In the second keynote at MMS today there was a cool demo from Dave Randal on how to control hardware with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. For this to work you need the SP1 of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and the machines you want to manage need the new Intel processors with support for the new Intel Vpro technology.
This first thing that Dave showed was how to use the out of band Management console in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to control the power state of a machine. You can turn machines off and on. The second demo was even better, Dave showed how to configure the bios settings of a machine which was turned off. With the out of band Management you can do the following things:
Powering on one or many computers (for example, for maintenance on computers outside business hours).
Powering off one or many computers (for example, the operating system stops responding). (more)
In March,
Techlog wrote a story about System Center Online Services and what had happended to it.
Now, during the Microsoft Management Summit day 2 keynote, Brad Anderson had an update on the System Center Online Services strategy. He announced the beta of an
"attached service" called Attached Knowledge Services. It essentially provides services in the cloud by means of a web portal, which connects to an on-premise SCCM environment.
Features like Scorecarding, Comparison, and integrating to WS2003 and SCCM 2007 are available out of the box. The scorecarding drills into performance aspects, SLA aspects and gives a broad overview of how the IT shop is performing. While still in Technology Preview stage, TAP customers are already onboard. Brad commented later that more will be announced at IT Forum Barcelona in November of this year. In the meanwhile, check out the
exclusive screenshots:
Att. Knowl. Services: Overview
Att. Knowl. Services: SCCM Scorecard
Att. Knowl. Services: WS2003 Scorecard
Att. Knowl. Services: Comm. Comparison
Att. Knowl. Services: Side-by-Side Comparison
Att. Knowl. Services: View Hardware
Att. Knowl. Services: Tasks
Jeanie Decker, from the Operations Manager documentation team, wrote: "I'm not a gadget-y sort of person. I mean, I like gadgets, but I've grown wary of them (both offline and on) because so often they're a disappointment -- either they don't deliver or I don't really have a use for them.
But recently I saw a presentation on a gadget that delivered the exact functionality that I've wished for numerous times: the ability to search just the System Center content on TechNet. So many times I need to look for technical content, and not just the information but the information as contained in our official documentation.
And now some folks have delivered with the System Center Content Search gadget for the Vista Sidebar. I installed it last week and have had to use it numerous times already, and :::drumroll::: it delivered exactly the results I needed every time (and usually as the first hit).
System Center Content Search was
announced at MMS this week, so I waited till after the announcement to post about it (and to make sure it was worth recommending)."
System Center Content Search
During the second day keynote on the Microsoft Management Summit, Brand Anderson showed Microsoft's update on the System Center Roadmap for the coming 3 years. While noting on the current release schedules, it also contained information about the upcoming "third wave" of System Center products:
VMM: v.2007 last year, v.2008 this year and v.3 in 2010
DPM: v.2007 last year, a rollup / SP1 this year and v.3 in 2010
SCCM: v.2007 last year, SP1 and R2 this year and v.5 in 2010
SCOM: v.2007 last year, SP1 this year, SP2 in 2009 and v.4 in 2010
SvcMgr: v1 in 2010
MDM: v.2008 this year and SP1 next year
SCE: SP1 this year and v.2 next year
So it seems that Microsoft has their schedules to releasing an interim release every 1 to 1,5 years and doing the major release every 3 years. The slide clearly shows that the "third wave" of System Center products will come out in 2010. Check out the link below for a high-resolution copy of the slide:
MMS 2008: System Center Roadmap
During his Service Manager breakout session, Travis Wright demo'd a new build of the product, which was written from the ground up. His second demo was centered around the upcoming System Center Configuration (SCCM) integration. This integration will have multiple features.
The first is that the SCCM data warehouse will be used for filling the Service Manager CMDB with information on CI's; details, inventories, etcetera. The second is that SCCM will be used to deliver applications and software packages to client machines; for instance, via a Change Request.
The third integration was a new announcement;
Desired Configuration Management (DCM) integration. Service Manager will be able to pickup "drifts" from DCM, detected by Baselines. Using the integration, an Incident can be automatically created to track those DCM "drifts".
Service Manager: DCM & SCCM integration
The Cross Platform and Interop team have
launched their blog, right after the
announcement at the Microsoft Management Summit. You can check it out here:
System Center: Cross Platform and Interop team
If you saw the
screenshots, but wanted to play with it for yourselves, you can follow their directions to download it:
The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which enable customers to manage Unix/Linux systems from Operations Manager 2007, was delivered as a beta today. The second beta announcement was the availability of the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors for HP OpenView (Unix/Windows) and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC).
Both betas are available on
http://connect.microsoft.com – search for
systemcenter.
Remember -- your need Service Pack 1 for Operations Manager 2007 to run this and it is NOT recommended to run this in your product environment..
Travis Wright and Michael Nappi, both from the Service Manager product team, gave a breakout session on Service Manager on the annual Microsoft Management Summit. They
updated the audience with the new roadmap and spook about what is going on with the development. In a nutshell, they told the audience, they took the feedback from the original beta 1 release and re-architected the product from the ground up to deliver a high quality v1 product. These are the major changes:
No more mandatory Sharepoint and Infopath needed;
Underlying technology used from Operations Manager (warehouse, SDK, etc);
Self-service portal runs as a dedicated ASP.NET website, but can leverage Sharepoint;
.. check out the other major changes in the screenshot below..
Techlog has the first screenshots from this (NEW) build:
Service Manager: Architecture
Service Manager: Key Changes
Service Manager: Extending
Service Manager: Self Service Portal
Service Manager: Create Incident
Service Manager: New WPF-based UI
Service Manager: Routing Wizard
Service Manager: Incident Details
Service Manager: SCOM integration
Service Manager: DCM & SCCM integration
During the breakout session on Service Manager, at the Microsoft Management Summit, Michael Nappi -- who is the Product Unit Manager for Service Manager -- updated the audience with the roadmap for releasing Service Manager.
The delay in the release dates have been due to the fact that the Service Manager team learned from the previous Beta 1 release and took drastic decisions to deliver a high quality v1 product. While the product team has a more aggressive internal schedule, these are the publicly communicated delivery dates:
Beta 1 Refresh at the end of 2008 calender year;
Beta 2 Milestone -- which will be feature complete -- at the end of second quarter of 2009;
RC Milestone end third or beginning fourth quarter of 2009;
RTM at the first half of 2010 or sooner.
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.
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System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”) was announced today at the annual Microsoft Management Summit, which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server.
Techlog has the first screenshots, taken from the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 Keynote:
SCVMM 2008: Announcement
SCVMM 2008: Overview Pane
SCVMM 2008: Virtual Center
SCVMM 2008: VMware Integration
SCVMM 2008: Host Based Rating
SCVMM 2008: HBR for VMware
SCVMM 2008: Powershell
SCVMM 2008: HA options for VM
SCVMM 2008: PRO tips
Also delivered today was the public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”), which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO). Using deep knowledge of the IT environment including operating systems, applications and hardware, Operations Manager identifies opportunities for more efficient physical and virtual resource allocation and generates “PRO tips” within the Virtual Machine Manager console. Administrators can implement these PRO tips and dynamically optimize their datacenter based upon pre-defined policies and the real-time, changing demands of users.
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Michael Kelly was invited to stage at the annual Microsoft Management Summit 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.
Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments.
Techlog has the first screenshots, taken from the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 Keynote:
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Announcement
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Discovery Wizard
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Health Explorer
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Performance View
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Architecture
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Diagram View
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Diagram View
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Problem Path
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Diagnostics
OpsMgr, Cross Platform: Strategy
Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments.
Providing customers with a comprehensive management solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications. Microsoft delivers the core foundational cross-platform support out of the box for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in the form of management packs.
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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.
(more)
AVG (AU/NZ) Pty Ltd, the Australasian distributor of AVG Anti-Virus and Internet Security software, has announced the availability of
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0. This latest version of the company’s popular free security software now incorporates protection against spyware through a new combined anti-virus and anti-spyware engine.
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 provides basic protection against viruses and spyware, together with the real-time safe-searching protection of the company’s LinkScanner technology, incorporated into the new AVG Security Toolbar.
The company released the 8.0 versions of its commercial products in February 2008. Home users can choose between the AVG Internet Security suite, AVG Anti-Virus or AVG Anti-Virus plus Firewall products. Business users can select Network Edition or SBS Edition versions of the AVG Anti-Virus and AVG Internet Security products.
AVG File Server Edition 8.0 and AVG E-Mail Server Edition 8.0 server protection products are also available.
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0 is intended for personal and non-commercial use on single computers running Windows 2000, XP or Vista. The product will be released initially in English, with Japanese following next week; other language versions are planned for release over the next few months. While AVG Technologies does not provide telephone or e-mail support for AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.0, the company hosts a web site and forum for user-driven support which can be accessed via www.avgfree.com.au. Interested users can download the software from this web site, or at third-party download sites such as CNet Download.com.
The AVG Free product does not include the proactive safe-surfing ("drive-by download" protection) of the full LinkScanner module that is included in the commercial AVG products, nor the protection against hackers, keyloggers, spam, phishing attacks and malicious file downloads that can come through instant messaging and attachments.
The free product also does not include the local telephone support and round-the-clock e-mail support provided with the commercial products.
A new SQL injection attack aimed at Microsoft IIS web servers has hit some 500,000 websites, including the United Nations, UK Government sites and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While the attack is not Microsoft's fault, it is unique to the company's IIS server.
The automated attack takes advantage to the fact that Microsoft’s IIS servers allow generic commands that don’t require specific table-level arguments. However, the vulnerability is the result of poor data handling by the sites’ creators, rather than a specific Microsoft flaw.
In other words, there’s no patch that’s going to fix the issue, the problem is with the developers who failed follow well-established security practices for handling database input.
The attack itself injects some malicious JavaScript code into every text field in your database, the Javascript then loads an external script that can compromise a user’s PC.
Apple has responded to critism of its “Software Update” tool for Windows. In version 2.1 users now see a split window with two separate lists for updates and new software.
The complaint from many security (and other) sources had been that users of the old version often ended up with new software they had not intended to install. The confusion was caused by the new software being included in the list of “updates”, which users would install believing they were required. The concern was users upon finding they had unintentionally installed software they may not want on their computer would be less likely to trust updates from any source and thereby forego necessary security updates across the board.
One of the most publicized critics of this practice, Mozilla’s CEO, John Lilly, says Apple has still not gone far enough. Even though the new software is now listed separately, the boxes are checked to download it by default. The boxes for optional software should be left blank so the user may check them only if they wish.
There are other vendors that have this detrimental habit of pre-selecting by default optional software in addition to the software the user intends to download. One example of this is additional toolbars, which many people have downloaded unintentionally and then had to uninstall. It is such an annoying practice that many will boycott a particular product for that reason alone.
Your computer problems may not just be hardware related as Windows may easily “break” when a new program is installed or a system file becomes corrupted.
If the computer starts fine but Windows fails to load, restart the computer and just after the Bios finishes loading, keep pressing the F8 key until the Windows Advanced Options menu appears.
The menu can only be navigated with cursor keys, so use the arrow keys on the keyboard to select Last Known Good Configuration.
If Windows starts up properly, remove any programs you installed or undo any changes you made recently.
If it still won’t start properly, reboot and go back to the Advanced Options menu again by pressing F8 and choose Safe Mode this time.
In Safe Mode, Windows will automatically skip loading programs and hardware components which in 99% of the cases should make it start. Don’t be shocked by the low resolution and how awful it looks. (continue at source).
The teeth gnashing is getting louder over Microsoft's plans to quit selling Windows XP at the end of June. Many businesses and consumers are crying foul, saying they want to avoid Windows Vista because of complaints that it is incompatible with too many peripherals or runs too slowly on older PCs.
Dell, for one, has posted plans to continue selling Windows XP on some computers until June 2009, and HP has reportedly said the same thing. The equipment builders say they'll use a loophole that Microsoft offers to business customers to downgrade systems from Vista to XP. Dell and HP would make the switch before the computer ships, letting customers get a computer preloaded with the tried-and-true XP.
The System Center Management Pack Authoring Console 2007 has been released to the Web! If you'll be at the Microsoft Management Summit next week, stop by the the Authoring Session SO04 - Tools and Best Practices for Authoring Management Packs for Operations Manager 2007 session for additional information.
The web package can be downloaded from these links: Authoring Console
x86 |
x64
Jeanie Decker: Most of our management packs are released to the download center (via the
Ops Manager Catalog) with a guide included. When we released
Ops Manager 2007 Service Pack 1, it included a number of management packs with it, but no guides, leading a number of you to ask us: "Where are the guides?" And the corresponding guides were available as separate downloads, but had not been updated to reflect the SP1 release, which led others to frustrated confusion -- were these the the right guides for the SP1 management packs?
So we removed the separate downloads (which, in turn, frustrated those looking for them). What we're doing to straighten this out, as quickly as possible:
- Get the management pack guides available online in our TechCenter.
- Identify the changes made to each management pack in the SP1 release and update the guides with that information.
- Post each management pack from the SP1 release with its updated guide to the download center and the Catalog.
I'm hoping to have the SP1 management pack guides in the TechCenter within a week or so (with the SP1 change logs to be added as soon as they're complete), and will post as soon as it happens. In the meantime, if you need a guide for one of the management packs included with SP1, email mpgfeed@microsoft.com and I'll send it to you.
Most MPs have one or more scripts which are used for a variety of things, discovery state monitoring, perf data creation, etc… In a lot of cases the majority of the script code is common to all the scripts in the MP, logging, connecting to a particular service (i.e. WMI), Error handling, etc… Typically this code is simply copied and pasted into every script in the MP, this means that it has to be maintained separately for every script in the MP, so if a bug is found in common script code it must be fixed in all places. This also makes the relatively simple functionality of the script much harder to read as the common script code usually dwarves the implementation.(
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This guide provides information on installing System Center Essentials 2007 (Essentials 2007) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager Workgroup Edition (VMM 2007) in the same environment.
It focuses on the system requirements, setup overview and best practices. Please refer to the installation guides of each product for more information.
Essentials 2007 provides end-to-end monitoring for the mid-market IT environment, along with software and update deployment. VMM 2007 provides centralized administration of your virtual infrastructure and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines.
In summary, the installation requires installing the Essentials 2007 components on a single computer, and VMM 2007 components on another computer. Each product also uses separate database instances.
Download:
System Center Essentials 2007 & System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 Installation Guide
There is a new MP added to the
downloads section that will monitor file shares on a Windows Server. The MP is designed to discover any file shares on the server (not including the hidden $ shares) and monitor the availability of the shares. The monitors are initially disabled so you will need to override the monitor to activate it. (
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Ian Blyth:
Pete mentioned that the new sizing and performance guide had some changes. One area I looked at was database size. I picked out these figures from the white paper and stuck them in a table to make it easier to see what was going on. The increases in size are linear with the number of agents.(
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The SCOM 2007 BizTalk Management Pack has finally been released. The Management Pack is a complete rewrite and covers BizTalk 2006, BizTalk R2 as well as the new features of R2 including RFID and the EDI functionality. You can download the Management Pack
here.
Also, If you were familiar with the Management Pack for MOM 2005 you will notice a number of changes. The biggest is the change to the alerting functionality. In SCOM you create subscriptions which will provide you with alerts for all of the events. If you are looking for the alerting functionality that MOM 2005 had (the ability to pick a rule and provide an alert based only on that rule) you can find a Powershell script on the Manageability Team Blog titled:
OpsMgr 2007: Creating a subscription for future occurrences of an alert. The script takes two parameters; the RMS server address and e-mail address you want notifications sent to. After you follow the steps outlined you will see a specific notification for that problem and SCOM will send e-mails to the e-mail address you entered in the script.
Neale from System Center Forum: I have created a MP that will check a target server’s SMTP service by using telnet. The script included in the sample MP will require a command (to run on the target server) and an expected response (usually a string). The VBscript part of this MP uses the Toolsack Baseline dll (from Toolsack Software) to perform the telnet functions. When you import this MP, can you find the example rules by changing the scope of the Rules View in the Authoring pane to Management server. You can implement this MP in a SCE environment as well. (
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Larry Orecklin, who runs the System Center business and virtualization, laid out the Microsoft vision on virtualization from the server to the desktop. He clearly put the emphasis on management, focusing on core pieces of System Center with Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager and Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).
If the hub of Orecklin's vision is management, the pieces that revolve around the hub are server virtualization, applications virtualization, desktop virtualization and presentation virtualization (i.e. terminal services). He said the VMM version that will support Hyper-V will ship with the hypervisor add-on for Windows Server 2008. He said the timeframe for that release will be June or July. He hinted that the beta of VMM that supports Hyper-V would be released next week at Microsoft's Management Summit in Las Vegas. In addition, he disclosed that Microsoft has 4.5 million seats of Microsoft Application Virtualization (SoftGrid) out in the field. He said Kidaro, which Microsoft acquired in March, would become an important tool for managing virtual PCs.
Pontus Blomqvist mentions on his blog that an updated version of the HP BladeSystem Management Pack is available:
Version 1.6.2 addresses the following:
Bug Fixes:
Fixed the HP BladeSystem Enclosure Monitor Manager to support the regional and language settings on Windows Operating System.
Fixed the HP BladeSystem Management Pack for Alert Parameter Replacement Failure on Operations Manager 2007 SP1.
Download:
HP BladeSystem Management Pack, version 1.6.2
Pete Zerger: There are a couple of tools for Powershell scripting that if you try, I don’t think you will ever want to be with out. You pretty frequently hear about PowerGUI, which is a pretty nice tool, especially for Powershell newbies, but I wanted to share with you my favorite toolset I use when working really rolling up my sleeves for some serious work in the shell. I’ll give you some quick tidbits on features, but you really need to give these a trial run.(
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Companies spend enormous amounts of resources just to determine if there are any gaps in their software licensing. Then the IT manager has to take that long walk to the CIO's office to explain how many tens of thousands of dollars it will cost to get all the licensing up to date.
The Asset Intelligence component of Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager 2007 can solve a lot of the asset management headaches regarding software and hardware. Asset Intelligence has a robust tool set not only for viewing hardware, but also for managing Microsoft SoftGrid virtualization and software but also to manage them. It also has the capability to "baseline" assets so changes can be seen over time.
Here is a quick dive into some scenarios that describe how this could change the way Windows shops view the world. (
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More enterprises are looking at Microsoft's desktop and server management software as viable options for Windows systems management. But IT managers with diverse platforms still don't view System Center in the same light as other major management platforms.
To get closer to the level of cross-platform functionality found in such established products as BMC Performance Manager, IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView and CA Unicenter, Microsoft needs to speed up delivery of management packs for third-party integration or offer more out of the box, said Stephen Elliot, an analyst at IDC, a market research firm in Framingham, Mass. (
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