MMS2011: Keynote 1 - Brad Anderson

Just attended the first keynote of MMS2011 with Brad Anderson. Here are some cliff notes of what was announced:

• Announcement and showcase of System Center Project Concero
• A Web Based management tool directed at managing private and public clouds
• Providing self service to application owners to manage their own cloud infrastructure from a cloud, VM or service model perspective.
• Provides the ability to view both infrastructures on the Private Cloud and those hosted on Azure
• Unique management perspective in managing the infrastructure "Services" rather than servers/VMs.
• Will have built in integration with Service Manager that provides the self service portal to request for change and additional resources to the Admin
• Announcement of Sytstem Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta
• Will have support for Xen, VMWare, Hyper-V. Possibly the only one in the market that has cross platform hypervisor management support
• Ability to manage load balancers as part of the service
• ability to discover bare metal computers through protocols like IPMI and DCMI and provision OS and VMs
• VMM Service Template function - kind of like a recipe of what makes up an application service. could be mixing OS, applications etc.
• Ability to seperate the OS and the Application so that there is no dependency. This will allow admins to update Operating Systems individually and keep lesser images; patch them seperately from the application.
• Ability to virtualize the Application via Server App-V to achieve the seperatino of App and OS. Deployment can then be seemless for multiple environments so as not neccessary to keep multiple sets of images.
• Announcing System Center Operations Manager Project 2012
• Will include Network Device monitoring out of the box
• Ability to show the connections between the network device and the servers
• Dashboards provides views such as network device average response time etc
• will have deep integration with AVICODE (Application Monitoring)
• Announcing Project Atlanta is now officially knowned as System Center Advisor
• Provides Configuration Change Management for supported applications and OS
• At launch will support SQL, Windows Server, Hyper-V, AD
• Agents installed on servers, report the configuration data up to the Advisor cloud service
• Rules available to check configuration against best practices, known issues, knowledgebase
• Responses back to the customer could be best practice advisory, hotfixes for known configuration issues
• Tracks configuration change for the servers
• Licensing: FREE if you have Software Assurance on the related App/OS