CIO have added their views on the MS view of the cloud here
I'm off for Keynote 2, check back later for my thoughts, or watch it live here
Showing posts with label Keynote. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Keynote. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
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
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”.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Microsoft Virtual TechEd - Keynote
The ketnote started with a general overview of the thinking behind Windows 7. Specifically mentioned was the user backlash against Vista, and a general feeling that there wasn't much end user or OEM consultation prior to it's release, and it significant performance problems.
Windows 7 was tuned to reduce a lot of the performance bottlenecks and provide a faster user experience. For high end, multi-core CPU systems the scheduling algorithms have been updated to give better performance on those systems too.
Two new tools were specifically demonstrated.
Resource Monitor is a souped-up tool from Task Manager, which can also show more details about running processes, and show which files are open on the file system and how much readings and writing is happening. It can also show what directories are locked (this is searchable too), so you can find out why you can't delete or modify a file.
Memory usage graphic is also a bit more intuitive, showing clearly how much ram is in use for apps, standby caching and spare.
Likewise, Network usage is effectively the TCPView package from SysInternals with a graphical interface, but linked to the process list so you can see which processes have network sessions open, and to where, and what ports are exposed on the machine.
As a side note, Mark Russinovich's machine he was demonstrating did show "Google Updater" as a running program. Make of that what you will. "Apple Mobile Device" was also running, so presumably he's not using a Zune.
The second tool was Problem Steps Recorder, which is designed as a troubleshooting tool for remote helpdesks (ie. you spouse rings you up and says "It's not working!"). If the problem is reproducible, the user can run PSR and reproduce the problem. PSR will capture the screen on every click and keypress, and store the information in a ZIP file which can be e-mailed through to the helpdesk person.
Windows 7 was tuned to reduce a lot of the performance bottlenecks and provide a faster user experience. For high end, multi-core CPU systems the scheduling algorithms have been updated to give better performance on those systems too.
Two new tools were specifically demonstrated.
Resource Monitor is a souped-up tool from Task Manager, which can also show more details about running processes, and show which files are open on the file system and how much readings and writing is happening. It can also show what directories are locked (this is searchable too), so you can find out why you can't delete or modify a file.
Memory usage graphic is also a bit more intuitive, showing clearly how much ram is in use for apps, standby caching and spare.
Likewise, Network usage is effectively the TCPView package from SysInternals with a graphical interface, but linked to the process list so you can see which processes have network sessions open, and to where, and what ports are exposed on the machine.
As a side note, Mark Russinovich's machine he was demonstrating did show "Google Updater" as a running program. Make of that what you will. "Apple Mobile Device" was also running, so presumably he's not using a Zune.
The second tool was Problem Steps Recorder, which is designed as a troubleshooting tool for remote helpdesks (ie. you spouse rings you up and says "It's not working!"). If the problem is reproducible, the user can run PSR and reproduce the problem. PSR will capture the screen on every click and keypress, and store the information in a ZIP file which can be e-mailed through to the helpdesk person.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The Dynamic Desktop
This keynote was presented by Brad Anderson who is one of Microsoft's general managers. He led into by talking about how the baby boomers are retiring and that by 2012, 30% of the workforce will be made up of Gen Y. The framing here was all about how Gen Y are tech savvy and will demand more flexible ways of working.
"The Dynamic Desktop provides a consistent experience for users independent of device or location".
Microsoft's belief is that now and in the future we should consider the client, the user not their device and we need to ask ourselves questions along the lines of how do we deliver applications and data to the user.
The next step was a quick demo of Application Virtualisation, so a .pptx was clicked on and Powerpoint was installed in the background in around 10 seconds. Pretty swish! They made an edit and saved it, they were then able to log in from another device and have the same file with the edit via VDI over Terminal Services gateway and so on. This works with the Vista Folder redirection I briefly mentioned in one of my earlier posts.
In Q3 the next version of the MDOP pack will be released and they highlighted that the product at launch was the fastest selling on Volume Licensing they have ever had. As Brian mentioned MDOP is only available via Software Assurance.
System Centre and it's add-ons were highlighted as the best way to provide and manage the dynamic desktop and Microsoft rightly argue that you should be able to use one tool to manage physical/virtual and client devices/servers. They claim to be providing this one stop shop.
Next up was a demonstration of Network Access Protection via Windows 2008, it showed how a device gets quarantined, remediation work is carried out (patch applied for example)and then the device is allowed to connect. The feature will allow you to set policies and do a check before implementation so you can understand the effect of any change. I guess this is much like the Resultant Set of Policy feature in AD GPO's.
Attached Knowledge Services was a good example of some innovative thinking. This is where all the System Centre suite report back to Microsoft (with no identifying info) the health of an environment, its make up and so on. This has then allowed Microsoft to create baselines to allow companies to see how they compare. Furthermore, if you are performing badly in some area you can query the data to find out what to change to help your environment. Taking this further, Microsoft have found that where one customer experiences specific problems, they can use this information to proactively warm others who may be getting to a similar situation, before the problem even arises. Whilst this has a tinge of big brother to it if i were a suspicious mind, the opportunity here is fantastic. This would clearly be a big reputational boost to Microsoft and its services, as well as a stability/reliability boost for its customers. Unless of course you are the customer that has to have the problem first ;-)
Finally, in a bit of a Columbo style "Just one more thing" moment a quick demo was performed using a USB stick to plug into a machine and from there he again managed to show his apps. This is similar to what Mars Office on a Stick is trying to do, but here it would be native to Microsoft. No further details were given but it was a slick show stopper demo.
One slight irritation was that they put up their roadmap of the System Centre suite, all the products are to go to the next version on 2010. Were they our replacement for Zenworks, we could face doing a rollout and a version upgrade as soon as the rollout completes. Having said that, we all know how their deadlines slip!
After this session, I am left feeling quite positive about where Microsoft see the future, they clearly recognise the problems Mars sees and are already looking to address them. It is like they have been stealing from my Client Architecture Framework document though!
"The Dynamic Desktop provides a consistent experience for users independent of device or location".
Microsoft's belief is that now and in the future we should consider the client, the user not their device and we need to ask ourselves questions along the lines of how do we deliver applications and data to the user.
The next step was a quick demo of Application Virtualisation, so a .pptx was clicked on and Powerpoint was installed in the background in around 10 seconds. Pretty swish! They made an edit and saved it, they were then able to log in from another device and have the same file with the edit via VDI over Terminal Services gateway and so on. This works with the Vista Folder redirection I briefly mentioned in one of my earlier posts.
In Q3 the next version of the MDOP pack will be released and they highlighted that the product at launch was the fastest selling on Volume Licensing they have ever had. As Brian mentioned MDOP is only available via Software Assurance.
System Centre and it's add-ons were highlighted as the best way to provide and manage the dynamic desktop and Microsoft rightly argue that you should be able to use one tool to manage physical/virtual and client devices/servers. They claim to be providing this one stop shop.
Next up was a demonstration of Network Access Protection via Windows 2008, it showed how a device gets quarantined, remediation work is carried out (patch applied for example)and then the device is allowed to connect. The feature will allow you to set policies and do a check before implementation so you can understand the effect of any change. I guess this is much like the Resultant Set of Policy feature in AD GPO's.
Attached Knowledge Services was a good example of some innovative thinking. This is where all the System Centre suite report back to Microsoft (with no identifying info) the health of an environment, its make up and so on. This has then allowed Microsoft to create baselines to allow companies to see how they compare. Furthermore, if you are performing badly in some area you can query the data to find out what to change to help your environment. Taking this further, Microsoft have found that where one customer experiences specific problems, they can use this information to proactively warm others who may be getting to a similar situation, before the problem even arises. Whilst this has a tinge of big brother to it if i were a suspicious mind, the opportunity here is fantastic. This would clearly be a big reputational boost to Microsoft and its services, as well as a stability/reliability boost for its customers. Unless of course you are the customer that has to have the problem first ;-)
Finally, in a bit of a Columbo style "Just one more thing" moment a quick demo was performed using a USB stick to plug into a machine and from there he again managed to show his apps. This is similar to what Mars Office on a Stick is trying to do, but here it would be native to Microsoft. No further details were given but it was a slick show stopper demo.
One slight irritation was that they put up their roadmap of the System Centre suite, all the products are to go to the next version on 2010. Were they our replacement for Zenworks, we could face doing a rollout and a version upgrade as soon as the rollout completes. Having said that, we all know how their deadlines slip!
After this session, I am left feeling quite positive about where Microsoft see the future, they clearly recognise the problems Mars sees and are already looking to address them. It is like they have been stealing from my Client Architecture Framework document though!
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Mat's thoughts on the keynote with Bob Muglia
Today the first session was the keynote with Bob Muglia one of MS's Senior VPs.
The key things I took away are:
- Demo of System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) that showed its ability to do pre-OS (what we tend to call bare metal) install by configuring both the BIOS (to enable virtualisation) and RAID. Both core functionality for server distributions.
- SCCM will soon have the ability to multicast, better aiding network distribution without clogging the pipes.
- Early benchmarking of Hyper-V shows it to be pretty competitive with a v1 release with VMWare ESX which has had a couple of years headstart. Obviously they didn't state who paid for the benchmarking and it's independence or not, but interesting all the same.
- System Centre Virtual Machine Manager was released as a Beta. A very interesting product that can manage both Hyper-V and VMWare virtual environments from the one console. The only product current available to do this on the market now.
- Whilst Hyper-V can move virtual machines, it does require downtime albeit brief. VMWare today can do this with none. Microsoft have a live migration working in the lab and will be introducing it in the future.
- Next up, Cross Platform extensions for SCCM were announced that allow for the management of SUSE/Red Hat/Solaris/HPUX etc. Again allowing for an investment in one product (SCCM) to enable companies to manage their entire infrastructure environment.
- Finally, that we are all heroes for doing the jobs we do, tying into the Windows 2008 launch in Feb and the use of David Bowie's song. I for one have always known I'm a legend ;-)
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