Looking at Desktop Virtualization including VDI? Thinking about migrating to Windows 7? Want savings, but unsure of the tradeoffs? Have more questions than answers on the topic? Join this moderated televised discussion for an hour full of virtualization insights.
Save the date: http://www.desktopvirtualizationhour.com/
Looking for a seamless way to manage both your physical and virtual assets across your IT environment? System Center Essentials and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) Workgroup Edition, along with Microsoft’s reliable and powerful Hyper-V hypervisor platform, provide an integrated solution for virtualizing and managing your physical and virtual assets. And, with more functionality delivered at a lower cost than VMware (see chart below), Essentials and VMM become the logical midmarket systems management solution.
For a limited time, Microsoft is offering Essentials 2007 and VMM 2008 at a 37% discount through designated partners. The offer includes a one-year Software Assurance agreement that includes a free upgrade to Essentials 2010 upon its release to manufacturing in 2010. That’s three products for the retail price of Essentials 2007 alone! To learn more, read the press release or contact your local partner. For a full description of the offer, see Terms and Conditions.
Virtualization Comparison Chart (click image for full article)
Microsoft announced this morning that over the next several weeks, they are pre-releasing several whitepapers around DPM 2010’s Release Candidate. The first WP to be released is about how to protect Microsoft Virtualization environments – including Hyper-V R2, Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.
Click here to download — How to protect Hyper-V with DPM 2010 whitepaper
Exclusive Access for Alumni
From today all registered attendees have access to the MMS 2010 CommNet but event Alumni have exclusive access to the online Schedule Builder tool for the next 14 days, before access opens to all other attendees on March 1st. This provides you with an opportunity to review the breakouts and labs being offered at MMS 2010 and to build your personal schedule before all other registered attendees have access to the booking system.
Some of you will recall my recent post about the usefulness of System Center Capacity Planner. I think we have an answer to the question of whether or not it’s a useful tool or if it could be more useful if extended to the ISV partner community. Microsoft has just made the following announcement regarding its end-of-life:
System Center Capacity Planner Has Been Discontinued.
Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) is formally being discontinued, effective immediately, as it no longer supports the current versions of Microsoft applications it was designed for. The most recent version, SCCP 2007, is no longer available. No new versions of this standalone capacity planning tool, as well as any new or updated application capacity planning models, will be developed.
This just in:
Dell announced today it has signed an agreement to acquire Kace, a leading systems-management appliance company with solutions tailored to the requirements of midsized businesses and public (government, education and healthcare) institutions.
Kace provides comprehensive and affordable solutions through the award-winning KBOX systems-management and deployment appliances which carry a wide range of capabilities including:
• Device discovery, PC and server inventory, and asset management;
• Configuration management, including operating system deployment, software distribution, application virtualization and scripting;
• End-point security via patch management, security-policy enforcement and vulnerability scanning; and,
• Service management through integrated service desk, user portal and alerting.
Dell channel partners will be able to resell Dell / Kace products, but the channel integration plan is not yet final. In the interim, we welcome our Channel Partners to go directly to the Kace Team to set-up a reselling agreement at http://www.kace.com/partners/application.php. Learn more at http://www.kace.com/partners/channel-partners.phpKACE has been successful in selling to midsized customers in every industry vertical, but has been particularly successful in K-12 and higher education, as well as state and local government. For a sampling of KACE customers by vertical and size see the KACE customer pages at http://www.Kace.com/customer
If you have additional questions on our recent acquisition, please read the Press Release located at http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/2010-2-11-Kace-Acquisition.aspx or contact your Dell Account Team.
Learn more about Kace products at http://www.Kace.com/products
The System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Cumulative Update 2 has been released. It includes the System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Agent Update (KB973583) and additional bug fixes. For full details, visit http://bit.ly/bf78O3.
Here are the 5 key upgrade tips for an enterprise considering Windows 7:
1. Make application compatibility the first priority.
2. Use System Center Configuration Manager for image creation and deployment.
3. Start with basic group policy settings but then update.
4. Work with ISVs early and often.
5. Align Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 deployment timing.
Read the full article on the System Center team blog.
The IBM Deployment Pack for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM) is used to configure IBM hardware components prior to deploying Windows using Microsoft SCCM. This kit extends Configuration Manager 2007 by providing a convenient integrated user interface that will be familiar to SCCM administrators. The Deployment Pack completes the end-to-end deployment scenario in environments where IBM-specific configuration steps are required including RAID, IMM, RSA2, BMC, and BIOS/UEFI.
More information, including a Users Guide, and download available from http://bit.ly/aR8oXD.
Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning and post-deployment change analysis solution for Microsoft server products, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.
However, is it really all that useful? Most admins and architects that I’ve spoken with about this product feel that it’s based mostly on over-engineered capacity planning models that favor Microsoft licensing and not necessarily on providing “real world” value.
But, what if it were extensible to the 3rd party ISVs?
I was recently talking with Martin Sajkowski, Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Secure Vantage Technologies, regarding some of their new product announcements for the upcoming Microsoft Management Summit, when the topic of capacity planning came up. While they’ve produced an Excel spreadsheet for calculating approximate data storage needs, it was lacking some critical decision point factors and was in need of updating for the forthcoming product releases. When I laughing said “too bad Microsoft hasn’t made the capacity planning models for System Center Capacity Planner available to the ISVs yet” it was as if a light bulb had gone off. “What a great idea!” he replied.
Yes, it is a great idea – though I’m sure it’s not an original one. Surely someone at Microsoft must have thought this would be great idea as well. Perhaps even some of you reading this are now thinking about all the core infrastructure solutions you have to design and implement that are not from Microsoft and how nice it would be to have planning models for those apps.
Would having a common framework for planning capacity and “what if scenarios” that supported Microsoft and 3rd party apps make System Center Capacity Planner more useful? If you could obtain capacity models from Dell, IBM, EMC, Veritas, etc. would you actually install SCCP? If you could estimate the outcome of production changes before actually making them, would you do things differently?
Sound off people! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.
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