2nd Keynote

Today Brad Anderson got to be the main man, as is tradition, first some stats:

1. Windows 7 is the fastest selling OS in history


2. In March 90 million Win7 machines were patched via Windows Update.


3. Windows Update patches 725million PCs each month - bear in mind most corporates wont point to Windows Update.

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