Best practices from Microsoft IT on Config Manager 2007

This was a nice wrap up to the day - the internal MS IT department team lead gave a presentation on how they handle the normal everyday jobs that all users of their products need to do.

The thing that surprised me was that they do not seem to be early adopters of their own technology...obviously they are heavily involved in the Alpha, Beta and QA for their new products (a process they delightfully call "Dogfooding", but in their own environment, they have only recently implemented some of the things I just assumed they would use from day one of it going gold. To give you a couple of highlighted examples, they only began to deploy O/S images six months ago using MDT, and only use one App-V based application throughout the entire organisation.

The other surprise was the size of their team - although the speaker did admit they outsourced for some tasks, their core team is only 13 people. This team services 274,000 clients based at six HQ and client sites globally.

Their SLAs are quite impressive too - for software compliancy (patching etc) they adhere to a 95% compliancy within 3 business days for active exploit patching. For critical updating the SLA is 95% within nine business days.

A large portion of the presentation was around performance monitoring - with such a large organisation which such a high data throughput, they needed to develop their own type of custom reporting, which they achieved with the LogMan tool, and a bundle of custom scripting.

One last point which was quite interesting - they stated that their DC operational costs had reduced by 75% using a virtualisation strategy - they have defined an 8-1 virtual to physical server ratio. They claim that most of the 75% savings are down to power and physical server cost savings, along with standardising the builds for easy and fast provisioning.