-Dynamic.
There are some self assessments online
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/cits/mo/mof/moftool.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/assessment/launch.mspx
however, when we met with the NYC Account team they said they would get us the full survey.

Further info on the Infrastructure optimisation can be found here > http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/infrastructure/default.aspx
They follow ITIL and COBIT too.

They have been running these surveys for 3 years and realised certain problems:

• Purchasing products does not always mean implementing
• Utilisation of products is usually around 0-10% of their feature set, some go up to 25% but virtually no one is ever above 50%. An obvious example the presenter said was Calendaring. All email has them and the ability to share, however the majority of employees are unaware/untrained etc.

The secret to service excellence is often pitched as people, process, technology. However it should read People+Process+Technology. Having one of two clearly does not make up for a lack elsewhere, the framework should help companies understand what they need to do.

There are 3 Infrastructure optimisation models that have been developed with Gartner and MIT. These are:

1. Core Infrastructure Optimisation Model,
2. Business Productivity Optimisation Model
3. Application Platform Optimisation Model

Each of the above have the four stages of development - Basic-Standardised-Rationalised-Dynamic.

A nice metaphor was used to describe businesses that are trying to progress their IT without dealing with each stage in turn - like a ship with 40 anchors, buying a bigger boat wont make you go faster.

As much as you try to go faster/ more dynamically by implementing new technologies, if you do not deal with the problems you are facing at each stage, all you are doing is introducing more complexity and instability and actually making this worse.

Their research has shown that if in any of the 3 optimisation models a business is still at the basic level, they will never be above standardised in the other 2.

It was interesting to ave a bit more of an in depth look at the MOF and IO models, I had only really skim read them before. It is certainly worth us having a chat about our areas and where we think we are and what that means. Maybe a team meeting topic?

Application Virtualisation & Streaming

I've attended a whole bunch of sessions covering different aspects of this topic, so I'll try to summarise my thoughts now we're done.

Firstly, the App Virtualisation product finally gives the Microsoft management suite proper user-targetting for software distribution, which it has always lacked. The main business benefit of the product is reducing the need for regression testing of different applications (i.e. conflict solver no longer required!). There is a secondary benefit in allowing previously incompatible applications co-exist, thus increasing flexibility/agility. This would be a great solution for COMPASS running Office 2007 alongside previous versions of Office.

The streaming aspect might be useful to deploy to users with limited connectivity, and there is clear potential to use this deployment mode to enable centralisation along with NGN V2. Lots more work to do here but also some big opportunities.

In summary App Virtualisation is something that should definitely be on our roadmap, but it's not going be a solution for everything.

System Centre Mobile Device Manager

I can't tell you just how bored I am of writing System Centre now
;-)

This lecture was about planning and deploying SCMDM. I thought it would be quite architectural but it was mostly run throughs of the wizards.

Key facts:

• Planning is very important as you need to touch many areas within IT - firewall, Active Directory and policies, security, SCCM and so on.
• Need to clearly define who 'owns' SCMDM due to the above.
• No Active Directory Schema changes are required
• Best Practices Analyser tool can be run pre and post deploymnet and it can report any errors or changes that need to be made.
• Device lifecycle is important to define as you don't wnat non-standard devices to cause problems.
• Coonsider who should support the end device and service, i.e. if the operator supports the phone but you support the service how are problems resolved where they interrelate? Need careful commercial negotiation before deployment.
• List of devices that will be Windows 6.1 can be found here > www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/mobiledevicemanager/devices.mspx

Mat's thoughts on the 3rd keynote

I know Brian has already covered some of it, I just had some additional notes that I thought were interesting.

• Microsoft are beginning to use Data Centres in a container. They have their first one installed in Boulder, Colorado which provides Virtual Earth. It is entirely powered by wind power.
• They have found System Centre a great help with acquisitions because it can now monitor and manager diverse environments and is massively scalable.
• Average is 1 engineer to manager 5000 servers!
• Internal Microsoft IT are basically the beta testers for all the System Centre products.
• They deal with 1 million events per day!

I think it would be very interesting to spend time with their team to see how they do things. Same for the desktop area who are more advanced in terms of the newer products and their use. I'll blog that in another post.

Extending SCCM to heterogenous environments

This was a session presented by Quest to talk about their products that can further enhance SCCM. It is designed to improve the ability of SCCM into non windows areas and help achieve a better ROI.
These are branded Quest Management Extensions (QMX) and contain the following functionality:

• Support for non Windows OS - Red Hat, Suse (server and desktop), OSX, ESX, HPUX via agents.
• Agentless (reduced functionality) for Novell, Ubuntu and network devices such as printers, switches, routers and mainframes.
• Can add non windows OS into Active Directory.
• Patch and software distribution to the above (1st bullet).

QMX for SCCM 2007 are the above except network devices, if that functionality is required you also need to purchase QMX for Device Manager.

Virtual Desktops

A quick update on the Virtual Desktop session, which was presented by Pete Downing of Citrix. The solution is fairly similar to the VDI (Remote SDS) solution that is under development internally, with a couple of noteable exceptions.

The Citrix solution (demonstrated on top of Windows Sever 2008 running Hyper-V) uses a very shiny looking web interface for the end user, and the network transport between the client and the virtual machine is ICA rather than the RDP protocol that most other solutions use. Citrix claim a 15x performance improvement over RDP (maybe it should have read 1.5x) but given our experience with Remote SDS on RDP at Doane, where performance is not comparable to the existing Citrix terminal server solution (ICA transport again), maybe we should be looking at this solution more carefully.

Other nice parts of the solution include the automatic virtual machine provisioning which includes some scripting for personalisation, but until we can get to a stateless PC image I think we'll continue to struggle with deployment. At least it's given me something to think about!

Virtual Machine Manager

This session was all about the System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) product. Microsoft realise that the virtual world is driving a massive amount of growth for example, last year, 1 in 3 Enterprises bought Softgrid, they predict next year that will have increased to 1 in 2 of all Enterprises.

They consider that virtualisation should be a skill you learn as part of a techie skill set, not a specialism you struggle to achieve. SCVMM is here to help!

SCVMM is basically a pretty gui front end driving Powershell scripts, at the end of each wizard you can generally click a 'View Script' button should you want to see how things work or use it to make automated scheduled jobs for example.

P2V functionality is built in (costs extra with VMWare) as is V2V (convert VMWare machines to MS), although SSCVMM 08 will have the ability to natively manage both MS machines and VMWare machines. The first product on the market to take this holistic approach. The 2008 version will also have the ability patch offline machines.

There will be a delegation web portal too, this allows a user to login and manage their machine via a browser. This saves giving too many rights or having to deploy an application to that end user just to make life easier. (We deliver the VMWare machine application via Citrix). This is all controlled by Active Directory Group policies.

It is worth considering Server Management Suite Enterprise as this contains SCVMM, SCDPM, SCOM, SCCM - basically all the System Centre products.

W2K8 Enterprise edition allows you to run 4 virtual machines with no need to buy additional OS lics, Standard only 1, but Datacentre is unlimited.

Due to this Microsoft claim Hyper-V is 1/3 the cost of an equivalent VMWare environment.

One note of caution was raised with a nice quote from Gartner - Virtualising without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualisation in the first place!

Microsoft know how to party!

Seriously look at the rapture on the faces of the audience ;-)

The party also had Lan Halo, a chainsaw juggler, a stage for people playing rock band, free arcade games and so on. We stayed for a while but the rock, paper, scissors amazed us ;-)