Recordings from our Windows Server 2012 Deep Dive and Mini-MMS Event, April 22-23, Dublin

A few weeks back we delivered two days of Windows Server 2012 Deep Dive sessions out in Microsoft Ireland and I've just received a mail that the session videos are now available.

For me, I totally enjoyed listening to the other guys present and definitely learned some new tips and tricks along with gaining a better understanding of Windows Server 2012 features through the content delivered.

I did a lightning roundup of some of my favourite sessions that were presented at MMS 2013 - unfortunately I couldn't get all of the ones I wanted in there but hopefully it gives people an idea of what they can see if they go and download the videos from Channel 9.

Dave Northey has done an excellent job in co-ordinating the event and overseeing the final recording content so if you have some time to learn about some of the new enhancements that you get with Windows Server 2012, then go check out the Deep Dive videos from here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ieitpro/archive/2013/05/14/windows-server-2012-deep-dive-two-days-of-free-training.aspx

Windows Server 2012 Deep Dive and Mini-MMS Event, April 22-23, Dublin

If you want to get some excellent FREE Windows Server 2012 deep-dive training and are based in Ireland, then get yourself registered with Microsoft Ireland for this two day event kicking off on Monday 22nd April until Tuesday 23rd.

The event sessions will be delivered by Microsoft Premier Field Engineers and MVP's alike. I'll be doing a session on Tuesday rounding up my best bits of the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 that was held last week in Las Vegas but before that, you'll be treated to sessions on Storage, Networking, Active Directory and Hyper-V (this one's delivered by 'Mr Hyper-V' Aidan Finn so you definitely want to hear what he has to say).

Check out this link for registration info but make sure you get your name down quickly as there's only a small number of places left:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ieitpro/archive/2013/04/19/windows-server-2012-training-in-dublin.aspx

Enjoy and hopefully I'll see you there!

MMS 2013 - Day 4 and Wrap Up

Admittedly I'm a little belated with this post (Vegas does that to you when you spend a week there!), however it's worth wrapping up what we did for the final days at the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 (MMS) over in the Mandalay Bay Resort, LV last week and giving people some references to the sessions that we attended.

The Sessions

Day 4 (Thursday) was another jam packed day of back-to-back sessions that kicked off with Microsoft's Vlad Joanovic presenting a session called "WS-B318 Manage and Monitor Your Windows Azure Usage From System Center 2012 SP1". In this session, Vlad walked through some scenario's about how to best use System Center 2012 SP1 to monitor and manage your Azure workloads from on-premise. Admirably, Vlad ran nearly all his demo's directly from Azure and thankfully on the day, he didn't get hit with the internet connectivity problems that were prevalent and an unfortunate feature of MMS 2013 throughout the week. As a side note to that though, it's a credit to Vlad's presentation skills that 6 minutes into his session, the fire alarm starting going off in the building and even with the automated voiceover alert from the fire alarm and the strobe lights too, he just kept on ploughing through without even a pause!

Check out this session on Channel 9 from here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B318


At 10:15, myself and Damian Flynn attended the "IM-B203 Building UI Add–Ins For System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager" session delivered by Microsoft's Jonobie Ford. This was an interesting presentation that delved into the 'not too widely known' world of SCVMM 2012 console add-ins. The demo showed a neat use case for example add-ins for Cisco UCS and HP Insight Control. This add-in delivered integration of Cisco UCS and HP Insight Control directly into the SCVMM 2012 console. As the company I work for are a HP partner, the latter example was definitely of interest and something that I think we can definitely look at deploying as a value-add to our customers.

Have a look at the session here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B203

Podcasting Again

Before the next session kicked off at 12:00 PM, I took a walk over to the Expo Hall where the vendors where located and came across Dan Kregor and his cronies recording another version of the Inside Podcast Network. Before I knew it, I had a microphone in front of me and I was joining in the discussion and banter with well known System Center guru's David Allen, Matthew Long, Mickey Gousett, Cameron Fuller, Christian Booth and Mike Resseler. We had so much fun on there that I ended up missing the next session and heading straight into lunch instead!

Check out all three of the MMS 2013 IPN podcasts here:

http://systemcenterpodcast.libsyn.com/ipn-special-mms-2013-day-2

http://systemcenterpodcast.libsyn.com/ipn-special-4-mms-2013-day-3

http://systemcenterpodcast.libsyn.com/ipn-special-5-mms-2013-day-4-free-food-and-boobs


Back to the Sessions

The penultimate session of the day for me was to attend "AM-B306 DevOps: Azure Monitoring & Authoring Updates for Operations Manager 2012 SP1" delivered by Microsoft's Daniele Muscetta, Marcin Jastrzebski and Brian Wren. These guys are at the pinnacle of SCOM management pack authoring and even though I'd already seen several 'DevOps' sessions during the week, I had to attend this one to see them do their thing. In this session, we were treated to a demo of the new Management Pack for Azure Fabric. This MP is a massive improvement on the older Azure one and should fill the gap nicely for those of you looking to dip your toe into Azure monitoring over the coming months. I particularly like the new Distributed Application template that comes out-of-the-box with this MP. We also had a run through on using the Visual Studio Authoring Extensions (VSAE) to author SCOM management packs and this again was interesting as it's the engine that Microsoft is pushing us to as the main authoring tool for SCOM - no more Authoring Console like in SCOM 2007.

Have a look at the full session here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/AM-B306

At 16:30, I attended what was to be my final session of MMS 2013. With so little sessions available the next day (Friday) and minimal time left in Vegas before we went home, we had made a decision to use the Friday for sightseeing and shopping. This session was titled "IM-B310 Troubleshooting Common System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager Issues" and was presented by Microsoft's John Messec , Amit Virmani, Kurt Scherer and Madhu Jujare. Here, they covered different troubleshooting scenarios and walked us through such things as ETW tracing, and troubleshooting Software Defined Networking (SDN).

Check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B310


The MMS 2013 Closing Party

On Thursday night, we had the MMS 2013 closing party which was held in XS Night Club at the Wynn Resort and Casino. The venue for this event was really nice and we set ourselves up nicely outside beside the pool bar early in the evening.

With this years venue and last years one being held in the Paris Hotel and Casino, Microsoft have really raised the bar in terms of closing parties. Let's hope that they keep this standard up for any future System Center conferences as most people I spoke to that attended said they had a great time.

Final Day Sightseeing

A trip to Las Vegas is never complete without doing a bit of sightseeing and as mentioned earlier, we chose to not attend any of the sessions on the Friday (there were only sessions up until 11am) and instead go sightseeing. Myself, my Irish buddy John McCabe (Microsoft Senior PFE), his boss José and Didier Van Hoye (Virtual Machine MVP and Storage legend!) all headed to downtown Vegas to check out the Stratosphere Hotel. This is one of the highest points in town and a must-visit spot for picture taking.

We then hit the Cheesecake Factory in the massive Caesars Palace Hotel for some dinner

Before then walking/trekking up the strip to check out the dancing water fountains of the Bellagio - another truly amazing sight of Vegas

Finally, our last stop of the week was back at Rí Rá Irish Bar in the Mandalay Bay for a well deserved one of these...

Wrapping up the week and in reflection, out of the three MMS conferences that I've attended, this one was by far my favourite and hopefully (fingers crossed) we might have another one next year!

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!

MMS 2013 - Day 2

It was another excellent day at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013 yesterday (Tuesday). This year for me, the conference is truly showing its value in terms of networking and meeting up with other members of the System Center community.

So far this week, I've resisted the urge to go crazy in Las Vegas partying and instead have been up bright and early each morning to attend the first sessions of the day which kick off at 08:30 (wonder how long that'll last....)

The Sessions

First up was a session titled "WS-B321 Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track v3: Private Cloud Reference Architecture Based on Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1". This session delved into the Microsoft Fast Track program and went through the private cloud reference architecture and where it fits in with Windows Server 2012.

You can check out the session on Channel 9 here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B321


The next session of the day for me was "WS-B329 Getting Started with Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks" which was delivered by Microsoft's David Aiken. The challenge for the presenter here was that the internet connection kept dropping off and when you're trying to demo a cloud based Azure solution, that's kind of important! To be fair though, he quickly changed over to his 'Plan B' internet and ran the demo from his phone hotspot! Once he got going, the session went into deploying VM's into Azure and was quite interesting.

Download and take a look at the session here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B329


The last session before lunch that I attended was another Azure one titled "WS-B331 Windows Azure and Active Directory".

Microsoft's David Tesar presented this one and promised that it wasn't going to be a Level 100 overview of Azure. He stayed true to his word and went into his slide deck and internet based demo's in great detail. I enjoyed this one for sure.

Have a look at it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/WS-B331


Inside Podcast Network

After lunch, I was due to attend two sessions on "How to Design and Configure Networking in VMM and Hyper-V" with my Irish sidekick John McCabe (Microsoft Ireland Senior PFE), but ended up getting asked by my MVP colleague Christian Booth to talk with himself, Marcus Oh and Dan Kregor on the Inside Podcast Network about our experiences of MMS so far. This for me is by far the highlight of MMS as I regularly listen to Dan and his cronies (guests) on their monthly podcast.

I've had a chance to take a quick listen to some of the podcast and it sounds excellent and that's a credit to Dan (and big thanks to Rod Trent of MyITForum.com) for making it happen at this years event.

If you've got some time and want to listen to us talk tech, check out the Podcast here:

http://insidepodcastnetwork.tv/ipnspecial3/

MMS 2013 - Day 1

Even though on Sunday, we had registration and a couple of sessions, the day that the keynote speech starts is the day that most people count as Day 1 here at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). This is a quick post to bring people up to speed about what went on over here yesterday (Monday 8th April) and a primer for what's going on today (Tuesday 9th April).

The Keynote

At 09:00 yesterday morning, all 5000 plus attendees were packed into the Event Center in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This was a far better room to host the Keynote speech than the ballroom that hosted it at this event in this same hotel back in 2011. When we arrived at the Event Center, we were greeted with some cool tunes from Microsoft's Joey Snow and even though there were some WiFi issues throughout that hotel at the time (for a room full of nerds, this was a Major problem!), he kept us all occupied with his choice of music.

Here's Joey warming up the crowd

The Internet being down across the hotel was a blocker for the Keynote starting at it's original time of 08:30 (all the demo's had to run with Internet connectivity) but once they got the problems sorted, Brad Anderson - Corporate Vice President of Program Management in Microsoft’s Windows Server and System Center Group (WSSC) - came onstage to do his thing.

The Keynote this year was titled "Cloud Optimize Your Business with Microsoft Management Solutions" and it a basic description of it's content taken direct from the MMS site is here:

With a set of breakthrough new products and growing industry momentum, Microsoft is transforming IT management. The new capabilities of Windows Server 2012 with System Center 2012 SP1 enable customers to build and manage elastic infrastructures while reducing complexity, improving deployment of critical applications, and advancing the consumerization of IT. In this keynote session, Brad Anderson will demonstrate how Microsoft technologies deliver new cloud capabilities, and he will showcase how customers are already realizing gains in productivity, growth, and innovation through Microsoft solutions.
 

For me, although there was no new information around any vNext content, I did think that the customer case study examples and video's (Domino's Pizza, Toyota, Sundance Institute) that they showed during the presentation were excellent and will go a long way to helping consultants like me drive our customers over onto the Microsoft platform and away from the 'other guys' in the virtualization and management space. You can view the entire Keynote on the Microsoft Channel 9 site from this link: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/KEY1 The Sessions I attended a couple of excellent sessions yesterday - one was a DevOps session based on creating web applications in Team Foundation Server (TFS), then monitoring them with SCOM and Global Service Monitor (GSM) and finally triaging problems with the web application right back into TFS through the SCOM integration and alert attachment/intellitrace management packs. Check out the session on Channel 9 here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/AM-B303 The other session I attended was called "Hacking the Data Warehouse: Mastering the Reporting Experience in System Center 2012 Operations Manager". This session was delivered by Veeam and in fairness had no sales pitch - just deep-dive technical SQL stuff to help deliver some cool reports in SCOM. It was no coincidence that a large number of the SCOM community attended this session. Check it out here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013/IM-B392  That's all for now, tomorrow I'll be attending some sessions on Windows Azure and System Center 2012 Network Virtualization and I'll post a bit more up here when I get some time. If you want quick and up to date info on what's happening this week at MMS, then get yourself onto Twitter and check out the following hashtags: #MMS2013 and #MMSFUN You can also follow me on: @kgreeneit

MMS 2013 Kicks Off - Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas

It's that time of year again when the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 kicks off in Las Vegas for a week of System Center sessions, community networking and of course a little fun (it is Vegas)!

I've been lucky enough to be able to attend MMS 2011 and also MMS 2012 and coming back here for MMS 2013, I sure feel like a veteran now! The week ahead for us attendees is packed full with sessions, instructor led labs, certification tracks and meet and greets.

Yesterday (Sunday) saw us register for the event (the registration process was a million times more efficient than last year's madness) and receive our swag which included a new laptop bag, a handy little zipper case for packing our power supplies, a pen, a 1GB USB key, a notebook, an MMS 2013 badge and a flashing necklace light which doubles up as our MMS 2013 closing party access key.

Although I'm not a huge fan of the bag this year (it's more to do with my own personal dislike for those type of laptop satchels than the actual quality of the bag itself), I've spoken with some other attendees and they're more than happy with it.

After registration there were a small number of sessions available to whet our appetite for the week ahead and myself and Damian Flynn headed into a session on "Updating 3rd Party Applications with System Center". The session was pretty cool and demonstrated how to use SCUP and SCCM to maintain your non-Microsoft applications - such as the never ending update app Java!

When we finished with that session, it was into a really cool private meeting between the attending System Center MVP's and Microsoft's Brad Anderson.

Today (Monday) is when the event kicks off fully and we have an early 08:30 start to attend the Keynote Speech before we then get stuck into the days packed schedule. If you want to see the Keynote Speech live, then make sure you're logged onto the official MMS 2013 micro-site and also the Channel 9 MMS 2013 channel. Links for both are below:

http://www.2013mms.com/

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013


I'll try to keep the blog updated over the coming days so stay tuned!

New MSFT Blog To Help Keep Your Feet On the Ground and Head In The Clouds

For the last few years everyone has been talking about 'the cloud' and what it means for their businesses. Depending on where you look or who you talk to, you may well get A LOT of different versions of what exactly 'the cloud' is.

As I work primarily in the Microsoft space, I'm really only concerned about what 'the cloud' means from their perspective and I just had to write up this blog post to tell people about a new Microsoft blog called 'In The Cloud'. This blog is headed up by non other than Microsoft's Corporate VP Brad Anderson and it's aim is to help us all understand what the cloud means from the Microsoft side and where they're going to take us with this journey.

The blog has just been launched in the last couple of weeks and already Brad has some interesting posts up there that are worth taking a look over as a taste of what's to come. I'd expect as we get closer to MMS 2013 and TechEd 2013 that there will be a plethora of great information added and if Brad and his team maintain the content here, it could well become one of the most popular blogs around on MSFT Cloud.

Along with the new blog, Brad has taken the plunge and (very bravely) joined Twitter to help get his views across and information out there. If you're on Twitter and interested in Microsoft cloud technologies, then this is an account that you'll definitely want to follow and if you're not on Twitter, then I'd recommend adding the RSS feed for the blog to your Inbox to keep right up to date.

Check out the blog and Twitter account from these links:

 'In The Cloud' (Blog)

@InTheCloudMSFT (Twitter)

Thanks to Brad and the rest of the System Center and Windows Server team for getting us access to these new resources!

MMS 2013 Content Survey Now Open

Last night Microsoft sent out an e-mail announcing their annual Content Survey request for the upcoming Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013 is open. This survey is detrimental in ensuring that the content presented at MMS is relevant to what the attendees want to see.

If you haven't registered on the MMS website and didn't receive an e-mail, you can access the Content Survey here:

https://www.2013mms.com/survey/ContentSurvey

It contains questions about the different types of technologies that you work with and what level of technical detail you would like to see those technologies presented on - Level 100 is just an entry-level overview session and Level 400 is the deep-dive technical content that most experienced techies are looking for.

MMS 2012 was held this year in April and although I had an excellent time and saw some really excellent and cool presentations, I couldn't help but feel I had seen a lot of the stuff being presented on over the previous 12 months through participation in Community Evaluation Programs (CEPs) and other online blogs and articles. Speaking with other attendees over there, this was kind of the general consensus.

I understand that not all attendees will spend nearly all of their spare time like I did learning System Center and participating in these Community driven programs but I honestly have to say that at MMS 2012, if I was running late for a particular session (it was in Vegas right..), that the decision to just give the session a miss and download it later was made easier due to the fact that I had either seen most of the stuff already or that the session was geared towards Level 100 audiences.

The fact that this year was the launch of System Center 2012 probably played a big part in the sessions that were delivered as Microsoft needed to ensure that everyone had a good understanding and overview of the products and Level 100 and Level 200 sessions are the best way to do that.

Speaking with Rod Trent and Flemming Riis last night, we all agreed that now is the time to get the right level of content and deep-dive sessions that we want presented by simply filling in the Content Survey form. If you are filling out the survey today or in the next few days (it doesn't take longer than 3 minutes), then one of the most important questions to ensure you complete is the last one about the 'General Event Questions' shown below

MMS previous attendees (alumni) should pay particular attention to this section and ensure that you use it as the forum to get your requests and points across about what you don't want to see and also what you would really love to see.

Don't be afraid to full up this section with as much suggestions as you can think of and if Microsoft get enough people suggesting the same thing, then they will definitely listen and add it to the content for next year.

So, what are you waiting for - start filling it out!

MMS 2013 Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino Las Vegas

If you work with System Center and Private Cloud technologies, then the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is the ultimate conference for you. This conference started off way back in 1998 focusing on SMS/ConfigMgr and then eventually evolving into showcasing the whole Private Cloud management suite of System Center products that we have today. In 2011, this was the first major Microsoft conference that I attended and I've been hooked on it ever since!

It's the one place where just about everyone who works in the System Center community come together to attend some excellent deep-dive sessions being presented by the Microsoft System Center product team and MVP's alike.

Last year at MMS 2012, the event was held in Las Vegas and it had been announced that MMS 2013 would be re-located to New Orleans in June 2013. Rumours started flying around about it being merged with TechEd 2013 which is normally also held in June but last night, i came across a tweet from Rod Trent of MyITForum.com that the official MMS 2012 website had been updated with some details about MMS 2013. These details confirmed that the conference would now be held the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas again (this is where it was held for MMS 2011) and would commence on the 8th of April until the 12th April - happy days :)

If you want to keep up to date with all the latest goings on for MMS 2013, then make sure you check out MyITForum.com and sign up to their MMS 2013 newsletter. Check out the link below for all the information that you need for now:

http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2012/10/08/forget-everything-you-heard-mms-2013-will-be-back-in-vegas/

I'm really looking forward to heading back there again and meeting up with all my System Center community friends. Here we go again............

MCSE Private Cloud Exam - Monitoring & Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 - Passed!

After seeing some of the other attendees of MMS 2012 updating their blog's with news that they had passed the BETA MCSE Private Cloud exams that they had tested on over in Vegas, I dreaded the worst this morning when I went to check my own results.

Before I left for Vegas back in April, I had booked myself in to sit exam number 071-246 - 'Monitoring & Operating a Private Cloud w/System Center 2012' on the Thursday. I had picked the Thursday intentionally because after attending MMS 2011 last year, I knew that the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning's would be filled with hangovers from the parties being held the nights before - I know, it's a tough life! With the MMS 2012 closing party being held on the Thursday night, I figured for sure that the Friday morning would be a no-go so Thursday afternoon seemed the best choice to sit the exam.

After attending an excellent Exam Cram session by UK System Center MVP Gordon McKenna during the day on the Wednesday  and taking it nice and easy that night with a meal and a couple of quiet drinks out with the Irish contingent (honest!), I felt I'd be ready to take the exam no problem the next day........How wrong I was!

I didn't take into account that during the day over there at around 16:00, due to the jet lag and total lack of sleep during the early part of the week, just as I was sitting the exam, my body decided it wanted to go to sleep! I spent the next two hours trying to literally keep my eyes open while doing the exam and I'm sure at one stage, the exam attendent caught me closing my eyes too!

The fact that out of a total of 60 questions on the exam, I counted 21 of them that were asked on Service Manager - which is not part of my Kung Fu just yet, I was full sure I'd failed the exam at that point and couldn't argue with the impending result.

Fast forward to this morning again and I've just found out that despite everything, I managed to pass the exam!

It turns out that I must know a little bit about System Center 2012 after all!

MMS 2012- The Lowdown

Well, that's another week in Las Vegas finished with the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2012 closing off on Friday 20th April. All the attendees have packed their bags and travelled back home - some across several different time zones - and everybody (including myself) are back to the grind of normal working life from last week.

As I didn't get around to blogging too much while in Vegas, I felt it was only right that I create a post that contains all the highlights of the conference and also add in some additional resources to get more information on the sessions that went on throughout the week.

Keynotes:

Day 1
In the keynote speech on Day 1, Brad Anderson (Corporate VP of Microsoft) made a number of announcements including the general release of System Center 2012 and the official name of their new server operating system - Windows Server 2012. This means that Windows Server 2012 will be due for release this year, with some speculation that it is due to RTM around September/October.

The new Private Cloud MCSE track was also announced and this is going to change the way people certify for Microsoft exams. If you want to achieve your Private Cloud MCSE, then you need to be up to at least MCSA on Windows Server 2008 and then pass the two new Private Cloud exams which take into account all the products within the WHOLE System Center suite. In a nutshell, you won't be easily able to double guess (or braindump) these exams and it'll definitely seperate the skilled engineer from the 'Paper MCSE' engineer that we have seen so often in the past.

As the focus for Day 1's Keynote speech was on the datacentre, we had some cool demonstrations from Ryan O'Hara and Vijay Tewari around self service provisioning using System Center Service Manager 2012 and bare metal deployment and cloud creation with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012.

Day 2
The keynote on Day 2 was titled 'A World of Connected Devices' and had a strong focus on end user device management. Significantly it was announced that Windows Intune will now support Apple iPhone/iPad and Android devices. Bill Anderson (Principal Program Manager) demonstrated the live installation of an application onto an iPhone.

Brad Anderson also talked about the new User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) feature. This comes bundled with a new version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) and it lets users retain their application experience between different Windows instances.

Along with a UE-V demonstration, we also had a demonstration on the rapid deployment of the Windows Server 2012 Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) within 60 seconds.

Finally, Brad announced that MMS 2013 would be held in June 2013 in New Orleans!

Breakout Sessions:

There were well over 150+ breakout sessions being held during the week and trying to make a choice as to which ones to attend was a nightmare! Even though we all had pre-configured our schedules before the conference, most people moved between sessions or changed their minds at the last minute due to the sheer volume of excellent technical content that was on show.

At the start of the week, the sessions were pretty much of the Level 100-Level 200 type and due to the participation of myself and a number of attendees in the excellent Community Evaluation Programs (CEPs) that led up to the conference, we had already seen and were familiar with most of the information on offer. If anything, this made us diversify our choice of session and choose sessions that covered products and solutions that were normally outside of our day to day work.

As an observation, last year at MMS 2011, it was interesting to see that the majority of attendees where Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) IT pro's and the amount of sessions dedicated to ConfigMgr was massive.

This year however, although the ConfigMgr sessions were plentiful, I noticed a large attendance in the Orchestrator and Service Manager sessions and this has to be representitive of the sway in focus towards these two technologies and the important roles they will play within future System Center deployments and designs.

This year Microsoft has opened up the Breakout Sessions to the public and they can be viewed at leisure through the new Digital MMS website.

Last year all attendee's received a DVD a few weeks after the event that contained all of the sessions and additional content. This year, due to the sessions being available for streaming online, we won't be getting a DVD in the post. If you don't like the idea of having to stream your sessions and would like to have them downloaded to your hard drive, then no problem - Stefan Roth over at SCOMFAQ.ch has created a nice and handy little PoSh script that enables you to download the entire MMS 2012 video catalog direct to your hard disk! You can get your hands on this script from the link below:

http://blog.scomfaq.ch/2012/04/21/mms-2012-download-sessions-offline-viewing/


Private Cloud BETA Exams

Along with the possibility for attendees to sit the normal Microsoft MCTS type exams, two new Private Cloud BETA exams were offered for free to any MMS 2012 attendee.

These exams were:

70-246 - Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012
70-247 - Configuring and Deploying a Private Cloud with System Center 2012

During the week, I attended an excellent Exam Cram session held by Gordon McKenna (UK based System Center Datacentre and Private Cloud MVP) and then on the Thursday I sat the 71-246 BETA exam. We don't get our results for around 8 weeks after the actual exam due to it being a BETA but I'm not holding out too much hope on having passed! I could blame the fact that I had hardly any sleep (totally my own fault) the night before and did very little preparation for the exam but in fairness, out of 60 questions asked, I counted 21 of them alone that were based on Service Manager of which so far, my real-world experience is minimal. The remaining questions took in the whole breadth of products within the System Center 2012 suite including System Center 2012 Advisor. The format of questions were also outside the norm and included a number of scenario type questions where you had to choose the correct number of steps to a problem and also the correct order in which these steps should be implemented. This new method of testing will only reinforce the need for real-world experience of the technologies being tested.

After speaking to other attendees who sat this BETA exam and the 71-247 one, we all agree that once the new MCSE Private Cloud qualifiaction becomes available to the masses, it will definitely require exposure and hands on experience for the whole suite of System Center products and it's my guess that there will be very high failure rate for those trying to aquire it. This can only be a good thing as it will increase knowledge and understanding of the suite and should go a long way to ensuring that those who do achieve MCSE status will have earned it through hard work and real-world experience.

People Networking:

For me, the week at MMS 2012 represented an excellent opportunity to link up with some old friends that I met at MMS 2011 and also to meet in person the many people that I've interacted online with via Twitter, LinkedIn and the Community Evaluation Program. The only downside though was that everyone was so busy each day/night, that we didn't all get longer to chat - however, the CEP meetup that was held on the Wednesday night was excellent and it was great to put a face to so many of the online persona's.

Out and About in Vegas:

It goes without saying that "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" but apart from the Casino crawls, the visit to The Gun Store and the numerous pubs and clubs we dropped into (on that note-why do Irish people always seem to end up in an Irish bar when abroad though?), one of the highlights of the week for me was the MMS 2012 closing party that was held in The Chateaux Nightclub. Microsoft booked out this amazing venue which is located on 3 different levels just under a replica of the Eiffel Tower and directly across from the dancing water fountains of The Bellagio. The fact that there was a free bar for 4 hours just added to the fun!

MMS 2012 Resources:

MMS doesn't just end after a week in April. Instead, it's an invaluable source of information on System Center throughout the year and the organisers, speakers, attendee's and general community churn out endless amounts of excellent blogs, tweets and resources as a result of the content they digested during the conference. Below is a list of  some of my favorite websites, blogs and twitter hashtags that are worth checking in on over the year for the most up to date System Center 2012 information that you are to find on the web:

Websites

Official MMS 2012 Site
http://www.mms-2012.com/

SystemCenterCentral.com
http://www.systemcentercentral.com/

MyITForum.com
http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/

Blogs

System Center Team Blog
http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/

Damian Flynn
http://www.damianflynn.com/

Aidan Finn
http://www.aidanfinn.com/

Kristian Nese
http://kristiannese.blogspot.com/

Dieter Wijckmans
http://scug.be/blogs/dieter/default.aspx

Christopher Keyaert
http://scug.be/blogs/christopher/

Adam Hall
http://blogs.technet.com/b/adhall/

Cameron Fuller
http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/default.aspx

Marnix Wolf
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/

Mike Resseler
http://scug.be/blogs/scdpm/

Travis Wright
http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/

Steve Beaumont
http://systemscentre.blogspot.com/

Flemming Riis
http://flemmingriis.com/


Twitter Hashtags

#mms2012, #sysctr, #systemcenter, #privcloud, #cloud,  #opsmgr, #scom, #scom2012, #scsm, #scorch, #sco, #appcontroller, #scvmm, #scvmm2012, #configmgr, #sccm, #sccm2012, #dpm, #scdpm, #scdpm2012


Hopefully you'll find this reference and brief overview of MMS 2012 useful and all going to plan, we're going to do it all again next year in New Orleans!

MMS 2012 is well and truly under way!

So, another year, another Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). Some of the great things about this conference are the quality of speakers, the opportunity to meet with your community peers and of course, the small fact that it is held in Las Vegas doesn't do it any harm either!

I'm over here this year with a decent contingent of Irish System Center enthusiasts and we are linking up with new people and friends every day as the conference progresses. I had the privilege to come over here last year for MMS 2011 and as an 'Alumni' this year they have really ramped up on the little extras for people who have previously attended. There is a closed off 'Alumni' lounge that we can hang out in which is fully stocked with refreshements, we get a really cool MMS 2012 Alumni (Nike) T-Shirt and I even got my hands on a (nerdy) "Get Your Geek On" pin badge which I'm proudly showing off pinned to my Ireland jersey today!

It's Day 2 of MMS 2012 today and this is when the first of two Keynote speeches by Brad Anderson - Microsoft Vice President takes place. Brad has just announced the General Release of System Center 2012 and highlighted the commitment of Microsoft to build and support the Private Cloud model. It was also announced that Windows Server '8' becomes Windows Server 2012 and will be released in this financial year for Microsoft.

If you want to have a look over todays Keynote or even watch tomorrow's one live, then you can access all of the keynotes and sessions from the MMS 2012 website here: http://www.mms-2012.com/

I'll try to keep the blog and my Twitter account as up to the minute as I can on the goings-on over here (only business related of course!), but if you're looking for some real-time blogging on some of the sessions, then check out Aidan Finn's blog to see what he's getting up to: http://www.aidanfinn.com/

System Center 2012 Private Cloud CEP MMS 2012 Ticket Winner!!

"Congratulations!  You have won a ticket to MMS 2012 (http://www.mms-2012.com/) through the Private Cloud Community Evaluation Program Community Contest!"

It was so nice to wake up this morning to the sight of the above email in my inbox telling me I've won a free ticket to the Microsoft Management Summit 2012 In Las Vegas as part of my participation and efforts contributing to the Microsoft System Center 2012 Private Cloud Community Evaluation Program (CEP).

This email follows hot on the heels of delivery of my Microsoft Touch Mouse that I also won from the CEP as the November winner of the contest.

 I can't think of a better technical program that I've been involved in that has such expert speakers with deep levels of technical content sessions and one that rewards participants in this way with prizes of such great nominal and educational value.

There is still some time left to go on the System Center 2012 Private Cloud CEP and you can sign up at any time from the link below:

https://connect.microsoft.com/site799/program7383

If you want to learn more about the new range of System Center 2012 products that are due to be released in the first half of this year or want to look over some of the blog posts that won me this competition, then click on any of the links below:

Installation:

Installing System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Installing System Center App Controller 2012

DPM 2012:

Upgrading System Center DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 Part 1

Upgrading System Center DPM 2010 to DPM 2012 Part 2

Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM Part 1

Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM Part 2

Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM Part 3

Cloud Management with System Center:

Cloud Management with System Center - Building a Private Cloud with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Creating a Virtual Machine Template with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Creating a Service Template with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Connecting your private cloud to System Center App Controller 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Customizing System Center App Controller 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Connecting App Controller to Azure Part 1

Cloud Management with System Center - Connecting App Controller to Azure Part 2

Cloud Management with System Center - Integrating App Controller with SCOM

SCOM 2012:

SCOM 2012 - Network Monitoring Magic!

SCOM 2012 - The All New 3 Tier Application (360) Service Template

SCOM 2012 - Creating your very own custom Distributed Application Template

SCOM 2012 - Recording a Web Browser Session

SCOM 2012 - Monitoring the System Center 2012 App Controller Website

Thanks for reading and 'Viva Las Vegas!'

System Center 2012 Private Cloud Community Evaluation Program contest winner!!

Nice to see the email last night arrive into my inbox telling me that I had won the November competition for the Microsoft System Center 2012 Private Cloud Community Evaluation Program (CEP) as a result of my blog posts on 'Cloud Management with System Center'.

There were two aspects of the prize - a brand new Microsoft Touch Mouse and entry into a draw in February for a free MMS 2012 ticket!


If you want to learn more about Cloud Management with System Center, click on the links below for my posts:

Cloud Management with System Center - Building a Private Cloud with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Creating a Virtual Machine Template with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Creating a Service Template with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Connecting your private cloud to System Center App Controller 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Customizing System Center App Controller 2012

Cloud Management with System Center - Connecting App Controller to Azure Part 1

Cloud Management with System Center - Connecting App Controller to Azure Part 2

Cloud Management with System Center - Integrating App Controller with SCOM


The System Center 2012 Private Cloud CEP is running up until February and is open to anyone who wants to sign up. Click on the link below to start learning about how System Center is changing the way we manage our cloud infrastructures:

http://connect.microsoft.com/site799/program7383


Enjoy!

Installing System Center App Controller 2012

Finally Microsoft have released the BETA of System Center App Controller (SCAC) 2012 last week and just in time for a System Center event that I’m involved in this month that I wanted to use as part of my demonstration!!

So, what is System Center App Controller 2012? It's the newest member of the System Center family and is the link needed to seamlessly connect and manage Application Self Service between both your private cloud and public cloud offerings.

When I attended MMS 2011 early this year, this product was showcased with a name of ‘Project Concero’. The demonstration that the MS guys gave of this product was amazing and with all the talk of public, private and hybrid cloud around these days, it’s the perfect time for the launch of this product.

I've just also finished an online session as part of the Microsoft Private Cloud Community Evaluation Program (CEP) and App Controller played a big part in the demos and slides and had a lot of people talking about it!

You can sign up for the Private Cloud CEP from the link below:

https://connect.microsoft.com/site799/program7383

This blog post will provide the information and steps required to install System Center App Controller 2012 into your private cloud environment and configure the link between your private cloud and Microsoft’s public cloud offering – Azure.

Firstly, see below for the hardware and software requirements needed to install SCAC 2012 as taken directly from the Microsoft website.

System Requirements—Server

This section provides information about system requirements and supported operating systems for installing and running System Center 2012 - App Controller.

Hardware Requirements

The following are the minimum and recommended hardware requirements for the App Controller server.

Hardware component	Minimum	Recommended
Processor	Pentium 4, 2 GHz (x64)	Dual-Processor, Dual-Core, 2.8 GHz (x64) or greater
RAM	1 GB	2 GB
Hard disk space	512 MB	1 GB

Note: For better performance, it's recommended that you use a version of SQL Server installed on a different system for the App Controller database. 

Software Requirements

The following software must be installed before installing App Controller.

Software Requirement	Notes
A supported operating system	For more information, see Supported Operating Systems in this topic.
Microsoft .NET Framework 4	If .NET Framework 4 is not installed (it is not installed by default), the App Controller setup wizard will install it.
Web Server (IIS)	If the Web Server (IIS) role and the following Web Server (IIS) features are not installed, the App Controller setup wizard will install them: Static Content Default Document Directory Browsing HTTP Errors ASP.NET .NET Extensibility ISAPI Extensions ISAPI Filters HTTP Logging Request Monitor Tracing Basic Authentication Windows Authentication Request Filtering Static Content Compression IIS Management Console
The VMM console feature in System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)	Only the VMM console feature is required for App Controller.
A supported version of SQL Server	For more information about supported versions of SQL Server, see Database Requirements in this topic.

To begin with, you need to build either a physical or virtual machine that meets the above requirements. The machine that I am installing onto is a virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 server on Microsoft Hyper-V. You also need to have previously installed System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 into your environment.

Once you have your new machine built and ready, you need to install the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Console onto the SCAC 2012 server. Copy the SCVMM 2012 Release Candidate media to your System Center App Controller 2012 server and then right mouse click on the 'setup.exe' file and select 'Run as Administrator' to begin the SCVMM 2012 console install.

Note: It is important that you use the SCVMM 2012 Release Candidate or higher for the SCVMM 2012 console installation as your SCAC 2012 pre-requisite check will fail. I ran into a problem in my environment where I had installed the SCVMM 2012 BETA build and the SCAC installer failed and wouldn’t go any further. The error message that came back was:

“Install a supported version of the virtual machine manager for system center 2012 console”

As there is no upgrade path from SCVMM 2012 BETA to SCVMM 2012 RC, I had to uninstall my SCVMM 2012 BETA environment and then reinstall with the later SCVMM 2012 RC (nothing wrong with this and it was a task that had to be done anyway!)

 Now click on the 'Install' option to continue

Select only the 'VMM Administrator Console' option and then click 'Next'

 Agree with the terms and conditions and click 'Next' again

 Choose the Installation Location and then click 'Next'

Leave the port configuration as it is (or change it if you wish) and click 'Next'

 Finally, click on 'Install' to begin the SCVMM 2012 RC console installation

Once this has completed, you should see the screen below showing a successful install of the console

Once the SCVMM 2012 Administrator Console has been installed, ensure that you have a pre-installed SQL 2008 instance either locally on your SCAP 2012 server or remotely on a separate SQL 2008 server.

When I’m installing System Center products, I prefer to have a standalone (preferably physical) SQL server with a separate SQL Database instance for each of the System Center products. If the System Center product has a reporting module, then I will also install a separate SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) instance for each System Center product too. This allows for easy administration and patching of your individual System Center applications without affecting anything else.

Sticking to these recommendations, I have pre-installed a new SQL 2008 R2 instance for System Center App Controller 2012 onto my physical SQL 2008 R2 server and I have used the by now ‘de facto’ standard SQL collation for all System Center products of ‘SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS’

The SCAC 2012 documentation doesn’t specify that this SQL collation be used (or any SQL collation for that matter), but as it is needed for most of the other System Center products, I’d recommend using it here too

When you have your SQL instance ready to go, click on the link below to download the System Center App Controller 2012 installation file to a location on your hard disk:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27843

Browse to the SCAC 2012 installation media, right mouse click on the 'AppController.beta' application and then select 'Run as Administrator' to begin the installation

Click on the 'Install' option from the splash screen below

The initial pre-requisite check should begin and if you don't have the .NET Framwork 4.0 installed, it will ask you if you want the installer to automatically install it now

When the .NET Framework 4.0 installation is complete, the App Controller setup will continue

Enter your product registration information and then click 'Next'

Agree with the terms of the licence agreement and then click 'Next'

Now SCAC 2012 will perform another pre-requisite check and will come back to you with a list of software that is missing and that needs to be installed. If you didn't follow the instructions above and ensure that the SCVMM 2012 Release Candidate is installed (as opposed to the BETA version), then you will see an error highlighting the SCVMM console as being an issue at this point.

Once I had installed the SCVMM 2012 RC console onto the SCAC 2012 server, the error message went away and all that was missing from the pre-requisite check was the Web Server (IIS) role. The SCAC 2012 installer will identify this as missing and will then add this role as part of the installation process.

Click ‘Install’ to kick off the missing pre-requisite installation

Once the pre-requisites are installed, the SCAC installer will continue as shown below. Select the installation location and then click 'Next'

On the Configure services page, specify the account that will be used by App Controller services. You can configure App Controller services to use either the Network Service account or a domain account.

Note: If you specify a domain account, it is strongly recommended that you create an account that is specifically designated to be used for use by App Controller services.

You can also choose the port for internal communication here too

On the Configure website page, specify the following:

• IP address: Select an IP address from the IP address list or type an IP address that users can use to access this site.

• Port: Type the port on which HTTP.sys must listen for requests made to this website. If you specify a port different from the default port (443 for HTTPS), clients must specify the port number in requests to the server or they will not connect to the Web site.

• SSL certificate: Select whether you want App Controller Setup to generate a self-signed certificate or use a previously imported certificate for SSL.

Note: To add or configure server certificates, use the Server Certificates feature in IIS Manager.
If you use a self-signed certificate, the certificate must be added to the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store of all computers that will access the App Controller website. Some browsers will fail to display App Controller if the certificate is not trusted. It is recommended that you use a certificate from a trusted certification authority instead of using a self-signed certificate.

The port that you assign during the installation of App Controller cannot be changed without uninstalling and reinstalling App Controller

On the Configure the database page, specify the following:

• Server name: Type the name of the computer that is running SQL Server. If you are installing the App Controller server on the same computer that is running SQL Server, the Server name will be prepopulated with the name of the computer.

• Port: Type the port to use for communication with the computer that is running SQL Server. By default, this value is not required and is therefore left blank.

• Instance name: Select or type the name of the instance of SQL Server to use. There will be a short delay while the instance names are populated in the list. The list of available instances may not correspond to the Port specified above.

• Database name: Type the name of the database to use. The account with which you are installing the App Controller server must have at least database owner (dbo) permissions in the specified database. If the specified database does not exist and the current user has the appropriate permissions, the App Controller setup wizard will create it for you. If you are performing a high availability installation, the second and subsequent server installs need to use the same database as the first server.

Note: Only one App Controller database can be installed per SQL Server instance

Choose whether or not to join the CEIP and also to use Microsoft Update for receiving updates within App Controller

 Confirm your selections are correct in the below screen and click on the 'Install' button

The installer should work through the components needed for App Controller

Once setup completes succesfully, ensure you have selected the 'Start the App Controller window when Setup closes' box and then click on the 'Finish' button to close the window

 If you don't have Microsoft Silverlight installed, you will be prompted to install it at this point

When the Silverlight installation is complete,enter your credentials to sign into System Center App Controller 2012

You should now see the screen below with the new System Center App Controller 2012 installation completed and you're now ready to manage your public and private cloud environments all from one window!

For further information on using System Center App Controller to manage your clouds, see my series of posts on 'Cloud Management with System Center'