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System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta Evaluation

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 delivers industry leading fabric managment, virtual machine management and services deployment in private cloud environments. Virtual Machine Manager 2012 offers key new features that include hypervisor creation and management, network management, storage management, private cloud creation, self-service usage and service creation. It features deep investments in server application virtualization, service design and service modeling all of which can be used to efficiently offer an on-premises private cloud.

Feature Summary

Fabric Management
- Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management – Deploy Hyper-V to bare metal server, create Hyper-V clusters, orchestrate patching of a Hyper-V Cluster
- Third Party Virtualization Platforms – Add and Manage Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX Hosts and Clusters
- Network Management – Manage IP Address Pools, MAC Address Pools and Load Balancers
- Storage Management – Classify storage, Manage Storage Pools and LUNs
Resource Optimization
- Dynamic Optimization – proactively balance the load of VMs across a cluster
- Power Optimization – schedule power savings to use the right number of hosts to run your workloads – power the rest off until they are needed
- PRO – integrate with System Center Operations Manager to respond to application-level performance monitors
Cloud Management
- Abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds
- Delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas
- Enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud
Service Lifecycle Management
- Define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, os images and applica tion packages
- Compose operating system images and applications during service deployment
- Scale out the number of virtual machines in a service
- Service performance and health monitoring integrated with System Center Operations Manager
- Decouple OS image and application updates through image-based servicing
- Leverage powerful application virtualization technologies such as Server App-V

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems:Windows 7 Enterprise;Windows 7 Professional;Windows 7 Ultimate;Windows Server 2008 R2;Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter;Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
- Windows Server 2008 R2 (full installation) Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter x64
- Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate x32, x64
- Windows Remote Management (WinRM) 2.0
- Windows PowerShell 2.0
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
- Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows 7
- SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter
- Windows Deployment Services (WDS) – (Version on Windows Server 2008 R2)
- Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 SP2 64bit

Download System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta Evaluation HERE

System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 Monitoring Management Pack

The management pack monitors the health status of System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 and its components. It alerts the admin on critical health state and it provides certain break fix tasks to take corrective actions.

The following alerts are new in this release of the DPM 2010 Management Pack:

Backup metadata enumeration failed
Agent ownership required
Replica allocated and initial replication scheduled
Share path changed
Duplicate disks detected
VHD parent locator fix-up failed
Virtual machine metadata enumeration failed
VHD parent locator fix-up canceled
SharePoint Item Level Catalog failed
Backup without writer metadata
Customer Feedback opt-in
Backup SLA failed
Hyper-V Recovery Success
Global DPMDB Database Not Accessible alert notification
StagingAreaRestore in-progress
StagingAreaRestore success
StagingAreaRestore partial success
StagingAreaRestore failure
Auto Instance Protection failed
DPM Online Recovery Point creation failures
DPM Online Cache volume is missing
Partial Backup success
Library devices were disabled

You can download the System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 Monitoring Management Pack HERE

Storage Calculators for System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

Microsoft has released some new sizing calculators for DPM 2010.

DPM_2010_Storage_Calculator_for_Exchange_2010.xlsx

DPM_2010_Storage_Calculator_for_Hyper-V.xlsx

DPM_2010_Storage_Calculator_for_SharePoint.xlsx

Vizioncore release free VMware Management Pack for OpsMgr

Vizioncore, a wholly owned subsidiary of Quest have released a free Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 which enables the monitoring of VMware virtual infrastructures. Now, before I get into the features and capabilities of what the MP gives you, it’s important to point out that this is the first free MP to deliver these capabilities, and may stir things up a little over at both Veeam and Bridgeways, who both have established MP’s for OpsMgr to enable monitoring of VMware environments. It’s important to say, both Veeam and Bridgeways offer trails of their solutions, so it would be important to compare the different MP’s for yourselves, however looking at a high level, one of the key elements that Veeam seems to have today, is that it’s PRO-enabled, thus provides more automated, dynamic and agile responses within the environment based on changing conditions. That’s not to say both Bridgeways and Vizioncore won’t evolve their technologies in the future, and bring in PRO capabilities, however today, you would have to classify it as a differentiator for Veeam. One you have to pay for however.

Screenshot Vizioncore Logo

So, what are the key features of the Vizioncore MP?

Essential alerts from the virtual infrastructure to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) of problems
Integration to System Center Operations Manager to centralize and consolidate monitoring efforts
Low cost and simple to use while allowing administrators to work in their familiar System Center Operations Manager views
Native management pack delivers alert and event management as well as trending inside the SCOM console
Agentless architecture for simple deployment and low overhead
Performance monitoring & availability event monitoring for fast resolution in the virtual environment
Out-of-the-box reports for host and guest metrics provides flexibility and clear communication between stakeholders

There’s even more features here…

What’s nice from my perspective, is the growth of the ecosystem around the Microsoft virtualisation platform, from Partners that have, in the past, been quite VMware focused. That’s more Vizioncore than Quest, but still, it’s moving in the right direction.

If you’re interested, you can get all the info, and download the MP, from here.

Source

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1 is RTM

Microsoft has released a new version of MDT 2010 named Update 1.

It’s a great tool im loving it.

What new:

For System Center Configuration Manager 2007 users:

New “User Driven Installation” deployment method. An easy-to-use UDI Wizard allows users to initiate and customize an OS deployment on their PCs that’s tailored to their individual needs.
Support for Configuration Manager R3 “Prestaged Media.” For those deploying Windows 7 and Office 2010 along with new PCs, a custom OS image can easily be loaded in the factory and then customized once deployed.

For Lite Touch Installation:

Support for Office 2010. Easily configure Office 2010 installation and deployment settings through the Deployment Workbench and integration with the Office Customization Tool.
Improved driver importing. All drivers are inspected during the import process to accurately determine what platforms they really support, avoiding common inaccuracies that can cause deployment issues.

Bug Fixes and small improvements

LTI Wizard performance improvement. The LTI Wizard now takes less time to initialize and shows up faster.
Issue in validating connection to the server fixed. In a few scenarios, MDT 2010 used to report the error message, "A connection to the distribution share could not be made" when a task sequence is run. The Microsoft Support article, “Error message when you use MDT 2010: ‘Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed,’” at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977566 describes this issue in detail. This issue has been fixed in MDT 2010 Update 1.
Support for installing Windows 7 roles and features. MDT 2010 Update 1 adds support for installation of Windows 7 operating system roles and features.
Looping issue with x64 custom Windows images fixed. In MDT 2010, ZTI–System Center Configuration Manager deployments could get into an infinite loop when deploying an x64 Windows image captured by LTI. This issue has been fixed in MDT 2010 Update 1
Error handling improvements in MDT task sequence templates. In MDT 2010, task sequences appear to finish successfully even when they really failed. These issues are fixed in MDT 2010 Update 1.

Download the new version HERE 😀

MDT 2010 Update 1 Beta Released

The Solution Accelerators Team have released Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 Update 1 Beta and would like your feedback.

Download the beta now at https://connect.microsoft.com/site14/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=8689

MDT 2010 Update 1 provides new capabilities, such as:

· Support for Microsoft Office 2010.

· A new User-driven Installation (UDI) deployment method (formerly known as “Modena”) for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007. UDI gives information technology (IT) staff control over the deployment experience while empowering users to interact with and customize their operating system deployment through an easy-to-use wizard.

· Improvements to the Deployment Workbench driver import process, detecting each driver’s true supported platforms.

· Many bug fixes and other small improvements.

This release supports the deployment of the Windows® 7; Windows Vista®; Windows XP; Windows Server® 2008 R2; Windows Server 2008; and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. See the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Documentation Library, which is included with MDT 2010 Update 1, for the complete documentation for this release.