Speaking at Experts Live EU 2019 in Prague!

It's been super-quiet on this blog lately, mainly in part due to the preparation I've been putting in for conference season, which kicked off over the last month or so. This week, I get to represent Ireland while I present a few sessions at one of my favourite conferences - Experts Live Europe - which returns to Prague for a second year after a very successful event last time out.

This year's conference runs from November 20th - November 22nd and is jam-packed with great speakers and content for attendees to hang out with and enjoy.

Speakers

This year, there's 45 speakers flying in from all over the world ready to share their real-world experience and knowledge on a range of topics within the Cloud and Datacenter space. The speaker lineup includes Microsoft MVP's, Microsoft Regional Directors, Microsoft employees and well-known Community Champions. For the Keynote opener, Microsoft's Joey Snow and Rick Claus (aka Patch and Switch) will share their stories about how you can use your existing technology skills to future-proof your career as a Cloud-focused professional.

You can check out the full list of speakers here.

Pre-Conference Day

Following on from the success of last year's introduction of a Pre-Conference Day, this year's event will host four parallel all-day deep-dive sessions - of which, I get to co-present one with my good friend and fellow MVP Robert Hedblom. Here's the list of Pre-Conference sessions available:

• Cloud & Datacenter Management with Microsoft System Center & Windows Server 2019 (delivered by Microsoft MVP's Kevin Greene and Robert Hedblom)
• Microsoft Security lighthouse - how enterprise environments can protect against threats (delivered by Microsoft MVP's Maarten Goet and Alexander Benoit)
• Productivity happens in the cloud: mastering the modern workplace for enterprises (delivered by Microsoft MVP's Jan Ketil Skanke and Ståle Hansen)
• Azure initialization from zero to hero: onboarding, governance & resources deployment (delivered by Microsoft's Phoummala Schmitt and Microsoft MVP Michael Rueefli)

Each of the pre-conference day instructors are highly skilled experts in their chosen fields and well-placed to set you on your learning journey over the full day.

Tracks

The main conference gives attendees 6 parallel tracks to choose from. With over 70 breakout sessions, plenty of community theater sessions and a packed exhibitor area, this conference has you covered for what you need to take your career to the next level.

My Sessions

On Wednesday at the Pre-Conference Day, I get to talk for a whole six hours with my good friend Robert Hedblom on 'Cloud & Datacenter Management with Microsoft System Center & Windows Server 2019'. Here's a description of what we'll cover:

"If like most businesses, you're responsible for managing and monitoring a combination of on-premises and cloud-based workloads, then this pre-conf session will equip you with the tools and real-world knowledge you need to keep things running smoothly. You'll get a run-through of all the new capabilities of System Center 2019 along with an overview of the new Azure-attach features in Windows Server 2019. We'll close out the day with a 'Notes from the Field' section - where we'll share our real-world experiences of managing hybrid cloud environments with System Center, Azure and Windows Server."

Following on from the announcements at this month's Microsoft Ignite conference, we'll also be giving attendees a sneak peek of the new Azure Arc service and we'll show how you can use it to manage your on-prem and cloud-based servers.

Later in the week (Friday morning), I'll be flying solo and presenting a session titled 'Getting Started with Azure Monitor'. Here's the description about this one:

"In this session, we'll take you on a journey around Azure Monitor - Microsoft's one-stop-shop for metrics, logs, alerts and telemetry data across your Azure resources. You'll also learn how to make good use of advanced monitoring integrations such as Application Insights, Virtual Machine Insights, Container Insights and Log Analytics."


Getting Registered

There's still some time left to get registered and if you haven't already, then check out the registration link here.


If you're attending, make sure to come over and say hello to me and some of the other presenters during the conference. See you all there!

Renewed as an MVP for 2019 - 2020!

For all Microsoft MVP's around the world, yesterday (1st July aka 'F5 Day') was the day that we all receive notification as to whether or not we've been renewed as MVP's for another year. Thankfully someone in Microsoft thinks I'm doing a good job for the community and I was happy to see my inbox lighting up with the all-important email stating I'd been renewed as a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP for 2019 - 2020!

I was awarded my first MVP (in the System Center category) in 2012 and no matter how long you're in the program, it's always a welcome relief to see that email land with confirmation that you're good to go for another year.

With many of my MVP peers moving over to the Azure specialty, the Cloud and Datacenter Management category that my award relates to gives me a unique opportunity to work on and present content to the community and my customers across the hybrid-cloud space. This category covers many on-premises management technologies (including SCOM 2019, which is still very much alive and kicking with our customers) and it also includes Azure management technologies and services such as Azure Monitor, Azure Governance, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Migrate etc.

Through the MVP program, I also get to network and hang out with some very smart people across many different technical spectrum's and I'm very lucky to work for an employer (Ergo) that supports me and my colleagues on this journey (we also have two other MVP's working here!).

In the past year, I've kept myself busy in the community by presenting at events such as Experts Live Europe, the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany, the Global Azure Bootcamp and the Microsoft Tech Summit. I've also managed to squeeze in the time to complete the authoring process with some awesome MVP friends on our recently released 'Inside Azure Management' book.

Hopefully this coming year as an MVP will help me bring more of these contributions to the wider community!

SCOM 2019 Prerequisites Script

I've recently been involved in deploying some new SCOM 2019 environments for our customers and I thought it'd be a good time to publish an updated version of my original SCOM Prerequisites PowerShell script.

This SCOM prerequisites script is a lot simpler than my previous one and I've updated it to remove the requirement for .NET 3.5 Framework components as well as grabbing the new download locations for the updated versions of SQLSysClrTypes and Report Viewer.

If you have internet connectivity, the script will automatically download and install the SQLSysClrTypes and Report Viewer files from Microsoft's download site.

I've created two scripts to assist you (specific to the SCOM role you're deploying) and you can download them directly from my GitHub repo here:

https://github.com/kgreeneit/scom/tree/main/SCOM-2019/prereq-scripts


Enjoy!

Presenting at CDC 2019 in Germany

Next week, I have another opportunity to head over to Germany and visit the lovely town of Hanau just outside Frankfurt - where I'll be presenting a session at the awesome Cloud & Datacenter (CDC) conference organised by my good friend and well-known MVP Carsten Rachfal.

I had a great time presenting over there last year and attendees at the conference were treated to sessions from some of the best cloud and datacenter-focused speakers from around the world.

This years event is being held at the same venue (Congress Park Hanau) and with over forty speakers announced, it's going to be another excellent few days of learning and networking.

Similar to last year, CDC 2019 will run over two days (21st & 22nd May) and span six different tracks with topics covering on-premises technologies such as Windows Server, Hyper-V and System Center along with cloud-based technologies such as Azure, AWS and Office 365.

I'll be presenting on Tuesday in Track 3 and I'll be going back to my System Center roots with a session titled 'Top Tips to Make Your SCOM Deployments Rock!'

Here's an overview of what I'll be talking about on the day:

SCOM can be a complex product to deploy and configure. In this session, we share our top tips and tricks to ensure your deployments and initial administration run smoothly and without issue. You’ll also learn about some of the new features to watch out for with the latest release of SCOM 2019.

If you haven't done so already, you can grab your ticket to attend CDC Germany 2019 here and I'll look forward to seeing some of you guys and girls over there! 😊

Presenting at the Global Online Azure Bootcamp 2019

For the last number of years, the Azure community has come together on a single day to host simultaneous Bootcamp events across the globe - with the single goal of sharing our knowledge about what's new and cool with Azure.

I've presented at a number of these previous events - usually hosted in our local Microsoft office here in Ireland but this year unfortunately, we had some issues retaining an onsite location. After some brainstorming and hurried negotiations while at the MVP Summit in Seattle last month, my good friend and Irish Azure MVP Aidan Finn somehow managed to pull together a massive 24-hour online-only event - with sessions submitted from presenters all over the world and available to anyone who has access to an internet connection!

At 15:00 GMT, I'll be presenting a session titled 'Getting Started with Azure Monitor' and in it, I'll help you get familiar with some of the key features Azure Monitor and it's associated services have to offer.

To make this a truly global 24-hour event, each session will be made available on a phased basis via our YouTube channel and they'll only be accessible for the weekend of the event (so make sure to put aside some time to view the ones you'd like to see).

The agenda will follow these three primary time-zone cycles:

• Perth / Beijing: AWST / Beijing Time which is +8 hours from GMT and +16 hours from PST.
• Dublin / London: GMT, which is -8 hours from AWST / Beijing Time and +8 hours from PST.
• Seattle / Los Angeles: PST, which is -16 hours from AWST / Beijing Time and -8 hours from GMT.

If you want to learn more about the Global Online Azure Bootcamp, then check out the official blog here - https://globalonlineazurebootcamp.wordpress.com/

Also, keep an eye on all the usual social media channels for the #GlobalAzureOnline tag and make sure to ping any questions you might have for the presenters with this.

Just Released: Inside Azure Management Book

I'm happy to announce that we're ready to publish our new book titled 'Inside Azure Management'.

Our hope for this book is that it will become the market leader in the Azure Management space and when you consider the team of authors and technical reviewers that are involved, this should be easily achievable!

I had an epic time working on this book and it was a pleasure to collaborate again with my good friends and co-authors Stanislav Zhelyazkov, Tao Yang, Anders Bengtsson and Pete Zerger.

Pete was the 'ringmaster' who kept us all organised and on-track with deadlines and we were supported by the valued insights of the following technical-ninja reviewers:

• Billy York
• Ryan Irujo
• Janaka Rangama
• Adin Ermie
• Ravi Yadav

This book is a complete re-write from it's predecessor (Inside the Operations Management Suite) and the goal is to bring our readers on a journey through the sometimes complex and always awesome Azure Management technology stack of services.

In the cloud game, it's nearly impossible to know everything about everything and I definitely learned some new tricks as I read through the chapters that my co-authors worked on. The chapters I wrote focused on Azure Migration, Azure Infrastructure Monitoring and Azure Disaster Recovery.

Here's the full list of topics we've covered across the book:

• Implementing Governance in Azure
• Migrating Workloads in Azure
• Configuring Data Sources for Azure Log Analytics
• Monitoring Applications
• Monitoring Infrastructure
• Alerting and Notification
• Monitoring Databases in Azure
• Monitoring Containers in Azure
• Implementing Process Automation
• Implementing Configuration Management
• Monitoring Security-Related Configuration
• Data Backup for Azure Workloads
• Implementing a Disaster Recovery Strategy
• Update Management for VMs

All of the authors and technical reviewers are strong advocates in the Azure Management community and to give something back, we've decided to release this book as a free download to anyone who wants it.

You can grab your free copy of the book from the Technet Gallery here:

http://tinyurl.com/InsideAzureManagement


Please report errata to insidemscloud@outlook.com and we'll work through any feedback we receive there.

System Center 2019 is now Generally Available!

Following on from last weeks post, Microsoft has just announced the General Availability release of System Center 2019.

This release is part of the long term servicing channel (LTSC) license model and comes with a support bandwidth of 10 years.

With full support for Windows Server 2019 across the stack, here's some of the additional capabilities that you get with System Center 2019:

• VMM integration with Azure Update Management for simplified patching of virtual machines.
• Better SCOM integration with Azure services such as Service Map to create automatic Distributed Application models based on server dependencies.
• Azure Management Pack brings comprehensive alert and performance metrics from Azure resources into SCOM.
• Along with a modernized and extensible SCOM full HTML web console, subscriptions and notifications are now modernized with support for HTML based email.
• Maintenance schedules in SCOM with SQL server AlwaysOn are now supported.
• SCOM Update and Recommendations feature for Linux workloads enables discovery of up-to-date MPs for Linux environments.
• Linux monitoring is now resilient to SCOM management server failover.
• All Windows Server Management Packs now support Windows Server 2019.
• Dynamic Storage Optimization in VMM enables higher availability of workloads.
• VMM now provides health and operational status of storage disks in Hyper Converged as well as disaggregated deployment.
• New RBAC role in VMM ensures that IT admins can be provided access commensurate with their role and no more.
• Support for latest versions of VMware in VMM (to enable migration to Hyper-V).
• Faster backups with DPM with a 75% increase in speed and a monitoring experience for key backup parameters via Log Analytics.
• DPM further supports backup of VMWare VMs including to tape.
• Orchestrator supports PowerShellv4+.
• Service Manager has an enhanced Active Directory connector.
• Support for service logon across the System Center suite aligning with security best practice.

You can get your hands on this latest release from all of the normal download channels including Volume Licensing Center, my.visualstudio.com and also the Microsoft Evaluation Center.

Enjoy!

SCOM 2019 Lands This Month and Semi-Annual Channel Is No More!

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that System Center 2019 would be made Generally Available this month (March 2019) and sandwiched into the same announcement came some interesting news about last years previously released Semi-Annual Channel licensing model.

The upcoming release of System Center 2019 is licensed as part of the traditional Long Term Services Model (LTSC) and provides the typical 5 years of standard support and 5 years of extended support that we've come to expect with previous LTSC releases.

New Features and Enhancements

Looking through the list of new features and enhancements to each of the products in the System Center 2019 suite, it's clear to see that the likes of SCOM, SCVMM and even DPM are being shown some developer love by Microsoft but the sheer lack of updates to both Orchestrator (better PowerShell support) and Service Manager (improved AD connector) should now clearly lay down a marker for where these products lie in the priority list going forward.


SCOM 2019

Here's a high-level list of all the new features and enhancements you get with SCOM 2019:

• Service Map integration with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to automatically create distributed application diagrams based on the dynamic dependency maps in Service Map.
• New Azure Management Pack allows viewing of Azure performance and alert metrics along with integration for web application monitoring in Application Insights. Also, support for monitoring more PaaS services, such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Factory, etc.
• Full HTML5 dashboards and drill down experiences in the SCOM web console.
• SCOM REST API.
• Modernized HTML email notifications.
• New alerts experience for monitor-based alerts.
• Enhanced Linux monitoring leveraging Fluentd and now is resilient to management server failovers in your Linux environments.

SCVMM 2019

Here's a high-level list of all the new features and enhancements you get with SCVMM 2019:

• VMM 2019 now includes a new role, VM administrator, which provides just enough permissions for read-only visibility into the fabric of the data center, but prevents escalation of privilege to fabric administration.
• Manage and monitor HCI deployment more efficiently.
• VMM 2019 storage optimization.
• Simplified patching of VMs by integrating with Azure Update Management.

SCDPM 2019
Here's a high-level list of all the new features and enhancements you get with SCDPM 2019:

• Improved backup performance (75 percent increase in speed).
• Monitoring experience for key backup parameters via Azure Monitor Logs.
• Backup of VMware VMs to tape.
• SharePoint 2019 and Exchange 2019 backup support.

Old vs New Release Cadence

Only as recently as the Microsoft Ignite conference last September, we saw a presentation  that planned out the release cadence of System Center for the coming year (see the following screenshot), which included a direct branch for the Semi-Annual Channel release model up to 190x.

For any of our customers that had Software Assurance on their licensing model and who needed to upgrade, our advice was to go directly to the new Semi-Annual Channel release of SCOM 1801 (and then to SCOM 1807 once that was released). The main reason for this recommendation was that this release contained loads of new features and enhancements compared to older versions and we found it to be much more stable too.

However, with this latest announcement from Microsoft about System Center 2019, if you've previously jumped onto the Semi-Annual Channel model, you'll need to ditch this and move back to the LTSC model instead.


Should You Upgrade?

You might be looking at this announcement for System Center 2019 and wondering if you should upgrade and before you do, there's a few things to consider as the new features and enhancements in this release have to be taken with a certain amount of context.

Looking at an upgrade purely from a supported workload perspective and if you're still running System Center 2012 R2 (which we find most existing System Center customers still do), then Mainstream support for this release ended in 2017 (see here).

Also, if you're running System Center 2012 R2, then the following quote from the announcement might give you some headaches if you plan on performing an in-place upgrade:

"Based on the learnings, we will start to focus our resources on innovation plans for System Center in LTSC releases and stop SAC releases. System Center 2019 will support upgrades from two prior SAC releases so customers running System Center 1801 or System Center 1807 will be able to upgrade to System Center 2019; just as System Center 2016 can be upgraded to System Center 2019."

Taking this statement as-is, I read into it that System Center 2019 won't support an in-place upgrade from System Center 2012 R2 and as such, you'll need to first go to either System Center 2016 or System Center 1801 and then up to System Center 2019 - which is essentially two upgrades that you'll need to perform and validate.

If you're OK with the fact that mainstream support has ended for System Center 2012 R2 or you're currently running System Center 2016 in your datacentre, then to be fair, the features that you get with System Center 2019 are an excellent reason to upgrade. Also, System Center 2016 was my least favourite release of the platform that I've worked with due to lack of new features and agent bugs. Wherever possible, I had recommended to our customers that they skip the 2016 release and wait for the next one!

Those of you who jumped onto SCOM 1801/1807 to take advantage of the new features and enhancements that these releases brought, will probably be disappointed to know that you have no choice but to upgrade to the SCOM 2019 LTSC release and as most of the new capabilities announced for this release were previously available through Semi-Annual Channel, then an upgrade won't bring as much value as you would have expected at this point in time.

Conclusion

For me, this announcement is kind of bittersweet. In one way, I feel that the lack of information and previous heads up about this licensing change from Microsoft could have been handled better (remember, it was only in September that they were all-in with the Semi-Annual Channel release model).

On the other hand, the fact that we're back to only having to manage and promote a single System Center release model makes life easier and Microsoft have also committed to delivering new features to LTSC through the use of regular update rollups (these were previously only used to deliver bug fixes) - which is great news.

Hopefully this announcement and change in release model won't cause too much disruption for those running SCOM 2012 R2 or the SCOM Semi-Annual Channel releases and for more information you can read the official announcement here:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2019/03/07/coming-soon-microsoft-system-center-2019/