MMS 2013 - Day 3

Day 3 (Wednesday) was for me, probably the best day yet for sessions at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013. All the sessions that I attended were delivered by System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management (SC CDM) MVP's and it's these type of sessions that normally have people talking about long after the conference is finished.

The Sessions

First up on Day 3 for me was attending an 08:30 session that was being co-presented by my fellow MVP and friend Damian Flynn. He was doing a session called "IM-B307 Early Adopters of System Center 2012 SP1" along with Microsoft's Nigel Cain. Damian and Nigel took the attendees through a number of lessons learned from their experiences in deploying System Center 2012 SP1 well before any of us had even heard of it as part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP).

Check out the session on Channel 9 from here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B307


At 10:15 we attended a session by Microsoft's Charles Joy titled "SD-B309 Orchestrating Hyper-V Replica Planned Failover with System Center 2012 SP1". Charles had an excellent demonstration on utilizing Orchestrator and Hyper-V to perform planned failover of your virtual machines. Charles has also made available over 50 Orchestrator runbooks that you can download now that form part of this session.

Have a look at it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/SD-B309


The relentless sessions just kept on coming and at 12:00 we had Cameron Fuller, Chris Ross and Jason Sandys present one called "IM-B317 Provisioning in System Center: Users, Groups, Virtual Servers, Software and More!". This session had possibly one of the most fun openings of the week and they did a role-play type intro whereby the threw down a challenge to the best method to provision different resources - either manually or automatically with System Center 2012. This session also showed us an excellent customization of the System Center 2012 Service Manager (SCSM) Self Service Portal (SSP) that surely now opens up the boundaries for what we can do with the standard (and not very cool) SharePoint Foundation SSP.

I really enjoyed this session so go check it out here for yourself:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B317

After a lunch meeting with our book publisher, we looked forward to another round of MVP driven sessions. At 14:45 it was into a session with Cameron Fuller, Gordon McKenna and Sean Roberts called "SD-B313 Effective Capacity Planning of Your Infrastructure Resources".  This was an excellent session where the highlight was when Sean started working with OLAP cubes to mine data from the SCOM datawarehouse and use it with Performance Point to generate capacity planning reports and dashboards on the fly. There was also some short slots for a number of vendors to showcase their wares around the capacity planning space.

Here's the link to see the guys in action: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/SD-B313


The last breakout session of the day was delivered by Maarten Goet and his one was called "IM-B316 Monitoring and Managing the Network and Storage Infrastructure with Operations Manager 2012". In this packed session Maarten used his excellent presentation skills to show everyone the capabilities around network and storage monitoring in SCOM 2012 SP1 whilst leveraging the SCVMM 2012 SP1 integration and management packs.

Check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B316


Once the breakout sessions ended for the day, it was time to attend some Birds of a Feather sessions with the other MVP's and Microsoft product groups. These sessions allowed the audience to ask any question they liked on System Center 2012 (excluding SCCM) and we got some really good questions with some equally good answers.

When they were finished, it was off to a meet and greet with some of my online System Center community friends and then (as you do) we went to the onsite Irish bar in the Mandalay Bay for some food and a few well deserved drinks!