The WMUG man at MMS

Keynote this morning was good, nice demo on task sequencer and custom tasks for deploying servers with specific roles, AD, DNS etc...

You can use custom tasks to configure raid, and even enable / disable BIOS settings, it is obvious that Microsoft has been working closely with the hardware vendors on this. I say well done, looks very slick

Multicast is going to be available in the R2 release of Configuration Manager.

Announcements, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Beta, with this you can manage hyper V and VMware virtual servers, all power shell backend, nothing new there. MSDN and TechNet sites are both hosted on hyper V, from what I have seen the performance is very good for a first release.

The beta of the Cross Platform Extensions for OpsMan is available from today, got my copy already, very nice, people have been waiting a long time for this, working with partners and Open Source, you can now view Apache web sites, MySQL, Oracle,  OS info around these systems from within the Ops Manager console. This means that you can also report on them, pull them into Distributed Apps, and use every other Ops Manager feature. You can even fix certain issues on Unix boxes without visiting the box its self, using custom tasks.

They seem to understand that we live in a heterogeneous environment, and they want us using their tools to manage it.