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SCCM: Windows Server 2008 Roles Support
In the MMS Keynote today, Michael Kelly had an interesting demo with System Center Configuration Manager SP1. SCCM plays an important part in the Microsoft Dynamic IT. One of the goals in the demo was is to show how to deploy Windows Server 2008 fully automated and configured. By using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit integration in System Center Configuration manager this can be done easily.
One of the cool thinks that Michael Kelly showed that it is now possible to perform hardware configuration as one of the tasks in System Center Configuration Manager. Examples are: Configure the RAID configuration, BIOS Settings, Network settings.
In order for this to work your hardware vendor must supply the necessary info on how to configure these settings this way. Another feature that SCCM SP1 finally now supports is multicast. This is a feature which many customers requested for a long time. Multicast is used when to deploy a lot of machines at the same time but without overloading the network because packages are only transported ones over the network.
When adding Microsoft deployments to System Center Configuration Manager you get extra options for deploying. Thinks like configure DNS, DHCP, add services or roles is now possible.
System Center Configuration Manager SP1 now fully supports the role out of Windows server 2008. With this and the extras System Center Configuration Manager can be used even better in Enterprise environments.System Center Configuration Manager SP1 is still in beta, it is not know when the RTM is scheduled.