The exhibition hall isn’t open so here I am. Much of what’s discussed is old technology but it’s good to get it all as one message – a nice refresher. I’ve either deployed already or am doing it in the next couple of months.
Jeff Wettlaufer and Sacha Dawes from MS speaking. The two big complaints they hear about is space and power management. True enough – I can relate to that.
- 2/3 of enterprises increasing data centre budget.
- 82% of data centres track SLA’s
- Data centres to consume 2% of USA power by 2009
- 42% of data centres to exceed power capacity in 12 to 24 monts
- 66% of data centres have already deployed virtualisation.
- 81% of customers doing server consolidation in net 2 years.
- 50% of European and USA enterprises adopted ITIL.
- 10% of IT budgets for compliance.
System Center can assist with some of this:
- Configuration management
- End to end monitoring
- Server compliance
- Data protection and recovery
There’s too much time being spent in the presentation telling us what we already know – the pain points in the data centre. It’s very repetitive.
Planning
The first step in deployment is modelling, i.e. System Center Capacity Planning. It’s limited to SCOM and Exchange still. Has been for years unfortunately. That’s a powerful tool that should be more widely adopted by MS, e.g. Hyper-V. We get a demo of Capacity Planner for OpsMgr 2007. SCCP is a free download and having used it for Exchange 2007 I’d say it’s a bit clunky to use but well worth getting used to because it’s a powerful estimation tool for hardware specification and Exchange deployment. There’s not too many of us who really need to use it for OpsMgr 2007 to be honest.
Deployment
Use System Center to deploy operating systems. Same for Vista as for W2008. Same for XP as for W2003. You’ve got MDT, WDS or ConfigMgr. Can also use these deployment tools for VM’s – better to use System Center VMM for template deployment.
Multicast was added in WDS – that’s the built into Windows Server imaging solution. BTW, it’s very disk efficient on the WD server. It’s creates file based images and uses single instance storage across images… hence a file is stored once on the server. Ghost is sector based so you can’t do this. But, WDS is limited to NTFS file systems.
Leverages "panther" the new installation routive introduced in Vista. Steep learning curve but well worth doing. If you’re here, talk to Rhonda Layfield in "Ask The Experts": she’s the queen of this stuff.
W2008 configuration is very easy to script and hence can be automated 100% using SCCM task sequences or by using an unattend script which runs after install using WDS. Check my Server Manager document. SCCM task sequences was the big coding project in the last release. You know what that means: it’s going to be leveraged more in the future. It lives on top of WDS so you’re using WIM images just like WDS, ImageX, MDT, BDD, etc. Task sequences also allow you to deploy BitLocker and configure it via the wizard. Useful for branch office W2008 servers in insecure locations.
Update Management
Deploy via WSUS. ConfigMgr allows you to set up scheduled and recurring maintenance windows for reboots and integrates with the OpsMgr 2007 agent to avoid unnecessary alerts. Check my blog for a scripted solution for WSUS and OpsMgr maintenance mode. ConfigMgr allows integration with W2008 Network Access Protection to ensure compliance. Advanced reporting on compliance and updates. Desired Configuration Management can highlight absolutely critical updates not being installed with a tiny bit of customisation.
Consolidation = Virtualisation
Use OpsMgr 2007 and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 via PRO connector to audit potential hosts and VM’s. ConfigMgr can audit hardware specs for potential hosts. VMM is recommended if you run a few Hyper-V hosts and can also manage ESX … obviously so you can migrate to Hyper-V 😉 PRO connector also allows rating and recommendations of which hosts to best deploy a VM on using a simple star rating mechanism. ESX admins using Virtual Center will find it familiar to use.
End-End Monitoring
OpsMgr 2007 can monitor everything it can discover and offer best practice guidance. It monitors everything from hardware to application and all points between, including the Hyper-V hypervisor. Health, performance including in this section. I can confirm from experience that it really works. It can ID failing hardware (HP written free Proliant management pack) before the hardware fails. I’ve replaced RAM proactively before it totally failed in the past. MS bringing in Linux/UNIX support natively using cross platform extensions. You can model "services" (ITIL point of view) using components: network devices, servers, disks, functions, synthetic session monitoring, etc. If anything in the model fails – the owner of the "service" knows and can easily drill down to ID the issue. SLA monitoring can sit on top of this. Lots of reports on granular or SLA detail. You can model your security to control access to the service (admin or operator or read only operator). You can have granular control, e.g. monitored object classes, e.g. SQL, or a set of servers so: a DBA can monitor all SQL servers or an application owner can monitor all equipment that runs their "service". This all uses management packs written by the vendors of the monitored products, e.g. HP, Dell, Citrix, MS development teams, etc. There are 3rd party management packs and you can author your own (a true black art).
Compliance
Two products. ConfigMgr Desired Configuration management allows you to define templates of what compliance is for your servers/applications. You can author your own or download ones, e.g. SOX, HIPPA, EU data protection, for MS products.
OpsMgr Audit Collection Services sucks security log entries up in "near realtime" into a central database. You can secure this so administrators have no access and only security officers/auditors have access. You can run reports on all this stuff, e.g. who logged on using privileged accounts, where, when and what did they do.
Service Manager (probably end of 2009 or early 2010 – it keeps slipping) will tie the tools and their databases together. It’s a work allocation tool – more than just a helpdesk. Work allocation doesn’t mean more work for engineers – it can be allocation to automation solutions.
A new term: "configuration drift". This is a measure of how far your services move away from desired configuration over time.
Release Dates: Config Mgr V3: 2010. DPM V3 2010. OpsMgr R2 2009. Service Manager V1 2010. Ops Mgr V4 2010.