Full details on the transition and migration path for existing customers on SMSE and new customers moving to SMSD
System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise is versionless and product use rights are determined by the status of System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise Software Assurance coverage. If coverage lapses, access rights under perpetual licenses are determined based on the product use rights in effect prior to the lapse in coverage. (
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Because organizations are increasingly using at least some virtual machines, it’s useful to be able to detect during an OS deployment if a task sequence is running on a physical machine or a virtual machine. It’s also helpful to know if the physical machine is capable of being a virtualization host. That’s where these enhancements to the MDT 2010 gathering process (ZTIGather.wsf) come from. We now gather these additional details(
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The newly released
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Beta 2 will help you prepare for your Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 deployments. MDT 2010 is the next version of the Solution Accelerator for operating system and application deployment. New features such as flexible driver management, optimized user interface work flow, and Windows PowerShell will help simplify deployment and make your job easier.
As a member of the Beta review program, you will be asked to provide feedback about the tools that the Solution Accelerator includes. If you are not a member, click
here to join the Beta program. For members, click
here.
Notification balloons seem to be a frequent topic of feedback from customers. There may pop up too often, or only certain users should get them, or the timing isn’t configurable enough.
Lately we’ve had multiple customers asking for a very specific feature. The AdminUI for SCCM provides the ability to disable notification balloons for normal Software Distribution packages, but not for Task Sequences.(
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Mike recently posted on how to take an MDT action based on group membership in Active Directory. At the same time, I was working on something quite similar but using a different approach, so I thought I’d blog it here to offer an alternative method to the one Mike describes; I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one to use!
With this solution you can dynamically install applications during a LiteTouch deployment based on the membership of Active Directory groups, this means that each computer deployment can be uniquely customised, without the need for complex scripting or advanced infrastructure. All that is required is this blog post, a group created in Active Directory for every application that will be dynamically installed, and all computer accounts pre-created in the domain and added to the relevant application groups.(
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This management pack supports monitoring of Windows Server Hyper-V systems. This includes monitoring coverage of Hyper-V host servers, including critical services and disks, and Hyper-V virtual machines, including virtual components and virtual hardware.
Feature Summary
This management pack provides the following functionality:
* Management of critical Hyper-V services that affect virtual machines and host server functionality
* Management of host server logical disks that affect virtual machine health
* Full representation of virtualization in a single Hyper-V host server, including virtual networks, virtual machines, and guest computers
* Monitoring of virtual machine hardware components that affect availability
Download:
Windows Server Hyper-V Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007
It has come up a few times where someone has requested taking actions in a Task Sequence based on the values of attributes on the computer object for the computer in Active Directory, like the computer’s OU or whether the computer is a member of an Active Directory Group. So I created an MDT User Exit script to set properties based on such attributes.(
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Hi everyone, as you may have heard, we are releasing a Solution Accelerator that will attain certification for ConfigMgr as an SCAP-validated tool with FDCC scanning capability. If you or someone you know works in a US government agency – you are aware that those organizations are required to have an SCAP validated tool for ensuring adherence to the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (
FDCC). This project will achieve this certification for ConfigMgr, and its in beta now, ahead of schedule for release.(
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Aidan Finn: Microsoft’s big differentiator from the competition is management. Most people have never experienced System Center so they’ve no idea by what I mean by management. They’ve seen things like HP SIM, IBM Director or VMware Virtual Center. For me, those are incomplete point solutions but they’re better than some of the freeware or “cheapware” solutions I’ve seen on some sites. When I say management I mean knowing what is where, how it’s performing, automation of deployment & configuration, backup/recovery from cradle to grave and from hardware to application inclusive of virtualisation. Sounds like science fiction? Nope, it’s a reality for some of us who’ve gone down the System Center route. Even back in the early days, I had this sort of thing running in 2005. Me and my team of 2 others managed 173 worldwide servers and were 3rd line support for the desktops. That included doing all the AD management, PC image builds, patching and software deployment. That sounds like we must’ve worked 24 hours a day? Nope, outside of project/development work, we did around 3 hours a day between us.(
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Jeff Gilbert: Every now and then you might see someone asking about an SMS or ConfigMgr client being physically installed at the client computer, but not appearing as installed in the admin console. This invariably results in someone else pointing them to their site maintenance tasks configuration—which is generally the culprit. I was doing some things in my lab today so I figured that I'd post a basic description of the behavior. (
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The Operations Manager 2007 Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) Roles and Security Hardening guide can be used to help further protect and harden your Operations Manager 2007 R2 environment in conjunction with the SCW on Windows Server 2008 by closing or disabling unnecessary ports and services reducing the overall attack surface.
Feature Bullet Summary:
The Operations Manager 2007 SCW Roles contain hardening definitions for:
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Server
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Root Management Server
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Agent
It also contains additional hardening option for:
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Audit Collector
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Audit Forwarder
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 SysLog Reader
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Agent Push Install And Repair
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Agentless Exception Monitoring
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 CEIP
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connector Framework
For more information and to download the guide visit
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c22c81eb-c6dc-4190-a4c9-2edbf5b528f1
Carol Bailey: I sometimes get questions from customers about values to set for the key sizes and validity periods for the certificates required for native mode and out of band management in Configuration Manager. This has been a tough one for me to answer, because in the main, these values are external to Configuration Manager and they are PKI design questions with advantages and disadvantages for different values. The higher the key size, the more secure the certificate is from attackers, but will require more processing to use. The longer the validity period, the less certificate maintenance required (and potentially some service disruption), but the certificate is more vulnerable to being compromised.(
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Steve Thompson: A recent post on the MVP alias got me thinking that others may not know that the standard ConfigMgr 2007 backup task does not back up the SSRS reports. If you have not extended the SSRS reports in any way, then the default SSRS reports can easily be recreated. Simply create a new Site Reporting Services Role.
However, if you have created any custom reports, report models, etc you will need to follow these guidelines.(
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Novell next week plans to release yet another tool that is the product of its three-year-old integration agreement with Microsoft, this time a plug-in for Microsoft’s management tools that lets users manage Novell’s Suse Linux.
The tool, which will ship June 19, was produced as part of Novell's involvement with the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab, which opened in 2007.(
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Steve Rachui: I was looking for this information recently and had a hard time locating it – probably my poor searching skills! Nevertheless, I found it again so am posting it on my blog so I can always have it close! The information comes from
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb693755.aspx
The following features are not supported when clients are managed on the Internet:
* Software distribution that is targeted to users (either directly or through Microsoft Windows security groups).
* Branch distribution points (a branch distribution point cannot support Internet clients, and clients on the Internet cannot be configured as a branch distribution point).
* Client deployment over the Internet.
* Auto-site assignment.
* Network Access Protection (NAP).
* Wake On LAN.
* Operating system deployment.
* Remote control.
* Out of band management in Configuration Manager 2007 SP1.
* The client ping functionality used with the client status reporting feature in Configuration Manager 2007 R2.
OpsMgr is mainly used to get a grip on you server infrastructure and to optimize performance and availability by using best practice, which knowledge provide in the MP’s, and resolve errors with a head start with the provided knowledge. But the next step into monitoring is getting the most out of your infrastructure and Virtualization is one of these things that can help you get there. (
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