System Center 2012 SP1 CTP2 published!

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

Yesterday Microsoft published System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 CTP2. I was using the CTP1, and was missing some of the features, but now they seem fixed (however, it’s to early to tell, ‘cause the download is still running Smile).

One thing that I was missing just yesterday, during my training about Microsoft cloud solutions, was the support for Azure VM in App Controller – it’s on the list; can’t wait to try it out!

Other notable improvements and updates are:

  • Virtual Machine Manager
    • Improved Support for Network Virtualization
    • Extend the VMM console with Add-ins
    • Support for Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units and discovery of SAS storage
    • Ability to convert VHD to VHDX, use VHDX as base Operating System image
  • Configuration Manager
    • Support for Windows 8
    • Support for Mac OS clients
    • Support for Linux and Unix servers
  • Data Protection Manager
    • Improved backup performance of Hyper-V over CSV 2.0
    • Protection for Hyper-V over remote SMB share
    • Protection for Windows Server 2012 de-duplicated volumes
    • Uninterrupted protection for VM live migration
  • App Controller
    • Service Provider Foundation API to create and operate Virtual Machines
    • Support for Azure VM; migrate VHDs from VMM to Windows Azure, manage from on-premise System Center
  • Operations Manager
    • Support for IIS 8
    • Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services
    • Azure SDK support
  • Orchestrator
    • Additional support for Integration Packs, including 3rd party
    • Manage VMM self-service User Roles
    • Manage multiple VMM ‘stamps’ (scale units), aggregate results from multiple stamps
    • Integration with App Controller to consume Hosted clouds
  • Service Manager
    • Apply price sheets to VMM clouds
    • Create chargeback reports
    • Pivot by cost center, VMM clouds, Pricesheets
  • Server App-V
    • Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during packaging
    • Create virtual application packages from applications installed remotely on native server

I’ll install them in my lab during the weekend and then we’ll see…

Have a nice weekend!

WinDays 12 – afterword…

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

So… another year, another WinDays conference is over… In short, it was fun (as always).

This year (like the year before), I was in charge of preparing the lab environment for almost all of the workshops happening at Centar Znanja – this was intense but also fun…

This year, at Wednesday, I had a session about Windows 8 deployment, called “A što je s klijentima?”. Session was early in the morning, but from my perspective, attendance was great, session was also OK (those who attended can say more about it Smile)!

I was using Windows Server “8” Beta as the basis for my lab, was deploying Windows “8” Consumer Preview with Windows ADK, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012 and System Center Configuration Manager 2012. My lab wouldn’t be possible without the support of my “sponsor” – Kodeks, who provided me with the new, 12th generation Dell PowerEdge R720 server (thank you guys for this one!). I can say that this is indeed a fine piece of machinery, wish to have couple of these for all of my demos & workshops (Smile)…

I also had a workshop called “Build your private cloud in 3 hours” at Thursday (with my colleague Marin) which was fun – early morning, half of the room full, lots of work to be done… it was a success!

Photos (thanks to Romeo & Bojana):

Again, thanks to everyone who attended my session and workshop (or was planning to attend but was recovering from “yesterday” Smile); hope to hear from you & see you next year at WinDays 13!

SCOM hits RC…

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

Today is a great day for all of the System Center Operations Manager fans – SCOM has reached the Release Candidate (RC) stage and is now available at Microsoft Download Center!

Operations Manager 2012 provides infrastructure monitoring that’s flexible and cost-effective, helps ensure the predictable performance and availability of vital applications, and offers comprehensive monitoring for your datacenter and cloud, both private and public. Operations Manager helps you better manage your datacenters by:

  • Delivering flexible and cost effective enterprise-class monitoring and diagnostics while reducing the total cost of ownership by leveraging commodity hardware, configurations, and heterogeneous environments.
  • Helping to ensure the availability of business-critical applications and services through market-leading .NET application performance monitoring and diagnostics and JEE application health monitoring.
  • Providing a comprehensive view of datacenters, and private and public clouds.

More info is available at the Server and Cloud Platform blog.

Next steps – download, install, explore & enjoy it! Smile