Technologies leveraged:
All the demos worked smoothly to prove it. We are doing some similar things with our solution, such as shadow copy, backups in data centre. Here is a great example of how we can take this forward, particularly for roaming users - why should my data be tied to ISB, if MTO can provide a much better service in every location; rather than good service in ISB but shocking elsewhere?
Again one to consider for the roadmap.
Benefits:
- Accelerates TCO savings by minimising recovery time and preventing data loss.
- Recover instead of rebuild - saves user time and allows root cause analysis
Rebuilding a unbootable PC guarantees data loss, this tool gives you the option to do data recovery at worst case and full system recovery at best. This way the user does not lose data or their time waiting on a rebuild and then their time setting things up just right.
Case study of a company called Ultrasonic Precision Inc they saw Help desk costs decrease 27% and end user downtime decrease between 50-60%.
Demo's were very effective is providing the crash analysis of a blue screen, and restoring data that had been accidentally deleted.
Tools included in DART:
You can add DART tools to a hidden system partition of your builds to ensure they are a F8 option for troubleshooting (probably should not include locksmith).
Whilst it is a MDOP feature, once you are licensed for MDOP on your desktops, you can use it on servers too.
You can create a DART cd/dvd from within a virtual machine - very cool.
Find out more here
Finally he mentioned a tool called SMStrace, which has the option to enter error codes, this can be very helpful.
By building your cost models with these themes in mind you will get a more balanced view of what will work.
Next steps are to assess the various solutions against these and see what will be a good fit for your portfolio. Again there was a number of steps to go through before having a user centric environment.
I'll leave the recap here, but hopefully it was enough to give you a taste. Once I get the slides I can elaborate further, but the detail on them and the pace he was going was more than I could get good notes down for and I'd like to do it justice.
To give a bit more background, this was the abstract:
Application virtualization? Workspace virtualization? Desktop virtualization? Composite desktops? Desktops-as-a-service? In an ever-more-complex game of "buzzword bingo" it has become very difficult to compare vendor offerings and choose the client-computing technologies and capabilities that will help you succeed as a business. This session leverages the "War on Cost" team's most recent research into client computing, and provides a framework for comparing the capabilities and considerations of emerging client models.
We'll compare the costs, benefits, and optimal use-cases for application virtualization, desktop virtualization and more; we'll discuss the impacts of each model on desktop deployment and management, datacenter workloads, application delivery, user productivity and business agility; and we'll highlight the key factors and best practices that must be considered when aligning your desktop strategy with business priorities. This session will equip you to make well-informed choices as you work to implement an agile and effective next-generation client-computing environment that meets your business needs.
Microsoft have decided to invest more in this areas and thus have rolled their System Center Mobile Device Manager product into Configuration Manager v.Next. They have already announced that they will support Nokia/Symbian platforms at RTM and are stating that they are working with other vendors, no time lines committed yet.
This is interesting as when I was at MMS in 2008, they were saying then that they were in discussions with Apple and Rim, so either these discussions a)take a really really long time, b)are not going well or c)lost focus... Might be worth getting a more formal roadmap under NDA to understand what is really happening.
Apart from Symbian, MS will also support WinCE 5.0+ WM6.1+. These devices will be able to do over the air enrollment, inventory, settings management, software distribution and remote wipe. WinCE devices wont be able to remote wipe or do over the air.
Over the air enrollment ties into SCCM and your EA Certificate infrastructure (PKI - which we will have as part of Connex). Demo'd well and worked flawlessly.
Admins can register users, or they will be able to self register.
They are working to make the user experience the same on all platforms, so things like offloading compliance check/remediation assessment to the SCCM server will ensure the user is not impacted regardless of how powerful their device is or what OS it runs.
Demo's of settings management and software distribution were equally impressive, and tie into the new Software catalog with v.Next - i.e user can choose to register their phone in it, or what software they want installed.
Public beta will be available by end May 2010
Really interesting session and I'm very hopeful it can be a good solution. I would want to see some firm commitments on timelines and platforms. Again though as we have Software Assurance on SCCM, we will be entitled to the product in the future anyway. Definitely one worth investigating!.
Next session was "Monitoring Networks with Operations Manager 2007 R2" I took a lot of notes on this one as I can see the benefits to an ops team, in that we often need to go to the Central Processing or Enterprise Networks teams and say dumb things like "My application is running bad", whereas "Server 51 is connected to Switch ABC on port 1, and we're seeing a lot of dropped packets between 9-11am" would be a bit more useful.
As you'll already doubtless know, R2 supports SNMP (V1 & v2) and can create either SNMP or SysLog workflows. What I didn't know is that it will also integrate with other monitoring solutions such as Solarwinds via a connector so that we can see the outputs of that alerting system right in the SCCM console. Pretty cool eh?
The larger part of the session was devoted (of course!) to v.Next, and how this offers more functionality. Please note this is all work in progress so subject to change before it goes gold.
The key points I noted are:
* Out of the box monitoring/discovery and reporting
* Server to network dependency discovery
* Multi Vendor/Multi Protocol support (SNMP v1/2/3 & IP v4/6 (note that discovery is IP4 ONLY!)
* Better scalability
Discovery can be manual or automatic (auto only needs one router IP address to discover the entire network!) and can be scheduled, via SMNP trigger or used on demand. This will support layer 2 & 3, VLAN memberships and HSRP (Cisco). Key monitor components by default are memory, CPU, Port, Interface card, PSU, temperature and voltage.
Monitoring defaults out of the box include port/interface up/down, traffic volume, CPU % utilisation, data drop and broadcast rates, memory counters (inc total and free RAM), PSU temperature and voltage and connection health end to end.
Final point was on inbuilt visualisation, which comes in either Dashboard or Diagram flavours - both looked common sense and useful, and of course were configurable ad infinitum.
Migrate - Map v.Next to existing 2007, migrate objects/clients/DP, Uninstall 2007 sites
All sounds so simple doesn't it ;-)
Enable migration in v.Next, specify hierachy - v.Next gathers info from 2007 for baseline, info is retained for reporting and displaying progress. I have some more details for those interested.
Concern for me is that it seems to be a side by side migration, not an in place - does this mean we will potentially need to buy new hardware to do an upgrade not long after we have finished our migration?
DPM 2010 released his week addresses these! They have removed any reliance on the end user and support user roaming and customisation. You can still enforce Admin defined restrictions.
Basics - first backup is a full backup, every future is the disk block changes - in essence allowing you to have a full backup each time, whilst only moving small amounts of data from the device to the DPM server. You can do multiple backups during the day to allow users to restore previous versions of files as they work. If they are offsite it backs up locally, sure if a disk fails you are stuck, but if they just want to restore any earlier version, they can still do this. Once back on network/vpn/directaccess it will sync with the DPM server.
Policy can configure backup locations, you can allow the users to add their own (or not). For example I have a bad habit of saving in progress files to my desktop and typically My Documents would be the location backed up - I could add my desktop to the locations to protect.
User can also choose to sync just before they go offsite, and do self recovery. If they lose their laptop you can restore to a new machine with their login, or if they just need a file, they can login to any machine and get what they need. I.e someone forgets their USB stick with their powerpoint.
The agent can be installed as part of a standard build, you only pay license costs when you start to do backups. This would be great as a premium service on top of SDS. Or a direct replacement for SDS backup.
A couple of flaws, each DPM server can only cater to 1000 clients, so assuming we need to run this from the datacenter, we would need significant server investment. Lets hope this becomes a cloud offering in the future!
SCCM 2007 R3 - will include more power management features. You can enable it in a data gathering mode first and understand how your estate is used, and understand the savings you could make. Typically Windows 7 has saved between $30-60 per machine by tweaking the power options from Windows XP. You will also be able to configure wake up for out of band patch/app distribution.
With the reports you can show CO2 savings as you implement the policies, therefore we could quantify the savings back to the sites. This helps as site power is obviously a different budget so whilst Mars IS wont see the benefit we can show the site what benefit they are getting because of our service.
SCCM 2007 R3 beta is available from today.
Brad says there are 5 things you need to build the core of your desktop strategy.
1) You must have one infrastructure to manage all your types of desktop - physical, vdi, app-v, etc. It must have comprehensive management tools for all the things you manage. Guess what? The system center suite does this ;-) In all seriousness it is a good point, for so long we have tried to go for best of breed and often suffered, there is a lot to be said for the one throat to choke approach.
2)Common way of integrating and managing all versions of virtualisation - vdi, VMs, App-v, Med-v Hyper-v, vmware, Citrix etc. Speaking of Citrix, XenApp can now be managed by the System Center suite (available in 60 days). Configuration Manager will allow for increased automation/management of XenApp and its server infrastructure - so delivery of apps to the server, through to publishing them to end users. Using Citrix Dazzle home users can gets apps delivered via Citrix and SCCM.
Some Hyper-V tweaks - Remote effects (fx?) and Dynamic memory, the first allows you to use a high end graphics card in your hyper-v server and provide full windows aero effects to end users with VDI - the GPU takes the workload so performance is not affected. Other VM providers cannot do this - this would mean the user experience is seamless from physical desktop to virtual - sounds insignificant but is very impressive - they demo'd it running 720p HD video in a virtual machine with all Aero feature on. Dynamic memory essentially allows you to define a range of RAM for your VM machines - this way as the user runs an intense app, they can dynamically grow their RAM usage, and when they close it, it will reduce. This allows for much more efficient RAM usage and again a significantly improved user experience. These tools will be available in SP1 for W2k8 R2 (I cant wait for my home server ;-) ).
3) Convergence of security and management - lower cost, simplified management and enhanced protection. Forefront product will now run off System Center infrastructure (no additional servers required). It will be built into Configuration Manager so you will get anti virus/malware/spyware. This also ties into the one infrastructure theme. RTM by end of year. As we consistently seem to have problems with our Symantec tools, maybe this would be worth a look! In fact the install package it includes in SCCM will auto uninstall other vendors security problems to avoid headaches (almost like a virus itself!) This combination will tie into the SQL reporting services and provide very rich reports to see overall status, any detections and so on. Tied into the Dashboard (see previous blog) a great addition to the office plasma!
4) Cloud based client management or as they define it, 'route to the cloud'. I have blogged about Windows Intune, so see this post for more.My view is that 2-5 years this product set will have developed enough to rival the on premise solutions, so by the time we come to look at the desktop management infrastructure again, this may be a viable solution.
Then Brad went off on a bit of a detour from the Cloud to the System Center Service Manager tool. This tool had 2 main design principles, simplicity and tight integration with AD and System Center. As blogged previously this tool will do compliance, incident/change and problem management. They gave an example of a customer having a meaningful CMDB within 2 hours of install, it is that simple.
In terms of compliance, it will do PCI, SOX, records management and one other I didn't catch. Service Manager can automate the discovery to assess compliance, demo'd in 3-4 clicks. If you already have VISA compliance and now you want to check for AMEX it will assess the delta that AMEX may require that VISA does not, but not duplicate the work already covered. It can even auto remediate to gain compliance. The integrated reporting can allow you to check compliance, or even generate the report direct for the auditor. Non compliance can auto generate a ticket for items it is unable to remediate. Microsoft will update the tool as regulations are updated.
Beta 2 available in June RTM later in the year.
5) User focused - enabling productivity anywhere on any device (sounds familiar!) - reiteration of much of what I have already written about SCCM, Configuration Manager v.Next. Talked about auto remediation of DCM/Settings management which is pretty cool, even to the extent of reinstalling apps a user may mistakenly remove.
There was a roadmap slide
Image credit: Hans Vredevoort - click the pic for his site.
Next years MMS will be at Mandalay Bay March 21st-25th 2011
By using Windows Intune you can avoid the above and deliver many additional features that small companies typically couldn't or don't do. Such as:
Signing up is via the MS Business Online services website, and you get access to the Cloud based admin console. From here you use a simple wizard to do some customisations and configuration which gets saved as a .MSI - this can then be installed on your pc estate and voila - you are managing you estate via the cloud!
I can see a niche use for Mars - Royal Canin currently have a series of startup companies whilst the enter a new market - each company has to manage its own IT - this would be a great solution to at least ensure they were patched, had anti virus, were licence compliant and so on. It can even manage non Domain joined machines the same as you would configure your traditional estate - this would ensure a consistent look and feel and user experience one the startup joins the Mars network fully.
The admin interface was very intuitive, and very immediate - I was impressed with this being a beta product. There is context sensitive help so someone with basic IT skills should be able to manage the PCs via this platform - again great for small companies where the focus is on the business not managing the IT. The PC agent even has some self healing built in to make it as simple as possible to remediate.
You can do things like export the hw or software inventories - great for Commercial to check compliance.
It does include basic remote control but the user has to make a request. Further versions will see this expanded.
Whilst it is only for client machines now, I did notice it had some server things listed so it may well be on the roadmap ;-) Another thing on the roadmap is software distribution - again this would be superb functionality to add.
Release should be within 12 months to NA/EU/Asia and Brasil
If you want to track the progress, the team at MS have a blog here
As mentioned in both my and Col's previous posts, it is all about the User Centric Client Management and its 3 pillars:
This is based on a new definition of an end user - more tech savvy, used to the consumerisation of IT, Digital native. IDC predicts that there will be 1Billion mobile workers by 2011 - 75% of US workforce will be mobile by end of this year and 80% of Japanese.
Consequently demand for IT specialists will shrink(40% this year), there will be an increase in balanced versatilists (definite consultant speak - IT Pro's will need more all round knowledge and adaptability.
v.Next will embrace the user and move away from the device. It will provide a web based software catalog that users can pick from.
Tech details:
The toolkit is designed to help with:
They plotted the journey from traditional data centre <15%>50% utilised (moving from physical to virtual machines) to private cloud - IT as a service, Chargeback and significant decrease in management costs to public cloud - capacity on demand, global reach.
They envision public/private clouds co-existing which I agree with. I cannot see this changing in the next few years whilst we have limiting legal regulation around data/user accounts or suspicion around the solutions. Once vendors have built up trust in the marketplace I can see the swing beginning where feasible.
The stage stage of data centers is IT PAC (Pre assembled components) this is a modular data center built as needs dictate, think of examples like the World Cup or Olympics, significant need that ramps up until the launch of the event, then suddenly not needed.
The toolkit derives from their learning from managing their environments (Azure/Bing etc). System Center v.Next suite will cover all aspects of private cloud management.
Azure is PAAS (Platform as a service)
BPOS is SAAS (Software as a service)
New for the Cloud is IAAS - Infrastructure as a service, the foundation the cloud is built on.
The toolkit is available from Summer 2010 and will contain:
Then a few demo's.
The licensing question was bugging me - how do you manage licensing or costs when anyone can self provision and scale up an environment. Unfortunately the answer was not great - that's down to another product SCVMM, which a)isn't quite true and b)not good enough.
I have a feeling the truth is that it has not really been thought about yet, so will be interesting to see if it gets documented/included at release or a later stage.
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