System Center Banter

War on Cost III 2011 event coming 14 December

Steve Burkett — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:51:00 GMT

And our free tour of London's top war related attractions continues as Inframon are set to host round III of their War on Cost event on December 14th at the Imperial War Museum in London. Last years event was probably the first public outing for a lot of the in-development System Center v.Next products by Microsoft's System Center team before their formal announcements at TechEd Europe 2010 which happened a few weeks later. This year, with most of the code pretty much complete, we should be getting a good look at what to expect, see where they're going with System Center and harass them about why they still haven't got such and such a feature in the products yet.

The Inframon official event page still needs some updating from last year, but you can get registered over at Microsoft Events.

If you're from up north and don't fancy the train journey, you might want to check out the System Center 2012 Preview Roadshow happening in Manchester on December 6th, or Birmingham on January 18th.

Re-blog: System Center Operations Manager 2012 : Hurry up already!

Steve Burkett — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:43:00 GMT

[Now that TechEd Europe 2010 has drawn to a close, it's ok to talk about this one! Check out Justin and Vlad's session over at the TechEd site here.]

Was a little exciting to get a first look at Operations Manager vNext 2012 while at the Inframon War On Cost event last Friday. And.... it looks remarkably similar to SCOM 2007 R2!

Well I guess that it's still a way to go in the development timeline. They were looking at getting a Beta released around February time, a Release Candidate out the door July-ish and the final product ready to go around this time next year. So there's still plenty of time for the UI to be tweaked a bit before it releases. One change I'd expect to happen is what they've got in the SCCM vNext beta 2, and that is they've ditched the Action Pane down the right hand side of the screen and instead have gone for an Office 2007 style Ribbon Toolbar across the top with context sensitivity menu options. I'm guessing this'll go in to all the System Center 2012 products.

Feature-wise, they've finally got the EMC Smarts technology wedged in there. They licensed this technology off of EMC waaaay back in March 2007 and it never made it in to the R2 product. Grrr! But better late then never. This lovely feature finally makes the Operations Manager product network topology aware. If your router at a remote office dies or your WAN link fails, you don't get hammered with multiple alerts telling you that every device and server sitting behind that router has just gone offline. It knows that those devices are dependent on that router being up and will supress their notifications meaning it's much easier to see what the root cause is.

The Discovery Wizard now has an Automatic Discovery mode. It'll go find devices and servers on your network and consult their ARP cache's in order to work out what else is out there on the network and what the device is attached to. This then allows it to formulate a map of how all the bits and pieces in your network fit together. Expect dynamic network maps to make an appearance. There's also a schedule option, so you can have it do a re-scan of your network every 24 hours in order to find new equipment that's been connected up. Nice!

I noticed the Network Devices discovery wizard had been improved as well. You can input multiple SNMP community strings in to the wizard so it'll for instance first try with SNMP v2 using a community string of 'OurPrivateCompanyCommString' followed by 'public', and if still no joy talking to the device, it'll drop down to SNMP v1 and repeat. That should be a time saver.

And couple that with some Inclusion and Exclusion filters in the Network Discovery Wizard too, so you can choose to only pick up devices of a certain type (Eg. only discover switches, don't worry about routers), having a certain OID (Eg. Only discover Cisco kit), or of a certain name. Should help us to exclude all those HP Printers on the network that we don't care about! Woo!

Architecture-wise, they're ditching the RMS server. Yup, these are going the same way as PDC's and BDC's went back in 1999, and have instead been replaced by Management Servers that are all considered equal peers. This makes sense as you'd no longer have a single point of failure there.

The Management Servers can be grouped together in to what are called Server Pools, and allow any MS in that pool to take over the tasks of another MS in the pool should it go offline. Likewise, clients will auto-switch over to reporting to that new MS should they no longer be able to talk to their regular assigned MS. Continuing with the pool theme, they've got Agent Pools for monitoring now as well, which means you can assign your Watcher Nodes to this pool and SCOM will automatically assign the watching tasks to whichever server in that pool is still available. Again reducing the single point of failure and helping keep your SLA figures look respectable!

They also had native support for the monitoring of Java, J2EE, Websphere, Weblogic, JBoss and Tomcat in there as well so the Linux boys should be a little happier. And there was talk of having Outside In Monitoring, whereby you can get watcher nodes sitting on servers at Microsoft to keep an eye on your public presence from their view. Keeping public facing websites and remote access systems up and accessible from the general internet should be a little easier with that.

Hopefully more details will be announced this week at TechEd Europe by Justin Incarnto and Daniel Savage (Senior SC Program Manager's at Microsoft) but this was a good start. In the mean time, it's trudging on with SCOM 2007 R2, which will be getting a Cumulative Update 4 at the end of January.

Update: Gordon McKenna, King of Inframon and SCOM MVP so privvy to far more information then us mere admins are, has stated that Operations Manager won't be getting the trick Ribbon toolbar like SCCM is. Huh. So much for standardised look and feel across the suite!

System Center Mobile Device Manager: Not just for Windows Mobiles!

Steve Burkett — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:43:00 GMT

So Wally Mead at last Monday's WMUG Config Manager session was a little coy about announcing what platforms were going to be supported in the Mobile Device Manager section of SCCM 2012. He said Nokia was definitely in there, but we'd have to wait and see for the rest.

It was a little interesting therefore to see in one of the War On Cost sessions last Friday that they had both Android 2.2.2 and iOS 4.0 shown on the screen, along with Symbian 3.3.3 and Win Phone 7. And they had a shiny new Windows Slate device there too which sadly wasn't playing ball with the conference room wireless kit.

So it looks like corporations will in the future be able to use SCCM 2012 to enforce policies and configurations across all the major mobile platforms, and do remote wipes when they inevitably leave them on the train. Unless you're running Blackberries. Which we are. Doh!

Opalis 6.3 : T-minus 17 days (or less)

Steve Burkett — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:33:00 GMT

Haven't had time to get playing with Opalis yet, but after checking out Adam Hall and Greg Chapman's session at the War On Cost event the other day I'm just itching to get started on it. But Adam announced there that the next version, v6.3, is going to be available before Thanksgiving on the 25th, the exact date he's keeping secret till he announces it at TechEd Europe this week. So I figure I'll wait just that bit longer and start fresh on 6.3 with all that 64 bit server support goodness.

Along with the 64 bit (Win 2008 R2) support for servers, it'll also ship with Integration Packs for the rest of the System Center products (SCSM, SCVMM, SCCM, SCDPM, SCOM) which should really make this complete System Center suite kick butt for managing your IT. The DPM integration is interesting as the idea is that SQL and Sharepoint Admins should be able to do automated restores of their data without requiring access to DPM per se.

He also mentioned that NetApp have done an Integration Pack and that three other major storage manufacturers are in the process of doing so. This'll really help those with large virtual farms and the like, as it'll be fairly easy for Opalis to dynamically allocate (and deallocate) storage space for new virtual servers as and when current demand requires.

For those just getting started with Opalis, Adam said they are still accepting people in to the Opalis Community Evaluation Program whereby you get a whole lot of handy material, labs and interaction with the Microsoft guys to help you learn what Opalis can do for you. You'll just need to catch up with what you've missed in the last month or so. If you're not quite ready yet, another iteration of the program will be starting around the end of January. Get in there!

But, how long before Opalis gets a name change? Surely Microsoft marketing will be calling it System Center Automation Manager 2012 or something soon enough?

System Center v.Next... Errrrr.... 2012 on it's way

Steve Burkett — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 12:05:00 GMT

So I trooped along to the Inframon War on Cost event in London last Friday. This kind of acted as a warm up gig for the Microsoft System Center guys that were preparing to do their sessions at the Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010 event in Berlin this week. I managed to get there late due to issues at work that morning but it sounds like they had experienced an early Guy Fawkes night as something had gone pop in the power grid there early in the morning and they were running around an hour behind schedule. So I missed the keynote session but managed to catch the rest.

So one announcement was that the next revision of the System Center line of products were going to get the 2012 tag. So that's Configuration Manager 2012, Virtual Machine Manager 2012, and Operations Manager 2012. Service Manager 2010 is going to get an R2 revision rather then go to 2012. And there's also going to be an InTune version 1 released around the same time. The estimated release dates are going to be about a year from now.

Keep an eye on the War on Cost site, as the Microsoft TechNet guys were there filming the sessions, with a view to posting them up on the site shortly.