I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
Looky here, ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 CTP2 has just been released for public consumption.
Download Installer hereDownload Docs here
Download Installer here
Download Docs here
Nod to Raphael Perez MVP for turning up the links mega-fast.
More info here: blogs.technet.com/.../system-center-2012-sp1-ctp2-now-available.aspx
Look at this spec!
•Virtual Machine Manager
◦Improved Support for Network Virtualization
◦Extend the VMM console with Add-ins
◦Support for Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units and discovery of SAS storage
◦Ability to convert VHD to VHDX, use VHDX as base Operating System image
•Configuration Manager
◦Support for Windows 8
◦Support for Mac OS clients
◦Support for Linux and Unix servers
•Data Protection Manager
◦Improved backup performance of Hyper-V over CSV 2.0
◦Protection for Hyper-V over remote SMB share
◦Protection for Windows Server 2012 de-duplicated volumes
◦Uninterrupted protection for VM live migration
•App Controller
◦Service Provider Foundation API to create and operate Virtual Machines
◦Support for Azure VM; migrate VHDs from VMM to Windows Azure, manage from on-premise System Center
•Operations Manager
◦Support for IIS 8
◦Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services
◦Azure SDK support
•Orchestrator
◦Additional support for Integration Packs, including 3rd party
◦Manage VMM self-service User Roles
◦Manage multiple VMM ‘stamps’ (scale units), aggregate results from multiple stamps
◦Integration with App Controller to consume Hosted clouds
•Service Manager
◦Apply price sheets to VMM clouds
◦Create chargeback reports
◦Pivot by cost center, VMM clouds, Pricesheets
•Server App-V
◦Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during packaging
◦Create virtual application packages from applications installed remotely on native server
www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx
NOTE: Do not install this into production, this is for the lab. There is no upgrade to the full release once it arrives.