Tag: System Center

Microsoft Ireland Partner Community Expert Event

I’m attending this day long event and will try to blog as I go along.

Morning Introduction

Conor Whickam, Partner Manager at Microsoft Ireland, opens the day to introduce the agenda.  This is meant to be an interactive session.  I was a bold boy at one of these this time last year so I’m shutting up.  I can hear sighs of relief.

Paul Rellis

Paul Rellis, the GM of Microsoft Ireland takes over with a keynote.  The theme is Microsoft = Productivity.  I guess this is a Business Intelligence year.  He starts talking about a famous human cannon ball called Armando?  The ringmaster was asked why he wasn’t replaced after he died.  It’s because he could find a person of the right calibre.  *Boom Boom*  MS invests in their people and “in their partners”.  MS wants partners to invest in their own staff as MS develops their staff.

The message about Azure/BPOS comes out.  Your two options are to install on premise or to install on Azure.  It’s a partner event but the hosting partners have already been had their ankles slashed.  MS needs to rethink that message.  Plenty of hosters are already pushing Linux more than Windows.  MS jacks up SPLA licensing costs (going up this year, at the end of each annual contract) while competing with their partners with aggressive sales.  CentOS and LAMP will continue to dominate the online market.

State of the Irish Market

Richard Moore now takes over to talk about the state of the Irish Market.  The opportunities include upgrade projects and end of life projects.

On the PC side:

  • 2010 will continue to see a decline until the second half of the year.  The low will be at 2005 levels.
  • Retail is continuing to take market share, growing by 10%
  • Up to 10% of national PC sales will be through the National Educational PC deal
  • Netbooks have not been as successful as predicted.  That’s because notebooks and netbooks do not have a great price differential.  However Telco’s may offer them at discount prices in combination with mobile broadband contracts.

Servers:

  • Sales down from 40,000 to 30,000
  • IDC predicts another decline in 2010.  This may level out in 2011.
  • A spike in sales (to Dell, not HP!) in 2009 was caused by the MS data centre.

Software:

  • 2009 saw a massive slowdown with 4% drop.
  • 2010 predicting a .7% increase.
  • 2011 expected to be around 3.4%

The overall levels are back to 2005 numbers.  2010 will see small decrease or a levelling out.

New opportunities

  • Exchange 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010
  • Server: upgrades and low end (continuing to sell)
  • Cloud computing

Exchange:

  • Lots of old deployments still out there.  70% of E2003 or older.
  • E2010 “offers cost savings” and productivity improvements.
  • Easier to support and maintain.
  • Access anywhere is a mature solution.
  • €15m in upgrade business out there.

Office 2010:

 

Current installation figures are:

  • Office 2007 (and Office 2010 Beta/RC) is at 30.1% of the Irish market
  • Office 2003 at 29.4%
  • Office 2000 is at 12.0%
  • Office XP 23.3%
  • Office 2000: 12%
  • Office 95/97: 1.4%
  • Other MS Office 1.2%
  • Non-MS products: 1.6%

Office and SharePoint go hand in hand and drive each others sales.

Server opportunities:

  • Windows 2000 end of life on July 13th
  • Virtualisation with Hyper-V very attractive

Server 2008 R2 Foundation:

The Irish market is dominated by small companies.  Server 2008 R2 Foundation would appear to fit in.  However, I don’t know about the fit.  The Irish SME is very happy with SBS.  EBS has been a flop here.

We now get the pitch on Forefront and how it is a future investment for partners.  Again, the Irish SME is stuck in yellow-box land.

Windows 7 Plans: 41% will be running Windows 7 by end of 2011

Now we get the BPOS talk.  See my previous posts on the Patriot Act.  Many are using BPOS as a complimentary add-on to their onsite installation.  For example, some users will use online service, IM will be used, etc.

He reckons there is a niche market for SAM (software asset management).  This is related to auditing and licensing compliance.  You’ll be as popular as a taxation auditor with IT on the customer site but you might make some money.

Partner Sales + Strategy

Karl O’Leary (Partner Sales) and Colin Cassidy (Partner Strategy and Program) now take over.

Colin says that their forecasts are usually pretty accurate.  Again, I’m asking that MS Ireland takes over running the country.  Paul Rellis does more for Irish business than our glorious leader, Brian Cowen.  And anyone who can crunch numbers anyway accurately is better than the Department of Finance. 

Some boring stuff now.  Taking a breather.

MS focusing on virtualisation and Exchange this year when it comes to the partner campaigns:

When you talk about Exchange leads to a conversation about the desktop.  That’s Office 2010.  That leads to Windows 7 and IE8.  Exchange will run on Server 2008/2008 R2.  It might be virtualised and that leads to Hyper-V.  This all needs security: ForeFront.  ForeFront is developed hand-in-hand with Exchange.  Then System Center is used to manage everything.  Don’t stop there.  Push productivity: Then you have Unified Communications (OCS) and SharePoint.  When you do OCS/Exchange then you talk about mobility, e.g. Smart Phones running Windows Mobile.  BTW, there’s something happening with Ballmer next week. 

MS Ireland going after VMware compete business with everything they have.  There is a pincer movement including HP and Dell.  Partners can choose the Bush principle: “You’re either with us or against us”.

4,000 Exchange upgrades are out there in Ireland now.  176,000 XP installations with support ending.  14,583 Windows 2000 installations with support ending.  That’s business to be had.

Partners Presenting

Gerry Kerr from CDsoft, Hyper-V and UC are their things.  Scott from Nitech are an infrastructure/dev partner working in BI.  A dude, Frasier, from Ergo as well.  They are field engineers who also say they do BI.  Oh boy, flashbacks of an awful part of the TechEd 2010 keynote.  I’m watching the doors to see if people are leaving … oh there we go 🙂

Gerry says something that I’ve been saying for over a year.  Hyper-V wins against VMware when you sell System Center, not virtualisation.  It’s the manageability that wins.

Louise Connaughton, EMEA Partner Support Group

Some stuff about what services you get as a partner.  That led into a coffee break which was sorely needed.

The Office / SharePoint Launch Wave

The 3 pillars of the combined solution are:

  • Best user experience: desktop, VDI, terminal services, phone, etc.  Office will also be online.  You can “round trip” between online Office and on-site office with document fidelity.
  • IT Choice: on site or online
  • Business Platform: Office, SharePoint, Dynamics, SQL, partners like Siebel and SAP

MS claims the ribbon is responsible for users using 4 times more features in Office 2007 than they did in 2003.  The ribbon is fully deployed in Office 2010.

2010 Launch

  • Partner readiness day (sales and marketing)
  • Partner IT road show in Dublin, Belfast, Shannon and Cork – similar to the Windows 7/Server 2008 R2/Exchange 2010 launch tour
  • A v-Launch

2010 PR:

  • nWOW microsite release
  • eBook with production quality video

Patrick Herlihy Demo

Patrick is the Exchange/BI techie in MS Ireland partner sales.  He’s now doing a demo of XP/Office 2003 VS Windows 7/Office 2010.

Barry McMahon

Barry (a MS sales person – Application Platform Lead) now talks about SharePoint’s role in BI.  Excel is the most valuable client application – agreed. I worked in a company where over 50% of business data was in spreadsheets.

Three contexts of BI

  • Organisational BI: Built and maintained by IT, for use by the company
  • Team BI: Built by the team, for the team
  • Personal BI: Built by me, for use by me (Excel lives here)

Excel (PowerPivot) with SQL enables and empowers that last one.  It’s made easier by PowerPivot.  Now you have an application. (you can add something called a Slicer to allow data selectivity).  That application can be published to SharePoint.  Here’s where your MIS department will pull their hair out, worried about application/data accuracy.

Here’s the pitch for WPC10 July 11-15th in Washington DC.  MS wants your money.

Lunch

They broke us up into 4 groups for lunch so 4 different MS teams could come in to do Q&A sessions.  The first one was funny; I was a bold boy last year and we joked about it a bit.  I skipped the last one; the speaker’s voice goes through me like a rusty blade.

The rest of the day is being broken into different tracks.  I was going to skip the virtualisation track – there’s nothing I can learn about the MS line.  However, they have Citrix in and I’d like to learn what they’re up to.  Spoke to some person during the week from Citrix.  She wanted to hear my opinion on their message.  It’s now my stock answer: “Too much marketing; just tell me what the damned thing does because neither your site nor your presentations do”.  So here I am sat waiting for the virtualisation session.

I will do those sessions as different posts.

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platforms Cumulative Update 2

Microsoft released an update for OpsMgr 2007 R2 cross platform extensions last night. 

The System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Cumulative Update 2 includes System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Agent Update (KB973583) and additional bug fixes.

This updated release includes all features that were in the previous update release (KB973583) and additional fixes in this release:

Adds support for (in previous release – KB973583):

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (both 32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Zones (Whole and Sparse Zones) for all supported version of Solaris

There are a number of fixes included, all available to read on the MS download page.

Automatically Protect New VM’s on DPM 2010 and On Secondary Server

Microsoft has published some scripts via a blog to accomplish two things when backing up VM’s at the host level:

  1. Detect when new VM’s are created and back them up.
  2. Also replicate those backups to a secondary DPM server when using DPM2DPM4DR
Technorati Tags: ,,,

KB978560: VMM 2008 R2 Rollup Package

This rollup package for VMM was released by Microsoft last night.  It is made available via Windows Update.  It contains a number of fixes:

Issue 1

Consider the following scenario:

  • A user is a member of the Self-Service User role.
  • A new virtual machine is created, and the user is assigned the owner of the virtual machine.

In this scenario, the user cannot connect to the virtual machine by using the Self-Service Portal.

Issue 2

Consider the following scenario:

  • A highly available virtual machine is offline.
  • Quick Storage Migration is used to move the offline virtual machine to another storage location that is in the cluster.

In this scenario, the virtual machine does not migrate to another node that is in the cluster by using Quick Migration or Live Migration after Quick Storage Migration is used.

Issue 3

VMware virtual machines are not listed in the Virtual Machine Manager console if there are duplicate custom named tags in VMware Virtual Center.

Issue 4

Consider the following scenario:

  • A new virtual machine is created, and the owner of the virtual machine is a member of the Self-Service User role.
  • While the create virtual machine job is running, a user is added or removed from the Self-Service User role.

In this scenario, the user is not added or removed from the Self-Service User role because the create virtual machine job is running.

This rollup also includes the resolutions that are documented in the following article for a Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 hotfix rollup package KB976244.

Thanks to fellow MVP Артём Александрович Проничкин for the heads up.

Technorati Tags: ,

Data Protection Manager 2010 Release Candidate

Microsoft released the RC (pre-RTM) of System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010, Microsoft’s backup solution.  As I mentioned last week, DPM 2010 includes lots of new features to simplify backups using Microsoft’s solution.  That would be the one criticism of the MS solution; 3rd party solutions seem to make it easier for the admin.

The thing that Hyper-V administrators will be eager to get their hands on when it RTM’s is the ability to backup VM’s at the host level when the VM’s are stored on a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV).

There is a MS webcast video on DPM 2010 here.  You can download the release candidate from Connect.

Technorati Tags: ,,

System Center Essentials 2010

SCE is possibly the least known of Microsoft System Center family.  The existing 2007 version is a merger of the core components of Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007.  It is a subset and it does support fewer servers and desktops.  That’s because it is aimed at small to medium companies.  For example, SCE 2007 manages up to 30 servers.

Microsoft is updating the product.  OpsMgr has seen changes with 2007 R2 and Configuration Manager is undergoing development for an R3 release for this year.  It doesn’t end there.

Microsoft knows that SME’s are quite likely to deploy Hyper-V for virtualisation.  The number of hosts might grow.  I know one small software company that runs two hosts with dozens of VM’s.  Developers want new VM’s for test and development on a frequent basis.   That sounds like maybe VMM would be handy.  And so SCE 2010 will include functionality from VMM to manage Hyper-V.  Virtualisation typically means there will be more servers.  Therefore SCE 2010 will manage up to 50 servers.

A release candidate (test) version of SCE 2010 is available. 

  • Delivers single console monitoring and management with summary information, common tasks, alerts and reports, allowing you to quickly see and manage your IT environment.
  • Provides rapid provisioning, importation, management and live migration of virtual servers.
  • Simplifies complex management tasks like packaging and deploying software, and configuring Microsoft and third-party updates.
  • Helps quickly solve problems using integrated alerting, expert knowledge and troubleshooting for servers, PCs and IT services running in your IT environment.

I Want My Hover Car, Jet Pack and Moon Home

I’ve seen a line flying around Twitter a bunch of times over the last 24 hours saying that in the year 2012, 20% of all businesses will own no IT assets.  OK, now I’m getting visions of dodgy TV shows like the BBC’s “Tomorrow’s World” or that classic piece of Australian tomfoolery, “Beyond 2000”.  Actually maybe it’s more along the lines of Conan O’’Brien’s “In the year 2000”.

Back to the seriousness.  I work in the online business and we obviously would love more and more stuff to go online.  And it is.  Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), heck Anything-as-a-Service is all anyone is talking about and it is big business.  But 0% IT assets?

How exactly does one get onto the Net to access those services without a PC or a phone?  I’ve heard some talk about businesses allowing employees to supply their own PC.  That’s a huge change.  Massive.  You could imagine that the office network becomes no different to an Internet café.  But that will only ever happen in small businesses.  My experience says that it will not happen, certainly not in the next 2 years, to that 20% of businesses.  It might happen with a few adventurous thinking businesses but that’s it.

[shines torch] “The PC will most likely remain an IT asset for more than 99% of businesses in the year 2012” [/shines torch]

That’s an asset and a risk.  It has to be managed, protected and kept compliant.  That means anti virus, patching, software management, auditing, policy enforcement, network access protection, etc.

There is a trimmed down version of System Center Desktop Management on the way.   You can think of that as Configuration Manager Lite from the cloud.  Features include:

  • Host protection (anti-malware and Microsoft updates)
  • Desktop monitoring
  • Desktop configuration
  • IT asset management
  • Remote assistance

Larger companies may strip down the branch office and go with things like BPOS or 3rd party solutions for SasS.  But those PC’s in the branch office will continue to be managed from HQ by System Center.  Operations Manager will audit security, Configuration Manager will do all of the good desktop stuff.  Data Protection Manager might backup a couple of key computers.  I personally think 3rd parties like Iron Mountain’s Connected is the best roaming user laptop backup solution.  And Active Directory will continue to be the policy engine.  You can see how a single Hyper-V host could run the branch office systems management, e.g. VM’s that offer a Read Only Domain Controller, a local BranchCache, a local DPM presence, etc.

No matter what you do, there will be some sort of IT asset that needs to be secured, protected, managed and made compliant.  And the rumours of the PC’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Technorati Tags:

Managing SharePoint 2010 using System Center

I’ve tuned into a webcast aimed at the System Center Influencers and I’m going to try blog from it live.  Microsoft’s line is that System Center is the way to manage SharePoint because Microsoft understands the requirements.

SharePoint often started as some ad-hoc solution but grew from there to be mission critical and containing urgent business data.  Administration is complex: users, file server admins, web admins, database admins and web developers.

System Center Improves Availability:

  • DPM backs it up the way it should be.
  • Operations Manager monitors health and performance.
  • Virtualisation (VMM managed) can allow for rapid deployment with minimal footprint.

Administration

  • Configuration automates management
  • Service Desk will add more benefits

Centralised Management

This is the norm for System Center.  Centralised management with delegation is how System Center works.  For example, a Sharepoint administrator could deploy a front end server in minutes using the VMM 2008 R2 self service portal.  A quota will control sprawl but the network administrators don’t need to be as involved.

OpsMgr Management Pack

  • There is a new monitoring architecture.  There are physical and logical components where the physical entity rolls up to a logical entity.
  • Monitoring is integrated into SharePoint so the SharePoint admins can see the health in SharePoint
  • There will be a unified management pack instead of the current 2007 split management packs.  The discovery process will identify the roles installed on an agent machine and only utilise the required components.

We’re shown an OpsMgr diagram that shows the architecture of a SharePoint deployment.  If you haven’t seen these, they are hierarchical diagrams that give you a visualisation of some system, e.g. HP Blade farm, Hyper-V cluster, SharePoint farm.

The 2010 management pack allows you to monitor a particular web application in SharePoint 2010.  The management pack is more aware of what components are deployed where and the interdependencies – sorry I’m not a SharePoint guru so I’m missing some of the terminology here.

Rules administration has been simplified.  There is a view in the Monitoring pane to view the health of all rules for the SharePoint 2010 management pack.  I like this.  I’ve not seen it in any other management pack.  The SQL guys should have coffee with the SharePoint folks 🙂

Three are 300% more discoveries and 1293% more classes and 300% more monitors than in 2007.  That is a huge increase in automated knowledge being built into OpsMgr to look after SharePoint 2010.  There are 45% fewer rules.  This is a good thing because there is duplicated effort being reduced for IIS and SQL management pack to reduce noise.  Microsoft assumes you’ll install those other management packs.  approximately 150 TechNet articles are linked in the pack to guide you to fixing certain detected issues.

Data Protection Manager 2010

DPM 2010 is due out around April 2010.  It important to Hyper-V admins because it adds support for CSV.  DPM allows you to backup to disk and then optionally stream to tape.  You can also replicate one DPM server to another for

SharePoint 2003 and WSS 2.0 are backed up basically as SQL.  You need the native SP tool to complete the backup..

SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 is backed up using a SharePoint VSS writer.  Every server (web/content/config/index) gets an agent.  DPM reaches out to “the farm” and can back up everything required.

DPM is designed to know what to back up.  3rd party solutions are generic and don’t have that.  For example, a new server in the farm will be detected.  The DPM administrator needs to authorise this addition.

DPM 2010 does something similar with SharePoint 2010.  However, it is completely automated, allowing your delegated VMM administrators or Configuration Manager administrators (SharePoint administrators) to deploy VM’s or physical machines.

One of the cool things about DPM is that it doesn’t have specialised agents.  It’s using VSS writers.  That means there is 1 agent for all types of protected servers.

We get a demo now and we see the DPM administrator can just select “the farm” and back that up.  There’s no selecting of components or roles.  The speaker only sets up his destination and retention policies.

DPM 2007 is noisy, e.g. data consistency checks.  I’ve seen this when I did some lab work.  The job wizard allows you to either to perform a heal/check if a problem is found, on a scheduled basis or not at all.  This is a self healing feature.

Recoveries can be done at the farm level, an individual content (SQL) database.  SharePoint 2007 can restore a site collection, a site or a document.  This requires a recovery farm, i.e. a server, consuming resources and increasing costs.  SharePoint 2010 with DPM 2010 does not require a recovery farm.  You can directly recover an item into the production farm.  Trust me, that’s huge.

The release candidate for DPM 2010 comes out next week.

Virtualisation

  • Web role, Render Content: Virtualisation ideal
  • Query role, Process Search, Queries: Virtualisation Ideal
  • Application Role, Excel Forms Services: Virtualisation ideal
  • Index role, Crawl Index: Consider virtualisation– small amount of crawling, and drive space used to store the index (VHD = maximum 2TB, although you can go to pass through disks for more).
  • Database role: Consider virtualisation – OK for smaller farms.

My Take

My advice on top of this: Monitor everything using VMM and Operations Manager.  You soon see if something is a candidate for virtualisation or if a VM needs to be migrated to physical.

If you run everything on a Hyper-V 2008 R2 cluster then enable PRO in VMM.  Any performance issues will allow an automatic Live Migration (if you allow it) to avoid performance bottlenecks.

If you are going physical for the production environment then consider virtual for the DR site if reduced capacity is OK.  For example, your production site is backed up with DPM.  You keep a Hyper-V farm in the DR site.  Your DPM server replicates to a DR site DPM server.  During a DR you can do a restoration.  Will it work?  Who knows :)  It’s something you can test pretty cheaply with Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.  Money is tight everywhere and this might be an option.