Alberto Ortega’s Blog

It is great to see how this community is growing, I like the video-way of being on top of industry related news, go deep and spend 20 minutes a day watching this 5-10 minutes videos and you will find yourself on-top of most of the MS management technologies

http://edge.technet.com/Tags/System+Center/

The last toy of Ops Mgr R2:

Visio Integration with Operations Manager R2

Last Wednesday 18-February we had a TechNet webcast about the System Center Suite. If you want to go deeper you can download the session resources here: http://cid-5f9c7b75bd402dda.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/TechNet/2009-02-18%20-%20System%20Center%20y%20el%20Centro%20de%20Datos

I recommend this session to earn a high-level perspective about the System Center Suite, on the online session you can watch demos about the following scenarios:

1. Datacenter Deployment: Windows Deployment Services (WDS) technology to remotely deploy OS on your datacenter environment.
2. Model Based Updates Management: System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM) to achieve templates based updates roll-out to the datacenter.
3. End to end monitoring: System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta (SCOM) to have an holistic view of your production services health.
4. Model based standards in the datacenter: System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM) to manage workstation and servers baselines against a desired configuration baseline enforced by IT.
5. Accountability in the datacenter: System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta (SCOM) to concentrate audit events, using Audit Collection Services,  from your windows server environment with reporting capabilities to overcome your security auditor demands.
6. Datacenter Planinng: System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (SCCP) (free download!) to size your services deployment on Miacorosft solutions like Exchange, Sharepoint and Operations Manager.

You can download the On-Demand session here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=es-AR&EventID=1032400708&CountryCode=AR

Next week Southworks SRL will take part of the SMSE (Systems Management Server Enterprise) event series on Microsoft Argentina, targeted for MS EPG customers. From Southworks we will be involved as expert in the System Center family Solutions. I will be a speaker on sessions about: System Center Operations Manager, System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Data Protection Manager and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V sharing the stage with the great Alejandro Ponicke and Leandro Sgallari the magician

Sessions Details

The series will be:

• SMSE Live Day 1: Wednesday 27-Aug (9-13 Hs): Live Event – Clients by invitation only.
• SMSE Live Day 2: Thursday 28-Aug (9-13 Hs): Live Event – Clients by invitation only.
• SMSE WC Day 1: Thursday 28-Aug (14:30-16 Hs): Public webcast
  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032383808&EventCategory=4&culture=es-AR&CountryCode=AR
• SMSE WC Day 1: Friday 29-Aug (14:30-16 Hs): Public webcast
  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032383810&EventCategory=4&culture=es-AR&CountryCode=AR

The outline for the Live sessions is (still developing on our UNMG network!):

• SMSE Live Day 1
  • SCVMM: Platform showcase | Intro | Snapshots | Live Migration
  • SCOM: Intro | SUSE Monitoring | Service Level Dashboard | Custom MP
  • SCCM: Intro | Win2k8/Vista Mgmt | Asset Intelligence | Update Mgmt
  • SCDPM: Intro | DB recovery | End User File recovery
• SMSE Live Day 2
  
  • Intel: VPro (By Gabriela Gallardo, Intel)
  • SCVMM: Live Migration Drill-Down | Self Service Portal
  • SCCM + SCOM: Control Panel Advertisements | SCCM Monitoring | Desired Configuration Management | Internet based clients
  • SCDPM + SCCM + SCOM: VM backup | DPM Reporting | DPM Health with Ops Mgr | SCCM Recovery from DPM triggered by Ops Mgr

The agenda for the Webcasts sessions will be a sub-set of the above focused on SCVMM 2008 Beta and Hyper-V. Subscribe today using the above links so you will have a reminder on your calendar!

SMSE is a licensing model developed this year by Microsoft to encourage the adoption of System Center products on the Enterprise.

Here at Southworks we deployed many times from scratch a fully virtualized infrastructure and we have many lessons learnt so far. Since 2006, the industry is betting hard to workloads virtualization as it will address the increasing complexity IT environments are facing improving agility on the datacenter. In this post I will share a snapshot of what happened last month on the Virtualization Industry. Later (next post) I will discuss common drawbacks when moving to a virtualized infrastructure.

Virtualization Short Take

VMWare 2.0 (free server from VMWare) has reached the RC1 stage (http://www.vmware.com/beta/server/), nowadays SW-IT has every workload in production virtualized over VMWare 1.0.6 and has proved stability but we suffered in terms of management. VMWare 2.0 RC1 top features are Volume Shadow Copy, SCSI pass-though disk, USB 2.0 devices, Web access management interface and more OS support (including Win2k8 x64).

VMWare ESX 3i is free as I mentioned on my previous post, this had an impact on the SMB market so if you want to drill-down: http://blogs.southworks.net/aortega/2008/07/30/vmware-esx-3i-for-free/

VMWare has joined last week The Linux Foundation as announced here: http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/press/2008/08/06/vmware-joins-the-linux-foundation/, this is an strong bet from VMWare to empower the use of their virtualization platform on Linux systems.

Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2 was released. VirtualBox is an absolutely free virtualization product for x86 and x64 platform (x64 support included in this 1.6.2 release) and can be used for server and desktop virtualization, a highlight of this virtualization platform is that it is compatible with VMWare VMs, however it will not load MS VHDs files as VMWare is supposed to do. I say “is supposed to do” as we failed many times in SW-IT when trying to boot a VHD disk over VMWare Player.

Hyper-V went to RTM! And is now available through Windows Update so all your Windows 2008 running Hyper-V will have the update available for install. Although Microsoft says the VMs are compatible from RC1 to RTM be careful as we experienced performance issues related with the Integration Tools (a.k.a VM Additions) when migrating. Together with this RTM a Powershell Management Toolkit (PSHyperV) was released by James O´Neill to automate Hyper-V many management tasks check it out at http://www.codeplex.com/PSHyperv

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Beta has now support for managing Hyper-V hosts (get it from http://connect.microsoft.com), moreover, SW-EE (Engineering Excellence Team) deployed this Beta version and successfully managed 8 Win2k8 hosts, so we will closely look how this solution evolves as we are early adopters.

Novell upgrades PlateSpin PowerConvert to v 7.0, PowerConvert is an enterprise-ready Virtualization Management solution that optimizes the data center by streaming server workloads over the network between physical servers, PlateSpin was acquired by Novell on March 2008 and will be a key components of Novell visions to the dynamic datacenter.

Finally the Xen Summit at Boston took place this June and many posts appeared in http://blog.xen.org regarding the tracks, Yoshi Tamura from the NTT Cyber Space Laboratories in Japan gave a very interesting presentation on Kemari. Kemari is a new approach to cluster systems that synchronize VMs for fault tolerance without modifying neither hardware nor applications, Kemari proposes a sync approach instead of a shared storage approach like VMWare’s VMotion or Hyper-V Live Migration.

References: How to be on top of Virtualization news?

If I had to choose only three vendor agnostic virtualization posts I recommend:

1. http://virtualization.com/: is a great aggregator of industry news  with short posts straight to the point.

2. http://blog.scottlowe.org/: Scott Lowe has a breath view of the virtualization and storage market and frequently posts on his “Virtualization Short Take” a snapshot of the virtualization industry.

3. http://www.virtualization.info/roadmap/: Virtualization Industry Roadmap logs every product release in a time-line style for the vendors that the Virtualization Congress has in its radar

References

o Novell upgrades PlateSpin PowerConvert to v7.0
http://virtualization.com/news/2008/06/24/novell-platespin-powerconvert-7.0/

o Desktop Virtualization Portal
http://www.desktop-virtualization.com/

o Xen Summit Highlights
http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2008/07/03/xen-summit-highlights-kemari-high-availability-20/

Jeff Jane CTO on Novell shares a great post series with us about Novell´s vision about the next level the IT industry needs to reach in order to address the increasing complexity we are facing. They call this the Fossa project and it is intended to be finished by 2012.

So far we have 3 posts that are worth reading:

• Fossa, further continued
• Fossa, continued
• Fossa

Novell Key Technologies and Product lines related to Fossa are:

• Virtualization: Xen Virtualization
• Platform: SUSE Linux Enterprise
• Orchestration: ZENWorks Orchestrator
• Identity: Novell eDirectory
• Collaboration: GroupWise (They just bought SiteScape, an OpenSource Teaming + Collaboration suite)

I could not avoid linking this project to the DSI vision pushed by Microsoft. DSI is in its 4th year of development (This is a 10 years vision) and is mainly focused on how will systems management evolve. The Fossa project has a broader vision than only systems management as collaboration is not within DSI. However MS has another vision/campaign called “People Ready” with a pillar centered on Collaboration.

As you saw there are many differences between Fossa and DSI, there are two main concepts where both vision converges:

If you want to go deeper on DSI you could begin with this blog post: Deliver Managed Applications under the MS platform! Develop a custom Management Pack - Prologue and then move to the MS website: http://www.microsoft.com/business/dsi/default.mspx 

Thanks to Wallis for this Management Packs Roadmap:

The installation media contains

• Exchange Server 2003
• Windows Server 2000/2003 AD
• Information Worker
• MS Server 2000/03 OS
• MS Client 2000 XP OS
• Windows Server IIS 2000/03
• SharePoint Portal Server 2003
• Windows SharePoint Services 2003
• Windows Server 2000/03 Terminal Services
• SQL Server 2000/05

May 2007

• SMS 2003
• Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Windows DHCP Server 2003/2000
• Windows File Replication Service 2003/2000
• Windows Group Policy 2003
• Windows Print Server 2003

June 2007

• Windows DNS Server 2003/2000
• Virtual Server 2005
• ISA Server 2006
• BizTalk Server 2006
• Windows Distributed File Systems Replication Service 2003

Q3 2007

• Configuration Manager 2007
• Virtual Server 2005
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007
• Exchange 2007
• Windows Server Clusters 2000/03
• Host Integration Server 2006
• Office Live Communications Server 2005 SP1
• System Center Data Protection Manager 2006
• Forefront Security for Exchange
• Forefront Security for SharePoint
• Identity Integration Server 2003
• Office Project Server 2007
• Windows Routing and Remote Access Service 2003
• Windows Network Load Balancing 2003
• Windows Distributed Transaction Coordinator 2003
• Computer Cluster Server 2003
• Windows AD Federation Services 2003
• Windows Print Server 2000
• Windows Internet Name Service 2003
• Windows Rights Management Services 2003
• Windows Key Management Services 2003
• ISA Server 2004

Q4 2007

• Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Commerce Server 2007
• Host Integration Server 2006
• Windows Password Change Notification Service 2003
• Antigen 9.0 MOM Pack
• Windows Server Automated Deployment Services 2003
• Windows Server Performance Advisor 2003
• Windows System Resource Manager 2003
• Communicator Web Access 2005

We could expect to get the Exchange 2007 MP at CYQ3 (between July and September), in the meantime we can convert the Exchange 2007 Management Pack created for MOM 2005 to a SCOM MP using the guidelines provided by the SCOM help. You will get almost full monitoring functionality but Client Side Monitoring won't work until the SCOM MP is released.

Hi all! Well, after doing all the planning and designing stuff with SC Capacity Planner now it is time to deploy the solution. This Wednesday 6th we will deploy SCOM 2007 to enhace monitoring capabilities that today Capa8 has with MOM 2005.

The session will be about:

1. Assess HW and SW requirements. Most output from SCCP.
2. Deploy SCOM 2007 side-by-side with MOM 2005.
3. Convert & Import all customized MOM 2005 Management Packs to SCOM 2007.
4. Monitoring transitioning from MOM 2005 and SCOM 2007.
5. Performing initial tune-up to SCOM 2007.
6. Exploring the SCOM 2007 UI. 

You can join the webcast Here.

On Thrusday 22 at Capa8 we will implement System Center Capacity Planner 2006 SP1 (available from TechNet Plus for free download and usage) and perform a What-If analisys about current deployments of Exchange 2003 and MOM 2005.

We will also use System Center Capacity Planner 2007 Beta 1 (available at Connect) to plan future deployments of System Center Operations Manager 2007 and Exchange Server 2007.

You can register from: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032338654&EventCategory=4&culture=es-AR&CountryCode=AR