MS is hosting "TechEd North America IT Professionals" (what we call "IT Forum Pro") from June 10th until 13th. It’s a huge event and is often the location where huge announcements are made. There’s a few things we’re expecting soon:
- System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2.
- Hyper-V.
We were promised that Hyper-V would be launched within 90 days of W2008’s launch. Apparently, they are ahead of schedule and there’s a whirlwind of rumours that MS will launch it next week.
I’ll be installing a "production" lab environment based on Hyper-V later this week on a HP DL380 G5 so I’ll try to blog my experiences with it as things move along.
I’ll continue to blog about my W2008 experiences. Our first W2008 DC is running nicely. I’m planning replacing our original W2003 DC ASAP. It was put in place by a 3 sided consultancy firm before my time with the company. This consulting firm SUCKS! 9GB C: partitions might have been OK 10 years ago but they have been a bad idea for more than 5 years now. Plus I found so many other things wrong with the DC, it’s just gotta be rebuilt – and rebuilt with W2008 x64!
I’m also getting to the point where I need to deploy Windows Deployment Services. I’m going to be deploying lots of servers in our network in the coming months and I want standardisation and speedy deployments. WDS is the way forward because it’s relatively easy and it’s free. I’ve already got a machine selected: my WSUS server has a relatively light load and is perfect for this job. Eventually I might look at SCCM 2007 R2 but I can’t justify the cost of a dedicated SCCM box or the agents right now.
Still no sign of W2008 production support for the SCOM 2007 agent or a supported W2008 management pack. My gut is telling me that they might come out at the same time as Hyper-V; it just makes too much sense. Some 3rd party solutions for monitoring Linux or Cisco via an agent. Un-trusted forests are monitored via a gateway. Being able to run these as dedicated agent VM’s might be a cool solution.