SCORCH-ing HOT!

It is official - System Center Opalis has now been renamed to System Center Orchestrator. SCORCH! The Microsoft main page has not been changed yet but I'm sure its soon enough. http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/opalis.aspx

MMS2011: Keynote Day 2 - Brad Anderson

Just finished the Keynote Day 2. Here are my cliff notes:

• Announcing System Center Configuration Manager Beta 2 to Public
• Ability to manage and control Windows, iPhone, iPad, Symbian and Android mobile devices
• Ability to report on inventory, status, on the mobile devices and even remotely wipe out the phone in the event of a lost phone
• Ability to deploy Citrix XenApp and Microsoft App-V applications
• Management of users devices can now be done from a single pane
• Superceding feature - ability to automatically uninstall an application when installing a new version
• Self Service Catalog for users to pick and choose applications to be installed on their computers
• Ability to manage Citrix Xen Desktop
• Extending inventory items now easily done via console instead of having to modify smsdef.mof
• Auto deployment rules can be configured to automatic download of updates and deploy.
• Announcing Forefront Endpoint Protection will now be part of Core CAL
• Announcing the inclusion of Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring as part of the MDOP Suite
• Announcing MMS2012 will be April 16 - 20 back at the VENETIAN, Las Vegas!

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

TechNet Free Subscription on Passing a Virtualization Exam

Want a FREE TechNet subscription? Well.. quickly go take a Microsoft Virtualization exam and.. well.. PASS it! Offer is for first 1000 only! between March 1 - June 30 2011

http://www.anthologymarketing.com/microsoft/deployment/virtualization_cert/virtcert_landingpage_r02.html

App-V superflow published

About a week ago, a new superflow documentation was released. This is the App-V deployment Superflow. Highly useful document if u need a step by step guide to install the App-V componentt. Flowcharts are provided to showcase the steps process.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=948cb798-779c-4a39-9a16-5181dd1c45a7