I was going to bed when I thought I'd just check my RSS feeds and some relevant info popped up.
I mentioned Infrastructure Planning Guides for the Dynamic datacenter - just seen it is now available, see here
Mary Jo Foley on MS bridging Public/Private clouds here
RTM of System Center Essentials (SCE) and SCDPM here
Windows Intune (Cloud based desktop management) was showcased yesterday
There will be some Configuration Manager v.Next announcments tomorrow so stay tuned!
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Configuration Manager v.Next - Hierarchy Design
This presentation build on the previous Configuration Manager v.Next talks and is around designing your architecture. For those non techies, skip to the next post now!
You should have a Central Administration Site, 1 Primary and Secondary's as required.
Central Admin Site - Location for all admin and reporting. No client data processing, no clients assigned and limited site roles.
Primary Site - services clients in well connected network. No tiered primaries, only add more for scale out; not needed for data segmentation, client agent settings or network bandwidth control.
Secondary - services clients in remote locations where network control is needed. Bundle Proxy MP and DP fr install. Tiered content routing via Secondary SQL replication.
Advanced features (multicast/streaming) are not available on file share only DPs (or W2k3 ones).
You can throttle and/or schedule to remote DPs
Branch DPs - can be run on a workstation, 100 or fewer clients, BITS gives you enough network control.
Utilise branche cache if you have W2k8 R2 (Mars traditional will) - they have seen a 71% drop in network utilisation at one customer.
Replication stays file based for content, but is SQL for global and site data.
SQL reporting services is the only reporting tool that can be used.
Topology views in Sites tab rather than event viewer - this will greatly aid troubleshooting replicating as the picture will show the alert and the link state.
You should have a Central Administration Site, 1 Primary and Secondary's as required.
Central Admin Site - Location for all admin and reporting. No client data processing, no clients assigned and limited site roles.
Primary Site - services clients in well connected network. No tiered primaries, only add more for scale out; not needed for data segmentation, client agent settings or network bandwidth control.
Secondary - services clients in remote locations where network control is needed. Bundle Proxy MP and DP fr install. Tiered content routing via Secondary SQL replication.
Advanced features (multicast/streaming) are not available on file share only DPs (or W2k3 ones).
You can throttle and/or schedule to remote DPs
Branch DPs - can be run on a workstation, 100 or fewer clients, BITS gives you enough network control.
Utilise branche cache if you have W2k8 R2 (Mars traditional will) - they have seen a 71% drop in network utilisation at one customer.
Replication stays file based for content, but is SQL for global and site data.
SQL reporting services is the only reporting tool that can be used.
Topology views in Sites tab rather than event viewer - this will greatly aid troubleshooting replicating as the picture will show the alert and the link state.
Configuration Manager v.Next Overview - Mat's additions
As mentioned in both my and Col's previous posts, it is all about the User Centric Client Management and its 3 pillars:
- Empower the end user
- Unify the infrastructure/admin consoles, consolidate the separate tools (Mobile Device Manager is rolled into SCCM)
- Control via improved feature sets and simplified processes.
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:
- Can deploy apps to DP group
- Role based security in admin consoles (which can be customised)- allows you to show only the items that role needs.
- Can set a security scope, e.g. a EU admin would only see EU relevant data.
- Should be able to reduce infrastructure - primarys are needed for scale only with them as an option for content distribution
- Data segmentation for users - so they only see software catalog items relevant to them.
- Using SQL transation replication rather than file replication services (for some data)
- Lots of work on client health to help troubleshooting and auto remediation.
- Mobile Device manager merged into v.Next. This will include cross platform support, ability to deploy apps to devices or user.DCM to devices, secure over the air enrollment, monitor and remediate out of compliance devices, app allow/deny.
- DCM (Desired configuration management) is now called Settings management.
- Patching - auto deployment of specific things based on rules - e.g. windows defender definition updates (and a very simple interface to configure these rules, audible gasps of joy in the audience).
- OSD (Operating System Deployment) offline servicing of images based on update baseline you set for the live environment - means new builds don't need to go through a patch process once built, they are build to the latest environment update level by default.
- Boot media updates - hierarchy wide boot media, unattended boot media with pre execution hooks to auto select task sequences.
- USMT 4.0 - hard link offline and shadow copy features, UI integration.
- Remote control - send CTRL+ALT+Del to remote device is back.
- Settings Management - v.Next can 'set' registry, wmi, scripts. Unified across servers, PCs and mobiles. Audit tracking.
- Configuration Item revision history - version control in packages so you can see what has changed over time.
Cloud Computing in the Enterprise: Enabling the Foundation with the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center
This lecture was about the Dynamic Infrastructure toolkit for System Center, basically providing the tools to allow an enterprise to build their own private cloud and manage it. Deliver the service, manage the fabric.
They went through a lot of the same background that had been covered in the keynote which was a bit of a waste of time.
They went through a lot of the same background that had been covered in the keynote which was a bit of a waste of time.
The toolkit is designed to help with:
- Self service (provisioning, not pw)
- Greater failure resilience
- Greater scale
- Consumption based charging
- Service catalog
- Service orientated (faster delivery)
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:
- Architecture roadmap, Infrastructure planning guides (these are generally great), best practices
- Out of the box capability for self service portal, provisioning engine.
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.
SCCM - State of the Union - Mat's view
As Colin said, the presenters were great - the best of the event so far!
They started off with a run down of the top 10 codenames they came up with before Configuration Manager v.Next. As it is now focused on User Centric Client Management, UCCM was a candidate, before they considered what would happen if the Forefront brand was added (say it out loud), and then even worse, 'Enterprise' at the end. It got a good laugh and bought the audience in.
In the last 3 months Asset Intelligence has grown 30%, they are learning the gaps and adapting. They encouraged us to use MS Asset and Planning toolkit.
As Colin mentioned they have worked with Adobe to ensure product updates are being rolled into SCCM/SCUP - this is a user feedback driven product enhancement. They talked about a partner product Shavlik Scupdate which does many more 3rd party products and integrates with SCCM. (I have used this in a previous job with Windows Software Update Services and it is a good product)
They talked about some of the stats they have gathered from those customers that enrolled in the feedback service and then showed the changes they have made based on that knowledge.
They also use forums both external to MS as well as technet. The top issues commonly are down to admins not reading the documents or superflows or fail to fully configure the products. Good to see RTFM is still key advice!
Over the next 12 months -
Configuration Manager Information Experience team will be writing more superflow, as well as a web based help module.
v.Next will be able to deploy apps not just to end users but also to Citrix XenApp, this would allow a scenario where the full application is deployed to a users primary machine, but when they roam - they get their app via Citrix. A great solution for some key users.
SCCM R3 - more power management and reporting, scales to 300k machines, oem media will work better, MDM licensing will be rolled in.
Lots of research has been done with customers and their end users. From this they have developed the v.Next marketing, all around 3 pillars - Empower, Unify and Control. I'll define these more in another post.
Their research from end users was useful but not often in the way expected. An example given was that if a generic notification popped up asking the user to take an action, they would generally ignore it, if it had the company logo, people would do what it said, even if the text was to format their pc! It will be interesting to see what middle ground they get to ;-)
v.Next is currently being piloted within MS IT on beta 1 with 50k machines. The TAP (Technical Access program) has 14 other customers, 6 have more than 100k machines, 7 more than 10 primary sites, 6 more than 100 secondary sites, 8 more than 100 distribution points (DPs) so pretty big/complex environments.
They then did 3 demos of things that may or may not make it into the final product and got the audience to vote. I actually think all 3 should be in, but wont list them here just in case.
Key things to prepare for v.Next:
They started off with a run down of the top 10 codenames they came up with before Configuration Manager v.Next. As it is now focused on User Centric Client Management, UCCM was a candidate, before they considered what would happen if the Forefront brand was added (say it out loud), and then even worse, 'Enterprise' at the end. It got a good laugh and bought the audience in.
In the last 3 months Asset Intelligence has grown 30%, they are learning the gaps and adapting. They encouraged us to use MS Asset and Planning toolkit.
As Colin mentioned they have worked with Adobe to ensure product updates are being rolled into SCCM/SCUP - this is a user feedback driven product enhancement. They talked about a partner product Shavlik Scupdate which does many more 3rd party products and integrates with SCCM. (I have used this in a previous job with Windows Software Update Services and it is a good product)
They talked about some of the stats they have gathered from those customers that enrolled in the feedback service and then showed the changes they have made based on that knowledge.
They also use forums both external to MS as well as technet. The top issues commonly are down to admins not reading the documents or superflows or fail to fully configure the products. Good to see RTFM is still key advice!
Over the next 12 months -
Configuration Manager Information Experience team will be writing more superflow, as well as a web based help module.
v.Next will be able to deploy apps not just to end users but also to Citrix XenApp, this would allow a scenario where the full application is deployed to a users primary machine, but when they roam - they get their app via Citrix. A great solution for some key users.
SCCM R3 - more power management and reporting, scales to 300k machines, oem media will work better, MDM licensing will be rolled in.
Lots of research has been done with customers and their end users. From this they have developed the v.Next marketing, all around 3 pillars - Empower, Unify and Control. I'll define these more in another post.
Their research from end users was useful but not often in the way expected. An example given was that if a generic notification popped up asking the user to take an action, they would generally ignore it, if it had the company logo, people would do what it said, even if the text was to format their pc! It will be interesting to see what middle ground they get to ;-)
v.Next is currently being piloted within MS IT on beta 1 with 50k machines. The TAP (Technical Access program) has 14 other customers, 6 have more than 100k machines, 7 more than 10 primary sites, 6 more than 100 secondary sites, 8 more than 100 distribution points (DPs) so pretty big/complex environments.
They then did 3 demos of things that may or may not make it into the final product and got the audience to vote. I actually think all 3 should be in, but wont list them here just in case.
Key things to prepare for v.Next:
- Flatten your hierarchy
- Use AD sites and services for site boundaries
- Break up collections that contain users/computers
- Use Branche Cache
- UNC paths for source content
- Use App CI - will help with state based apps and detection methods.
- Use DCM
Keynote - Detail
As Colin has said I took lots of Notes. I also took some pics of the empty stage, to give an idea of the size
These were from the 1/3 nearest the stage - I reckon about 6k attendees could be accommodated.
You could really see the impact the flight ban has had on attendance as it was maybe 3/5s full at most. Hopefully there will be more attendees tomorrow now flight restrictions have eased.
Anyhoo back to the details...
Brad Anderson started off as the warmup for his boss Bob Muglia, Brad took us through some stats -
3 out of 4 attendees use SCCM, 80% of which are already on R2
2 out of 3 use SCOM, again 80% at R2
50% of SCOM users, take advantage of its hetergenous features to manage Unix/Linux
50% of attendees use System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
25% use App-V
10% are beta'ing System Center Service Manager
7 years ago MS first announced the Dynamic Systems Initiative, the first step on the path to Dynamic IT now they are making it a reality, the vision will continue to evolve.
He talked about things like the Lab management tool in Visual Studio 2010 which allows you to deploy your own test lab using Hyper-V and SCVMM.
Brad talked about Opalis, a recent acquisition, which has a Orchestration feature, which automates moving (virtual) Dev environments into production, with the whole environment available at once - no more multiple changes/over time.(Opalis is something we may own but is outside of scope of Connex - something for EUT to investigate further I think).
Next up was a demo and a pretty impressive one. There is a feature within Hyper-V which allows you to do a long distance live migration. This would allow failover between say ISB and MTO, with no user impact as the servers would migrate in a live state even over the huge distance.
Obviously MS are keen to push new parts of the System Center suite, they talked about the human workflow of change and how it can slow the process, System Center Service Manager (SCSM) can now do a change automation based on ITIL. System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) has better functionality for backing up (Hyper-V) based virtual machines, down to individual files on VMs, not just a snapshot. Multi site clustering with Hyper-V and System Center products....and so on.
Actually they are making some significant improvements, I could well see it being time for Mars to assess Hyper-V certainly for Dev/QA environments as it is much cheaper than VMware and seems to be catching up in functionality and adding features VMware does not have.
Further areas of improvement will be including more Compliance management in SCSM and SCDPM. All about proving how they have and continue to deliver on their vision of Dynamic IT.
So Microsoft asks, "What next?"
The Cloud.
All the attributes MS have defined as Dynamic IT apply to the cloud. The Cloud they defined as just in time provisioning and scaling of services on shared hardware.
Why Cloud? Accelerates the speed and lowers the cost of IT. Brief definitions of Public/Private clouds (hosted/in house) and Shared/Dedicated (Shared with other customers/Service dedicated to you).
Microsoft is working to provide dedicated clouds with Azure in the future (Shared only now).
They are looking to deliver one platform, one application model and one management solution across all of - customer premise, partner cloud, MS clouds.
There are a few key enablers -
Hardware Model - Windows server is now 75% of all servers globally. MS now buy servers in 2000 server containers, they just plug in power, network and water. This is 10x more efficient than the process of provisioning individual/racks of servers. They are working with hardware partners on the learnings and expect to see smaller containers offered to end users in the future.
Application Model - This is a set of services delivered as part of the cloud - this reduces dev time, has increased scalability, higher high availability and greater flexibility. Again a 10x improvement over current methodologies to be faster to market. We need to understand that servers will fail, however, applications should not, the service should continue. MS are developing a new model language currently code named 'M' this allows a developer to build apps based on a model rather than traditional methods.
Operating Model - They have learnt a lot from running Bing! as a service with a small number of admins. They have taken this knowledge and built it into Azure and System Center to improve their products. They can now have 1 admin managing 1000's of servers! They suggest that IT jobs in this sector will evolve to provide a higher service, faster delivery etc. The underlying operating model enables this. They have seen (you guessed it), a 10x reduction in the cost of operations.
New features coming -
SCVMM v.Next will have the ability to manage OS/Apps that run across multiple machines (1 OS, multiple VMs - this I have not explained well, I'll try to find more info over the rest of the week). Applications are referred to as 'fabric layers'.#
Service Designer feature - allows you to deploy new services based on your templates (Customer logs call for more Oracle capacity - admin clicks on deploy Oracle service and the capacity is provisioned) basically you can draw the picture of your service in Visio and then SCVMM will deploy it....SCVMM will also scale up/down as the load increases/decreases as per your requirements. Great for end users, a nightmare for licensing compliance!
Server App-V use multiple apps on the one OS independently, SCVMM manages the underlying application fabric.
Greater control of offline patching - remember the app service must stay up, gives greater control and automation.
SQL Azure - running SQL as a service across 6 datacenters and 1000's of servers, provision of a new DB is as simple as clicking on a web page.
Finally, integrated monitoring between on premise and cloud - a SCOM management pack shipping later this year for Azure. The demo showed a diagram of the environment with hw onsite and cloud based, a simulated problem in the cloud alerted via SCOM allowed the admin to run a task to provision more capacity in the cloud. Again very impressive, but how do you manage the cost of this up/down scaling and the capacity required on standby? I think contracts will be very interesting!
My takeaways - we probably need to look at all the features of the products we have bought as part of Connex, not just focus on the immediate need (I think a common mistake in Mars and industry wide). There is much more to many of the tools that could allow for greater automation and much slicker operations just with a bit more upfront effort.
Secondly, we need to think more holistically and not just in our GIST silo's, products EUT are using will be more than useful to other teams, we need to ensure we highlight these to our colleagues (as we have done with SCCM and SCOM to Processing). This is probably a great example of where an Enterprise Architect function would be particularly useful - I think Chris Lane is going to be busy ;-)
I'll leave it here as I have another 4 sessions to blog, but you can find more info below.
For those that would like to watch today's keynote, it is now available here
Finally, tomorrow's keynote will be streamed live here from 8.30am Pacific
These were from the 1/3 nearest the stage - I reckon about 6k attendees could be accommodated.
You could really see the impact the flight ban has had on attendance as it was maybe 3/5s full at most. Hopefully there will be more attendees tomorrow now flight restrictions have eased.
Anyhoo back to the details...
Brad Anderson started off as the warmup for his boss Bob Muglia, Brad took us through some stats -
3 out of 4 attendees use SCCM, 80% of which are already on R2
2 out of 3 use SCOM, again 80% at R2
50% of SCOM users, take advantage of its hetergenous features to manage Unix/Linux
50% of attendees use System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
25% use App-V
10% are beta'ing System Center Service Manager
7 years ago MS first announced the Dynamic Systems Initiative, the first step on the path to Dynamic IT now they are making it a reality, the vision will continue to evolve.
He talked about things like the Lab management tool in Visual Studio 2010 which allows you to deploy your own test lab using Hyper-V and SCVMM.
Brad talked about Opalis, a recent acquisition, which has a Orchestration feature, which automates moving (virtual) Dev environments into production, with the whole environment available at once - no more multiple changes/over time.(Opalis is something we may own but is outside of scope of Connex - something for EUT to investigate further I think).
Next up was a demo and a pretty impressive one. There is a feature within Hyper-V which allows you to do a long distance live migration. This would allow failover between say ISB and MTO, with no user impact as the servers would migrate in a live state even over the huge distance.
Obviously MS are keen to push new parts of the System Center suite, they talked about the human workflow of change and how it can slow the process, System Center Service Manager (SCSM) can now do a change automation based on ITIL. System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) has better functionality for backing up (Hyper-V) based virtual machines, down to individual files on VMs, not just a snapshot. Multi site clustering with Hyper-V and System Center products....and so on.
Actually they are making some significant improvements, I could well see it being time for Mars to assess Hyper-V certainly for Dev/QA environments as it is much cheaper than VMware and seems to be catching up in functionality and adding features VMware does not have.
Further areas of improvement will be including more Compliance management in SCSM and SCDPM. All about proving how they have and continue to deliver on their vision of Dynamic IT.
So Microsoft asks, "What next?"
The Cloud.
All the attributes MS have defined as Dynamic IT apply to the cloud. The Cloud they defined as just in time provisioning and scaling of services on shared hardware.
Why Cloud? Accelerates the speed and lowers the cost of IT. Brief definitions of Public/Private clouds (hosted/in house) and Shared/Dedicated (Shared with other customers/Service dedicated to you).
Microsoft is working to provide dedicated clouds with Azure in the future (Shared only now).
They are looking to deliver one platform, one application model and one management solution across all of - customer premise, partner cloud, MS clouds.
There are a few key enablers -
Hardware Model - Windows server is now 75% of all servers globally. MS now buy servers in 2000 server containers, they just plug in power, network and water. This is 10x more efficient than the process of provisioning individual/racks of servers. They are working with hardware partners on the learnings and expect to see smaller containers offered to end users in the future.
Application Model - This is a set of services delivered as part of the cloud - this reduces dev time, has increased scalability, higher high availability and greater flexibility. Again a 10x improvement over current methodologies to be faster to market. We need to understand that servers will fail, however, applications should not, the service should continue. MS are developing a new model language currently code named 'M' this allows a developer to build apps based on a model rather than traditional methods.
Operating Model - They have learnt a lot from running Bing! as a service with a small number of admins. They have taken this knowledge and built it into Azure and System Center to improve their products. They can now have 1 admin managing 1000's of servers! They suggest that IT jobs in this sector will evolve to provide a higher service, faster delivery etc. The underlying operating model enables this. They have seen (you guessed it), a 10x reduction in the cost of operations.
New features coming -
SCVMM v.Next will have the ability to manage OS/Apps that run across multiple machines (1 OS, multiple VMs - this I have not explained well, I'll try to find more info over the rest of the week). Applications are referred to as 'fabric layers'.#
Service Designer feature - allows you to deploy new services based on your templates (Customer logs call for more Oracle capacity - admin clicks on deploy Oracle service and the capacity is provisioned) basically you can draw the picture of your service in Visio and then SCVMM will deploy it....SCVMM will also scale up/down as the load increases/decreases as per your requirements. Great for end users, a nightmare for licensing compliance!
Server App-V use multiple apps on the one OS independently, SCVMM manages the underlying application fabric.
Greater control of offline patching - remember the app service must stay up, gives greater control and automation.
SQL Azure - running SQL as a service across 6 datacenters and 1000's of servers, provision of a new DB is as simple as clicking on a web page.
Finally, integrated monitoring between on premise and cloud - a SCOM management pack shipping later this year for Azure. The demo showed a diagram of the environment with hw onsite and cloud based, a simulated problem in the cloud alerted via SCOM allowed the admin to run a task to provision more capacity in the cloud. Again very impressive, but how do you manage the cost of this up/down scaling and the capacity required on standby? I think contracts will be very interesting!
My takeaways - we probably need to look at all the features of the products we have bought as part of Connex, not just focus on the immediate need (I think a common mistake in Mars and industry wide). There is much more to many of the tools that could allow for greater automation and much slicker operations just with a bit more upfront effort.
Secondly, we need to think more holistically and not just in our GIST silo's, products EUT are using will be more than useful to other teams, we need to ensure we highlight these to our colleagues (as we have done with SCCM and SCOM to Processing). This is probably a great example of where an Enterprise Architect function would be particularly useful - I think Chris Lane is going to be busy ;-)
I'll leave it here as I have another 4 sessions to blog, but you can find more info below.
For those that would like to watch today's keynote, it is now available here
Finally, tomorrow's keynote will be streamed live here from 8.30am Pacific
v.Next overview
Day 2, session 4 was a very good presentation. This one focussed on the upcoming Config Manager v.Next, and the benefits it will offer. The main points I recorded were:
User Centric Client Management - allowing users to connect from anywhere, embracing mobile technologies and central control of assets. v.Next still focuses on system management as with previous versions, but will allow such enhancements as highly configurable deployment options for applications, O/S and patching, for example allowing deployment only for the primary user of a device, out of hours and user selectable download and installation of apps and patches, advanced application management (but with considerably less scripting) and the facility to setup system requirement and dependency checks prior to app deployment, including available memory, disk space and CPU type.
Other points include integration of RBS with templates, a better admin interface and distribution point grouping, cross platform mobile management, including a cute feature which would allow an administrator to package for example Acrobat reader for several device types, and only need to add the user once to the distribution list - v.Next would then deploy to all the users devices as appropriate without the need for separate processes. Also, remote control is integrated into the console for easy multi platform control of devices.
Please check my previous post for the O/S deployment options available with v.Next.
User Centric Client Management - allowing users to connect from anywhere, embracing mobile technologies and central control of assets. v.Next still focuses on system management as with previous versions, but will allow such enhancements as highly configurable deployment options for applications, O/S and patching, for example allowing deployment only for the primary user of a device, out of hours and user selectable download and installation of apps and patches, advanced application management (but with considerably less scripting) and the facility to setup system requirement and dependency checks prior to app deployment, including available memory, disk space and CPU type.
Other points include integration of RBS with templates, a better admin interface and distribution point grouping, cross platform mobile management, including a cute feature which would allow an administrator to package for example Acrobat reader for several device types, and only need to add the user once to the distribution list - v.Next would then deploy to all the users devices as appropriate without the need for separate processes. Also, remote control is integrated into the console for easy multi platform control of devices.
Please check my previous post for the O/S deployment options available with v.Next.
Automating windows
Day 2, session 3 was "Automating windows"- details were pretty sketchy, but I though it sounded interesting...This presentation focussed on manipulating WMI and CIM using Powershell 2, and showed the benefits of replicating changes to single or multiple PCs, even those outside of a DMZ in a secure manner. I must admit, not being a Powershell/WMI wizard myself, I got somewhat lost in the detail on this session, although the benefits of automation were quite clear for task like client monitoring and configuration. Currently we manage this type of activity in the Zen environment, however going forward I can see this technology will be commonly used in the new Mars environment.
Configuration Manager: State of the union
Day 2, Session 2 was entitled "Configuration Manager: State of the union" and was easily the most entertaining session of the day. The hosts started off the presentation showing the various name ideas that the team went through before settling on v.Next, which was amusing if not entirely useful.
They did of course get serious in the presentation, and covered some very slick ideas including integrated Adobe updates in SCCM by the end of 2010, and other 3rd party updates via a third party add-on for SCCM called SCUPdate. The big demo for me was centred around Citrix XenApps deployment of applications via thin client, were the application itself remains on the server, and is seamlessly delivered to the client over either network or internet connection. This seemed to me to be an idea way to deploy and provision applications, and I'm surprised that we haven't seen this technology in Mars as yet.
The rough release timeline for Config Manager v.Next for those interested:
Beta 1 - May 2010
Beta 2 - Q1 2011
RTM - Q3 2011
They did of course get serious in the presentation, and covered some very slick ideas including integrated Adobe updates in SCCM by the end of 2010, and other 3rd party updates via a third party add-on for SCCM called SCUPdate. The big demo for me was centred around Citrix XenApps deployment of applications via thin client, were the application itself remains on the server, and is seamlessly delivered to the client over either network or internet connection. This seemed to me to be an idea way to deploy and provision applications, and I'm surprised that we haven't seen this technology in Mars as yet.
The rough release timeline for Config Manager v.Next for those interested:
Beta 1 - May 2010
Beta 2 - Q1 2011
RTM - Q3 2011
Day 2 - Keynote from Bob Muglia
Today's event kicked off with a keynote speech from Bob Muglia, president of MS Server and Tools Business. The kenote was quite lively and well presented as you would expect. I didn't take notes during the keynote, but I know Mat will blog heavily about this, so I just robbed some highlights and will let him add the detail.
1) Official releases of both System Centre Data Protection Manager 2010 and System Centre Service Manager 2010.
2) Demonstration of a Distributed Application (DA) with components which were locally monitored and available from the cloud using MS Azure. Demonstration of a task to “Add Web Rule Instances” for the cloud resources. Demonstration of performance information gathered via the web front-end components in Azure. These functions were provided via a management pack that was stated to be publicly available “later this year”.
3) SCVMM 2011 Tech Preview version – The ribbon concept (Microsoft Office, etc) was integrated with SCVMM which implies that this is a technical direction for the UI for the System Centre product line.
4) First sighting of an Opalis workflow within a Operations Manager 2007 R2 console.
5) SCVMM 2010 Tech Preview version – Demonstrated scans for compliance of the image offline, patching offline, and orchestrating deployment of the image. SCVMM was stated to communicate with WSUS for patches.
6) OpsMgr v10 screenshot – displaying changes to the console including the removal of the “Authoring” section and the addition of the “Modelling Configuration”.
1) Official releases of both System Centre Data Protection Manager 2010 and System Centre Service Manager 2010.
2) Demonstration of a Distributed Application (DA) with components which were locally monitored and available from the cloud using MS Azure. Demonstration of a task to “Add Web Rule Instances” for the cloud resources. Demonstration of performance information gathered via the web front-end components in Azure. These functions were provided via a management pack that was stated to be publicly available “later this year”.
3) SCVMM 2011 Tech Preview version – The ribbon concept (Microsoft Office, etc) was integrated with SCVMM which implies that this is a technical direction for the UI for the System Centre product line.
4) First sighting of an Opalis workflow within a Operations Manager 2007 R2 console.
5) SCVMM 2010 Tech Preview version – Demonstrated scans for compliance of the image offline, patching offline, and orchestrating deployment of the image. SCVMM was stated to communicate with WSUS for patches.
6) OpsMgr v10 screenshot – displaying changes to the console including the removal of the “Authoring” section and the addition of the “Modelling Configuration”.
Day one wrap
To wrap up the day, I attended an orientation session (better late than never) and then hit the expo hall with Mat to do the tat run. I'm now fully loaded with product brochures, silly putty, badge holders, t-shirts and a rubber duck. Mission accomplished.
Operations Manager 2007 R2: An Introduction
Next up was "Ops Manager 2007 R2: An introduction", which was not what I'd hoped for - the monitoring and alerting processes described where efficient and relatively easy to configure, however the focus in this session was for monitoring Unix/Linux servers, and although I can see the benefits, I didn't feel they were very relevant. I'm looking forward to later sessions on SCOM which will outline the dashboard functions, which I can see will be very useful. Most of the alerting described in this session is adequately covered in our present Spectrum system, and I didn't see much in the way of additional benefits.
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