Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012

Microsoft have demonstrated here at MMS 2011 today, some of the new features built into their new System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2012 offering.

Some brief highlights are:

• Full integration from the AviCode aquisition for monitoring and deep insights into Microsoft .NET and J2EE applications for maximum availability and performance

• New dashboarding for better service level agreement tracking and native SCOM graphics

• Network monitoring built in as standard

Microsoft System Center Advisor - Codename Atlanta

Microsoft VP Brad Anderson announced yet another new tool to assist datacenter administrators with the management of their infrastructure.

The new System Center Advisor tool  - previously codenamed 'Atlanta' is a secure cloud service that proactivley monitors your Microsoft Server deployments with a configuration assistant that utilises the full input of 90,000 Microsoft tech support staff who are contributing on a daily basis to the knowledge base that this product relys on.

It installs a low end agent onto your server and runs very similar to the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzers and provides links to support kb's and hotfixes based around recommendations that it thinks are needed to optimize your servers.

You can download this utility from the link below:

https://www.microsoftatlanta.com/

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012

It was announced today that the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 application is availble for beta download right now.

The new edition of VMM 2012 allows for a far more seamless integration of Self Service management and VM provisioning. A big positive from this is the fact that VMM 2012 now adds support for the Citrix XenServer Hypervisor making it a true cross-platform Hypervisor management tool.

SCVMM 2012 now supports bare metal provisioning of Hyper-V hosts using IPMI, DCMI, SMASH and custom provisioning which means in essence that you can now deploy a new hyper v host using SCVMM templates and the HP ILO for example, that will build the O/S, add it to your cluster and even install a SCOM agent using the pre-built SCVMM template in your library.

Cluster storage management is now possible too and you no longer need to exclusively use Failover Cluster Manager to manage your LUN's.
You can download the beta from this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/try-it.aspx#down

Microsoft Codename Concero

I had heard this product name a few weeks back from a blog post online and was intruged by the possibilities of this new cloud management solution.

During his keynote speech this morning, Microsoft VP Brad Anderson spoke about and demonstrated the new private and public self service portal that will really put it up to VMWare in the battle for systems and cloud management.

Concero allows administrators to manage multiple private and public clouds while provisioning virtual machines and services to individual business units. Using Concero with the newly announced System Center 2012 products, datacenter administrators will be able to provision not only virtual machine OS deployments, but leveraging App-V, you will be able to deploy and manage down to the application level thus minimising the amount of VHD template's that are stored in the library.

Microsoft System Center 2012

Microsoft Vice President Brad Anderson made some really cool announcements this morning during his keynote speach (it could have been a little later than an 08:30 start - we are in Vegas and most people are still either in bed or out partying!).

He announced the new version of Microsoft System Center 2012 which will include brand new updates of all of the existing System Center products over the next year along with some new products to complement the management suite.

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator

It's official - Microsoft have announced (what most of us knew already!) at MMS 2011 that Opalis will be renamed 'Microsoft System Center Orchestrator'.

I'll post more on this as I go through some of the sessions.

MMS 2011 - Las Vegas

Well, finally after 15 hours travelling -7.5 hours from Dublin to Philadelphia, 2 hour stop in Philly and then a 5.5 hour flight to Vegas - I've arrived in my hotel and am going through the full motions of jet lag!!

Went to sleep at 10.30 p.m. local time (around 04.30 a.m. Irish Time) and woke up bright eyed and bushytailed at 04.00 a.m. local time (11.00 a.m. Irish Time)!! My body still thinks it's back in Ireland and I think it's gonna take me a couple of days to get back on track!

The flight from Dublin was like an endurance test but the flight from Philadelphia to Vegas was quite interesting. I got talking to a really nice guy sitting beside me on the plane and it turns out he's going to be one of the presenters over in MMS 2011 and he had some really cool stuff to talk about during our 5 and a half hour flight! He confirmed what we were hoping for in OpsMgr 2012 that it would have much better dashboarding and reporting capabilities and also some really cool new features that I'll wait to blog about once I've attended the sessions during the week.

I also got to see some slides based around AviCode and that's another session I'm looking forward to seeing over the next few days.

There is a lot of buzz building over here too based around the new System Center offering codenamed Microsoft 'Concero'. It's a cloud management portal that will allow customers to manage both on premises Hyper V and SCVMM implementations in tandem with off premises services running on Azure and Azure appliances.

So, I have it all to look forward to over the next week, I'll keep the blog updated with all the new products and features as I hear about them!