An ordinary guy trying to make a difference
Another great write up by Michael Niehaus on Bill Anderson's "State of the Union" ConfigMgr session - an MMS MUST attend session if you use ConfigMgr. It's been a busy year with exciting times ahead (as always).
Now I wonder how long before the picture of Ed goes public ;-)
http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus/archive/2008/04/29/mms-2008-system-center-configuration-manager-state-of-the-union.aspx
Michael Niehaus has done a great summary of Bob Muglia's keynote MMS presentation which is well worth a read and includes some important announcements:
http://blogs.technet.com/mniehaus/archive/2008/04/29/mms-2008-keynote-the-dynamic-datacenter.aspx
Microsoft announced at MMS the public beta release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly referred to as code name “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”) is now available.
"System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server. When used in conjunction with the broad System Center management suite, customers can use SCVMM 2008 to effectively manage both their virtualized and physical servers and applications."
LAS VEGAS — April 29, 2008 — Today, before an audience of more than 4,000 IT professionals and partners at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2008, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp., outlined the next phase in the company’s strategy to enable dynamic IT organizations. As part of this strategy, Muglia announced technology innovations that are designed to expand Microsoft’s virtualization capabilities and introduced its use of open source technologies and industry standards to broaden its ability to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.
“At Microsoft we are helping redefine what it means to do IT management in the enterprise with the new capabilities we are announcing today,” Muglia said. “By taking our knowledge of the Windows environment and expanding it to address heterogeneous management needs across platforms, applications, hardware and virtualization, we are opening up a new level of opportunity for companies to drive greater efficiency, responsiveness and value for their business.”
As IT environments grow more diverse and complex across desktops, datacenters, physical and virtual deployments, and heterogeneous infrastructures spanning Windows and non-Windows environments, Microsoft has worked closely with customers to deliver a comprehensive enterprise strategy for an integrated management solution. The announcements today build on the strong, existing Microsoft System Center presence in the datacenter with key additions in the areas of cross-platform, expanded interoperability and multivendor virtualization management solutions, which are further extended by the contributions of a strong and growing partner ecosystem.
Extending Cross-Platform Management for the Datacenter
Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments. Providing customers with a comprehensive management solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications. Microsoft delivers the core foundational cross-platform support out of the box for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in the form of management packs. Companies such as Novell Inc., Quest Software Inc. and Xandros Inc. have demonstrated their support by working to deliver monitoring abilities for applications made by organizations such as The Apache Software Foundation, MySQL AB and Oracle.
Further demonstrating support for its commitment to OpenPegasus, Microsoft also announced today that it will be joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute code back to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.
“The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions have already delivered exciting results for Xandros,” said Andreas Typaldos, CEO of Xandros. “They enabled us to cut our expected development time in half as we created our management packs for Apache and MySQL running on Linux and Solaris, resulting in quicker time to market and delivery of betas to our customers today. This new foundation from Microsoft enabled us to focus on the development of high-level management functions for applications, with the knowledge that the Cross Platform Extensions were providing the necessary underlying interfaces to System Center Operations Manager, enabling heterogeneous management from a single location across customer environments.”
Microsoft also delivered a beta of the updated System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors, based on many of the same extensible open source technology and industry standards as the Cross Platform Extensions, which provide an integrated administrative experience and the ability to interoperate and exchange System Center monitoring data with third-party management offerings such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.
Single Pane of Glass for Managing Virtualized and Physical IT Assets
Also delivered today was the public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”), which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO). Using deep knowledge of the IT environment including operating systems, applications and hardware, Operations Manager identifies opportunities for more efficient physical and virtual resource allocation and generates “PRO tips” within the Virtual Machine Manager console. Administrators can implement these PRO tips and dynamically optimize their datacenter based upon pre-defined policies and the real-time, changing demands of users. When used in conjunction with the broad System Center management suite, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables customers effectively to manage both their virtualized and physical servers and applications across their desktops and datacenters with a single set of consistent, compatible tools.
“Deploying, monitoring and managing applications across a heterogeneous IT infrastructure can present many challenges and complexities, all of which are compounded when consolidating servers, optimizing desktops and applications, or creating business continuity solutions using multiple virtualization solutions,” said Jerry Phillips, senior director of Systems Operations at Clear Channel Communications Inc. “Our experience with System Center solutions has demonstrated that Microsoft not only recognizes our need to manage our Windows datacenter infrastructure, but also non-Windows and virtual servers from other vendors. Being able to do so through a single administrative console will provide improvements in productivity and reductions in our cost of IT operations, enabling us to improve overall organizational contributions.”
A number of partners, including Brocade, Dell, EMC Corp., Emulex Corp., HP, NetQOS, QLogic Corp. and Quest, announced they will deliver management packs enabled for PRO. These management packs enable partners and customers to integrate their domain-specific knowledge directly into Virtual Machine Manager and further integrate physical and virtual management.
“Dell’s focus is to simplify IT for our customers and drive complexity out of the datacenter, and virtualization is a key technology driving this effort,” said Laurie Tolson, vice president of systems management at Dell Product Group. “By working with industry leaders like Microsoft on advances in systems management between Dell OpenManage and Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Windows Server 2008, we’re able to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual management spaces, providing an optimized solution that helps our customers get the most out of their hardware and virtualization investments.”
“New ways to lower energy costs, reduce server sprawl and optimize datacenters are provided by the collaboration between HP and Microsoft as virtualization goes mainstream,” said Scott Farrand, vice president of Industry Standard Server Software at HP. “Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager used alongside HP Insight software on HP ProLiant servers, and HP Server Automation software, allow customers to seamlessly manage physical and virtual environments. The combined solutions also allow customers to maximize availability, performance and flexibility of physical host servers, virtualized guest operating systems and workloads.”
Beta software of System Center Operation Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, Connectors and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 were made available to attendees at the conference and can be downloaded at http://connect.microsoft.com. Customers interested in finding more information on the System Center offerings or in evaluating them through trial offerings can visit http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter and the System Center blog at http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
SQL Server 2005
951574 Error message when you update a table column that is a foreign key in SQL Server 2005: "Internal Query Processor Error: The query processor could not produce a query plan"
951339 Error message when you try to open the Office Customization Tool: "Files necessary to run the Office Customization Tool were not found"
950067 Certificate error Web page is displayed when you try to visit an SSL Web site by using Internet Explorer 7: "There is a problem with this website's security certificate"
952239 Error when installing SP2 on Windows Server 2003: "Setup has detected a driver (elxsli2.sys) that is not compatible with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2."
951032 You may receive an error message on a Windows Server 2003-based computer that has Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 installed
951749 Stop error message on a terminal server that is running Windows Server 2003 SP1 or Windows Server 2003 SP2: "Stop 0x000000AB (SESSION_HAS_VALID_POOL_ON_EXIT)"
951031 Performance may decrease on a server that is running the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2003 and that has Symantec Notification Server 6.0 installed
951041 Supported paths for upgrading from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008
950928 Error message when you restart a computer that is running Windows Server 2003 or an x64-based version of Windows XP Professional: "Stop 0xC000021A"
951721 The certification authority startup event in the Security log always reports a usage count of zero for the signing key on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003
949127 You cannot establish a wireless connection by using EAP authentication on a Windows XP-based client computer if the Service Set Identifier (SSID) includes a comma
The Security Compliance Management toolkit consists of 12 desired configuration management (DCM) Configuration Packs that you can use with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007. You can use the Configuration Packs to scan the computers in your environment to determine their level of compliance with baselines prescribed in security guides from Microsoft for Windows® XP SP2, Windows Vista®, and Windows Server® 2003 SP2. Customers can then use the DCM feature in Configuration Manger 2007 to produce reports that IT professionals can use to remediate security baseline settings and provide proof of compliance to a known baseline. Customers also can customize all of the prescribed security baselines and Configuration Packs.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5534bee1-3cad-4bf0-b92b-a8e545573a3e&displaylang=en
Reading Michael Niehuas' blog I noticed the post below. So like he says, here's YOUR chance to tell Microsoft EXACTLY what you think about it, where it excels, where it's absolute pants, and what can be done to improve it:
As we make plans for the next version of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, it would be great if you could provide feedback on what you think about the current version, including:
Feel free to post your comments to this blog entry, or if you would prefer you can e-mail them to me directly at mniehaus@microsoft.com. Go ahead, bury me in e-mail - make me regret asking for it :-)"
I've seen some fantastic, amazing things in my life but this is right up there, I just can't stop watching it and I'm SO glad someone put it on You Tube.
I bet you can't guess what the surprise is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdEw8xnsZDI
Has Britain Got Talent? Watching this hell yeah ;-)
Just came across this and thought some of you at MMS might find it interesting
"There's a lot planned for the Microsoft Management Summit next week in Vegas! I'll be there, as will several other content managers and writers from the System Center team. The following sessions are good places to meet the team and influence upcoming Operations Manager or System Center content:
Operations Manager Community Jam Tuesday, April 29, 2:00 – 4:30 in Casanova 603 Chris Fox, Senior Technical Writer; Bill Anderson, Technical Writer for System Center Capacity Planner
Are you interested in learning more about the new Operations Manager Community Jam site and providing your feedback? This is a community-oriented site to facilitate the sharing of management pack (MP) solutions and learning about other unique implementations. Site content includes customer-authored MP’s, managed code, command shell scripts, featured articles, forums, and a unified search across the best of Operations Manager content sources. In this focus group, you can:
System Center Documentation: Content Innovations, Content as a Service, and Other New Architectures Monday, April 28, 3:00 – 4:15 in Titian 2201B Kim Field, Director; Steve Kaczmarek, Dionysia Sofos, Deb Lewy, John Merrill, Jonobie Ford, Content Managers; Elise Morrison, Managing Editor
This session, conducted by the content management team, will demonstrate current innovations in content delivery, and describe future architectural directions including Content as a Service offerings and Health Models. This session will provide detailed demonstrations of new content deliverable including the System Center SuperFlow, Configuration Manager Feature Quizzes, the System Center Content Search Gadget, and Virtual Machine Manager How-To videos. We’ll also discuss our Content as a Service and Community Jam initiatives. Finally, we will close with a Q&A session during which the content management team will seek feedback on these new solutions."
MMS Focus Group are a great way for YOU to have your voice heard and one session I would have loved to have attended (had I been there), is this one tomorrow.
So if you're in Vegas, pop along to this session say "Hi" and if they call security tell them Cliff sent you (joke about security you'll be fine ;-)
"For you folks attending the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 2008) this year, I wanted to remind you of the presence of the writing teams that support many of your products and the sessions that we are sponsoring. (See my post of 4/14/08 System Center Writing Staff at MMS 2008!)
But I also wanted to point out one specific focus group that might be of interest to you:
Focus Groups:
Content as a Service – Tuesday, April 29, 2008 – 2:00 – 4:30 – Casanova 604
Prescott Klassen, Senior Program Manager; Kim Field, Director
Are you interested in providing feedback to Windows Server Systems Division User Assistance on scenarios and prototypes for next generation content delivery systems? Attend our Focus Group session and help us set the future vision for our Content As A Service (CaaS) project.
Goals of Focus Group:
- Review customer scenarios and prototypes for next generation Content Services
- Discuss current state of User Assistance in our products and get feedback from attendees
- Gather additional requirements and scenarios from attendees
You've probably heard a lot of talk about software delivered as a web service. Well, this is your opportunity to help influence how content can be delivered in the future using web services. Please consider signing up for this one!!"
Why do I see Status Message 4610? [28/04/08] Contributed By: Cliff Hobbs [MVP ConfigMgr/ SMS] The Schema extensions for SMS are the reason for this one...
We are delighted to announce that the next WMUG Meeting will take place on the 13th May at the Microsoft Campus in Reading.
Full details can be found on our home page (http://wmug.co.uk).
Everyone is welcome, all we ask is that you register in advance (no later than 6th May), so we know numbers for the size of room, for catering and of course for security reasons.
As always, we'd like to thank Microsoft for all of their help in organising this event.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
We look forward to seeing and meeting as many of you as possible on the 13th..!!
Here's an interesting opening for Microsoft UK based at Thames Valley Park in Reading (a HUGE campus location that's in a beautiful location).
More details: http://members.microsoft.com/careers/international/default.aspx?loc=UKD&lang=EN&job=90302471&newapp=0
Carol posted this on the "Configuration Manager Writers - Announcements, Comments and other Stuff" blog so I thought I'd post it here as well:
"Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 RC is now available for download on the Connect site. This includes the accompanying documentation, which includes the following:
All new or modified content in this documentation since the Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 Beta update contains Topic last updated – March 2008. For a list of the topics changed, see “What’s New in the Configuration Manager Documentation Library for March 2008”.
This documentation update will not be published to the Web and is available only by downloading Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 RC from the Connect site. The documentation will be published to the Web with the official release (RTM) of Configuration Manager 2007 SP1, even though it will still contain preliminary content for Configuration Manager 2007 R2. All topics changed since the SP1 RC release will have Topic last updated – May 2008.
Documentation for Out of Band Management
Most of the changes in the documentation between the SP1 RC release and SP1 RTM are in the out of band management feature. Of particular note are the following 4 topics:
SQL Server 2000
951288 SQL Server records a backup operation in the backupset history table when you use VSS to back up files on a volume
951289 The VSS application stops responding when you perform a backup operation on a server that is running a SQL Server 2005 failover cluster
950467 FIX: An access violation may occur when you use a linked server to run a SELECT statement in SQL Server 2005
951189 FIX: The SQL Server 2005 service may stop responding when you run multiple instances of the bpc utility or you run many BULK INSERT statements at the same time
951120 FIX: A peer-to-peer transactional replication does not replicate rows if you rebuild the index for a published table at the same time as you insert data to the published table in SQL Server 2005
951188 FIX: Error message when you connect to an instance of SQL Server 2005 by using a login for which you create a logon trigger: "The server failed to resume the transaction"
950653 A software inventory operation does not work correctly in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 if the inventoried file has invalid time attributes
950032 The SMS_Executive service (Smsexec.exe) process for Systems Management Server 2003 may crash when it tries to shut down while the process is experiencing a heavy load
951646 Description of the behavior changes that occur after you install post-Office 2003 Service Pack 3 updates
949198 Description of the Visio 2003 hotfix package: April 15, 2008
951450 Error message when you export organization chart data to an Excel workbook format in Visio 2007: "Microsoft Visio has encountered a problem and needs to close"
950935 A COM server may not exit as expected after the object is destroyed if you start Internet Explorer 7 as the COM server
950376 You cannot upgrade a Windows-based operating system when you have Windows PowerShell 1.0 installed
951306 Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Windows could allow elevation of privilege
951030 Error message on a Windows Server 2003-based computer that has the McAfee antivirus program installed: "STOP: 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA"
951029 User profiles are corrupted after you log off from a remote desktop session to a Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server on which Symantec AntiVirus 10.1 is installed
951033 Stop error message on a Windows Server 2003-based computer that has Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 installed: "0x00000076" or "0x000000CB"
951202 The Diskpart.exe utility cannot covert local disks to dynamic disks on a Windows Server 2003-based computer that has the Cluster service installed
951243 A call to the StorPortNotification function by a StorPort miniport driver may fail silently in Windows Server 2003
950407 The %ProgramFiles% registry value that a 32-bit application is writes is automatically changed to %ProgramFiles(x86)% on a computer that is running a 64-bit version of Windows Vista
951213 Description of the update for Silverlight 1.0: April 4, 2008
951716 New files and folders do not inherit owner and group when SetUID and SetGID bits are set on NFS shares
951015 The recovery agents that should be associated with encrypted files are missing after you restore the files to another Windows Server 2003-based computer
951027 UIA binaries do not work to view the document content of a Web page that is displayed in Internet Explorer 7 on a computer that is running Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
947841 On a computer that is running an x64 version of Windows Server 2003 or an x64 version of Windows XP, Visual Studio 2008 crashes when you try to open the "Find" dialog box
945060 There may be inconsistencies in the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) and Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) values for an image file in Windows Vista and in Windows XP