A blog covering Azure, Hyper-V, Windows Server, desktop, systems management, deployment, and so on …
The Windows Server team announced that latest build of "Longhorn" CTP has started to ship. Existing beta testers already have access and it will be on MSDN and TechNet in the coming days.
I’m thinking that I need to wrap up my work with CM 2007 asap to get working on this. There’s some new functionality that sounds really exciting and I could have made great use of it back in 2003 when I designed and deployed a multi site W2003 AD across the world.
SCE 2007 RC1 has been released on Microsoft Connect for public testing. SCE is the systems management solution for small to meduim sized enterprises, comprising the core functionality of Configuration Manager 2007 (SMS v4), Operations Manager 2007 (MOM 2007) and WSUS. It is intended for organisations with less than 50 servers and less than 500 desktops/laptops.
SCE 2007 should not only be considered by those organisations but also organisations who provide outsourced IT services, e.g. you manage a customer’s IT infrastructure on site or you host a small to medium infrastructure for a client. SCE 2007 can be cross certified with OM 2007 so that it forwards events to a central OM 2007 server. You can then monitor the health of all of your clients using a single OM 2007 console from the warmth and safety of your own network. You can then respond to events as they happen, often before the customer or client even knows there is a problem. Microsoft has a Managed Services Program where further information on this solution can be obtained.
New functionality included in the RC1 release includes:
There is no upgrade from Beta builds to RC1. You will have to uninstall and reinstall.
I’ve just written another whitepaper on System Center Configuration Manager. This time its focusing on how to manage software using the product. My next whitepaper will probably focus on using CM 2007 for software updates.
Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (CM 2007) is the successor to SMS 2003/2003 R2. CM 2007 allows administrators to manage the deployment of PC’s, the distribution and management of software, management of software updates and to manage devices as well as many other tasks. Quite simply, it is an enterprise solution for managing the configuration of the network through the lifecycle of the network.
The first thing that people think of with SMS 2003 or CM 2007 is software distribution. It is the task that almost everyone will primarily use it for and it is often the requirement that drives the initial purchase. Software distribution and management is just a tiny bit of what CM 2007 can do but it will be the focus of this document.
I am going to show you how to distribute software, meter it’s usage, uninstall the software and report on all activities.
If you wish to read an introduction to CM 2007, it’s new features, architecture and how to deploy it, then you should read my whitepaper, “Installing Configuration Manager 2007: An Introduction to System Center Configuration Manager 2007”.
This document is based on the Beta 1 Refresh build of CM 2007. Much of the documentation and the user interface still refer to the product as SMS. This is likely to be rectified before the release to manufacturing.
The document continues …
This document will be located on a free website until the weekend. This might place a cap on downloads.
Microsoft Press announced that all of the free deployment tools for Vista are now available:
A new version of the Virtual Server 2005 management pack for MOM 2005 has been released. Support for SQL 2005 reporting has been added.
This management pack will offer the following functionality to MOM 2005:
Virtual Server
Virtual Machines
Reports
The Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager for Office System 2007 has been released and is available for download. It is a group of tools designed to help administrators during the planning and testing phases of a Microsoft Office 2007 System deployment.
SQL 2005 Service Pack 2 was just released. There is added support for Vista and Office 2007 System. Features added include but are not limited to:
There much more detail on what’s new on the MS website. It’s a long list and I’ll save the virtual rain forest by not copying and pasting the entire list here.
Microsoft released the freely available Virtual PC 2007 today. A 64bit and a 32bit version can be downloaded. From the little of the beta that I saw, anyone used to the 2004 version will not have a big shock. The big change from 2004 is the added support of Windows Vista.
This product is free. I will say it again. FREE! There is absolutely no reason that anyone working in mdium to large scale IT infrastructure should not have something like this on their PC for testing:
I will admit that I am hooked to VMware snapshots so that’s the way I’ve gone. But I have happily used Virtual PC 2004 (in fact I bought it for my team the week it was initially released, way back when). Virtual Machines have saved my bacon so many times I can’t count them. In fact, every whitepaper I’ve written and every presentation I’ve given in the last year have been based on virtual machines. Go to a confenerence like IT Forum, TechEd, MMS, WinConnections and you’ll see almost nothing but VM’s on the big screens.
If you’re not using this software, do yourself a massive favour and download VPC 2007 now and see what it can do for you.
Bink posted an interesting article last week about a possible security vulnerability in WDS during client deployment. The issue is that some organisations allow ordinary non-admin users to build their own PC’s using the PXE boot and the WDS client. The machine builds but the user has no input as to what is installed and has no admin rights. But, if you press the right key sequence while the Windows PE (WDS) client is running, the user can launch command prompt with complete access on the system so they can do what they want on the system.
There’s a fix at the end of the article to dscribe how you can disable the command prompt for your boot clients in WDS. It looks like they copied this from a Microsoft KB article.
Credit: Bink
Technet Ireland have arranged an event centred on Business Intelligence using SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Office System to be held on the 7th of March in the Morrison Hotel in Dublin. It’s a day long event with some special speakers flying in from MS US:
A shocking number of people are unaware of the solutions that Microsoft Office System (Office, Infopath, Project Server, Sharepoint, etc) and SQL can provide. And these are just a small number of the products that Microsoft provides in this huge market space. I can’t claim to be an expert, far from it, because this is a huge area that requires complete dedication. Just ask the countless organisations that are spending huge budgets on SAP implementations that never seem to end.
I’ve seen people try to reinvent the wheel because they haven’t done research, e.g. a 2 man team spending 24 man-months to develop an Apache based web server that hosted queries/reports of a SQL 2000 datawarehouse … exactly what the free IIS based SQL Reporting Services does!
If obtaining, making available, reporting and analysing data is important to you then make it a point to attend this event.