System Center Guide

Looks like my prediction caught the attention of the System Center Service Manager (SCSM) Team… the following was posted to the team’s blog overnight. Notice the closing comments….

Hard to believe that the Microsoft Management Summit 2010 is only two months away now!  Service Manager is going to have a MUCH larger presence this year with:

• 4 sessions by SCSM product team Senior Program Managers
• 1 session by MVP Maarten Goet
• 1 session by Microsoft Consulting Services consultants
• 3 sessions on Opalis including integration with Service Manager
• 1 session by Service Manager customer – MPSD – the operations team that runs Microsoft.com, TechNet, MSDN, etc. that has been using Service Manager in production for a few months to manage 4,000+ servers
• 2 sessions just on compliance and risk management using Service Manager including one from a partner – Secure Vantage
• 1 session by our partner Intel showcasing how customers can leverage Intel vPro capabilities directly from within SCSM
• 1 session dedicated to showcasing just some of the many partner solutions that are coming to market on top of SCSM at RTM
• 2 panels covering broad topics but also including SCSM
• 5 instructor led hands on labs (that will also be available as self-paced hands on labs)

That is a LOT of content.  You could practically spend the whole week at MMS doing nothing but learning about Service Manager (and eating and sleeping occasionally of course   ).

You can see the entire session schedule filtered down to just SCSM content by going here:

http://www.mms-2010.com/public/sessions.aspx

Reminder: there is a reduced registration price of $1,725 if you register before March 24.  It goes up to $1,970 after that so hurry and register.

We hope you all can make it! 

There are even apparently people speculating and taking bets that Service Manager might announce RTM at MMS.  Now, that would be exciting!!

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.

The System Center Professional User Group of Jacksonville will hold their 4th quarter meeting on November 19, 2008 at 6:30 P.M.  It will take place at New Horizons Learning Center, 7020 A.C Skinner Parkway Suite #180, Jacksonville, FL, 32256.
 
A meet and greet period is scheduled for 6:30 to 7:30 with food and drinks provided.  This will be followed by a presentation from sponsor SecureVantage Technologies entitled “Security Auditing with System Center Operations Manager and the Audit Collection Service.”  All System Center Professionals in North Florida are invited.
 
SPUGJax was created to connect I.T. professionals working in the Microsoft System Center ecosystem with products such as SMS, SCCM, MOM, SCOM, Microsoft virtualization technologies, SoftGrid and the many third-party tools that support System Center.
 
Please forward this post along to anyone you know working with Microsoft server applications.  Thank you.
 
A special thanks to all of those that attended the first meeting.  It was a great success.  1E, Inc. presented their suite of applications and provided sandwiches, drinks, sides and cookies by Jason’s Deli.
 
 
Respectfully yours,
 
Dan Taylor and Ivan Lindenfeld
http://spugjax.tech.officelive.com