MMS 2008: Keynote Highlights
Bob Muglia kicked off the annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) at the wonderful Venetian in Las Vegas by talking about Dynamic IT. Dynamic IT is about the vision that Microsoft is having for dynamic datacenters and centers around 4 key pillars; Unified & Virtualized, Service-Enabled, User-Focused and Proces-Led & Model-Driven. This vision is a 10 year effort, and Microsoft is currently at the 5-year milestone.The keynote talked about how the datacenter could evolve to a true Dynamic Datacenter. The first part into a Dynamic Datacenter is efficiently handling the physical datacenter. On top of that physical datacenter Microsoft will push the hardware virtualization aspect to gain dynamic placement of operating systems. The third layer is Application Virtualization where you separate the application for the OS layer and dynamically provide them throughout the datacenter. The last layer in Microsoft's vision is the Models. These models standardize how services can be provided and managed throughout the lifecycle. Bob used a fake company called Dinner Now to give more detail about every layer.
Michael Kelly was invited to stage to demonstrate how System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) will manage the physical datacenter layer. Kelly talked about the Sequencing possibilities in SCCM and about the partnering around SCCM with Dell. The integrated dell server deployment will provide a sequencing step to configure the hardware when Windows PE will be booted; for instance -- like RAID configuration. The beta version of this software will be available in the coming weeks on the Dell website.
Kelly also talked about the Configuration Manager 2007 R2 that will be coming out in the future. Multicast will be added to the features of SCCM to deploy multiple servers at once, while keeping the network traffic as low as possible. With this and the other SCCM OS deployment features, Microsoft forsees SCCM as the main means to provide the hardware layer with the OS layer.
Bob continued the keynote with talking about the Hardware Virtualization. He told the audience that Hyper-V will be released this summer. He also emphasized that this first release of the virtualization software will be directly competitive with ESX on a performance aspect. Bob announced the direct public availability beta of System Center VirtualiMachine Manager 2008, formerly known as VMM v.Next, which will manage Hyper-V and ESX.
Rakesh was invited to stage to demo SCVMM 2008. He demo'd showing that SCVMM integrates the managability of ESX and Hyper-V in one console. He was able to show features like supporting vMotion by ESX, Quick Migration and the Powershell support. Another features was the Library which supports storing templates. SCVMM 2008 can support HA templates which will be placed on VM clusters and cluster resources are handled accordingly.
Rakesh showed how SCVMM and SC Operations Manager will integrate. A new feature in SCVMM 2008 will be what they call "PRO Tips". This will integrate knowledge from SCOM to show what could be done to properly provision the hardware and VM layer if for instance the performance is poor.
Next, Bob talked about Application Virtualization and how Softgrid will drive this now and in the future. It separates the application layer from the OS layer and provides flexibility in deployment and placement of the application services throughout the datacenter.
The last layer that he talked about is the Models that are needed to describe the services that the datacenter. Delivers. There are four models components that Microsoft sees; Business Process Model (for the Analyst), Configuration Health Model (for the IT Pro), Application Model (for the Architected and Developer) and the Compliance Model (for the Information Worker). Something that Microsoft is calling codename "Oslo".
Bob had a big announcement that Microsoft will be supporting Cross Platforms like Linux and talked aoubt the SCOM Cross Platform Extensions. Barry Shilmover was invited to stage to demo this. He showed that the Discovery Wizard is extended to discover Linux servers and push the Linux SCOM agent. Barry said that the Linux agent is built out of Open Source components and showed an architecture diagram that displayed WS-MAN compoenents as well as OpenPegasus. Partners like Xandros and Quest are building management packs for Linux like Oracle, MySQL and Apache which were showed on stage. The public beta of Cross Platform Extensions is available right now and was handed to MMS attendees.
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