You may be aware that I am still keen on SQL Server and despite the changing nature of my role at Microsoft I still try and keep my hand in with the latest version.  One thing I overlooked until I did SQL Relay was contained database security which is easy to use and can make your life a lot easier.

In previous versions of SQL Server logins are stored in  the master database whether you use windows or SQL Server authentication.  That’s fine until you want your database to move to another instance of SQL Server. For example if you enable mirroring your database could end up running on a secondary server and if you haven’t got a separate process to move the logins across to the secondary this could cause problems if those logins have changed or new ones have been created.

SQL Server 2012 fixes this with contained databases and makes deployment easier by enabling you to put the logins into the application database.  As well as making database more portable it also means that uses connect to specific database rather than to the whole the instance thus limiting what they can do to just that database.  For example they won’t even be aware that there are other databases in that instance. 

For this to work you need to alter the properties of the instance either in options form the GUI:

 

or using the following TSQL:

EXEC sys.sp_configure ‘Contained database authentication’, 1

GO

RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE

GO

I would then configure my database for contained security again either form the UI..

or in TSQL..

USE Master

ALTER DATABASE [DeepFat] SET ‘containment = PARTIAL WITH NO_WAIT

GO

If I then create a login..

USE [DeepFat]

CREATE USER [Deepfat] WITH PASSWORD = ********

I can do a simple test to see how this works.  I open Management Studio and try and use this login to connect to my instance and it will fail..

because I also need to specify the database I am going to (by expanding the options and selecting the database to connect to) …

If I do that I will be able to connect but all I will see in management studio is my database..

 

This will work for all the other kinds of logins like windows authentication.  So a nice simple way to contain the enthusiasm of your uses to wander around your SQL servers as well as making the database more portable.

If you want to try this you’ll need to use SQL Server 2012, and you might want to see what else is new in this release on the SQL Server track in the Microsoft Virtual Academy

I wanted to something different for SQL Relay last week as this is a community driven event and I didn’t want to cover areas that the other experts on the Relay team would cover. This left some gaps and I have had several follow up questions via twitter and e-mail which I want to cover in this post.

Columnstore

I covered several uses of the in memory column based technology in my session 2 of which are in SQL Server 2008 R2 (PowerPivcot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint) and two are new for SQL Server 2012: Tabular Analysis Services and Columnstore indexes.  Columnstore indexes are part of the database engine rather than part of Analysis services and are created much in the same way as for other indexes:

CREATE NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE INDEX [IX_CS_FactProductInventory]

ON dbo.FactProductInventory

(

ProductKey, DateKey, UnitCost, UnitsIn, UnitsOut, UnitsBalance

)

They can speed up a query  by 10-100x compared to a normal index however you can’t update a table with a Columsntore index on you have to disable it and then re-index after you have made your changes.  There a good guide on its usage on the SQL Server wiki.

Security

I would like to have covered of contained database security which as the name suggests means that the login credentials of users get stored in a given database rather than in master and for SQL Server authentication this means that the password is in there as well.  As well as making the database more portable a user who just has their credentials in that database can’t change to another database and have little or no permissions outside that database.  Therefore when you connect to a contained database you need to specify the database as well as the server/instance (for example in management studio)  I can see there being huge advantages of this approach for developers wishing to make applications cloud ready and ISV’s can make deployments of their applications more easily.

I also got asked about crypto enhancements in SQL Server and these are:

• Create certificate from bytes
• 4K certificates supported for import
• SMK/DMK default to AES256
• Key backups encrypted with AES256
• SHA2 (256 and 512) support
• Password hashes use SHA512
• RC4 deprecated

LocalDB

I have to admit to glossing over this as I am not primarily a developer and I rarely play with SQL Server Express.  LocalDB is an installation option in SQL Express and allows for a cutdown version of SQL Server to run against a local database. Note LocalDB doesn’t support Filestream and cannot be a merge replication subscriber and for more on this refer to LocalDB in MSDN

Power View

I have now checked and there is currently no drill down capability in Power View.  If htis is important to you r business you can register your interest in this feature oadn/or clusteringn Connect (Microsoft portal for feedback on products)

SQL Server Guest Clustering/Always On

No matter how good your virtualisation stack is if you want to make SQL Server highly available you need some form of solution whereby a virtual machine can hand off the running of a SQL server database instance to another virtual machine for planned and unplanned downtime.  Correct me if I am wrong but Vmware DRS simply doesn’t do this (neither does Hyper-V so I am not trying to criticise Vmware per se).  Your choices were mirroring before the launch of SQL Server 2012 and now that’s out you have Always On.  This should work well on Vmware as well as Hyper-V as there is no dependency on shared storage and hence iscsi support in your VMs.   

So hopefully that helps clear up a few things I had to skate over in the interest of time, do ping me if I have missed your query off and look forward to chatting with you all agin at SQL Bits or some other community event soon.

Curiously one of the topics we hardly ever get asked about at our IT Camps is security in Hyper-V.  Perhaps it’s because you all have total confidence in our approach security, or you already have the facts to hand, but more likely is that you forgot to ask about because it’s not top of your agenda.

That’s OK, and anyway I need to write this so I have the definitive answers to hand when someone asks me.

So what do you need to consider when virtualising your data centre?

The best resource I have seen is by the US Government specifically the National Institute of Standards & Technology in their Guide to Security for Virtualization Technologies.  It’s a big read but the three key sections are:

4-2 recommendations about locking down the hypervisor.  the key points are:

• No unauthorised access to the operating system controlling the VMs
• Resources shared by the managing operating system and the guest VMs are kept to a minimum
• that the host or physical operating system is kept up to date with patches
• The host operating system is only used to run virtual machines

4-3 recommendations for securing the virtual machines themselves

4-4 recommendations for securing a virtual desktop infrastructure

So having got your head around that and carried out your own risk assessments be that by contacting CESG if you are in UK government or the risk assessment advice put out by the UK government for businesses in the UK, you then need to apply this to your environment.  For Hyper-V the three key resources you need are: 

• Hyper-V Security Guide on TechNet:
• Hyper-V Security Guide
• Planning for Hyper-V Security

I would argue that you’ll also need System Center to manage your data centre security, check and rectify compliance issues as well as to audit and changes.  To help with that there is a Governance Risk & Compliance Process Pack which uses the integration between Service Manager and the rest of System Center (Config Manager, Ops Manager, Virtual machine Manger via Orchestrator).   It has extensive guidance for the non IT functions and  has the side benefit of showing you how to unify System Center to better support the business.

Finally You’ll want to lock down windows server as well whether that’s the physical operating system or the guest and there’s a Security Compliance Manager to help with that.

Four cities,  in four days makes for one tired evangelist, so why am I doing SQL Relay with the SQL community I hear you ask.  Well that’s your answer really -  I can’t hear you ask anything when I am sat in darkest Surrey blogging away so I am actually doing these events not so much to speak as to listen.  For a start we have some of the best experts on SQL Server in the world giving up their time to go on tour as well so I can learn from them.  More importantly I am interested in what’s going on with SQL Server in the real world; are you virtualised, are you still on SQL Server 2005 or even 2000, and are you dedicated or is SQL just something you do in between Exchange, and Active Directory.

 

With lots of Power% and %Point stuff in SQL Server I thought I might skip the actual PowerPoint to avoid confusion.  I also want my talk to be based on what you want to hear about so if you do plan to go:

• Edinburgh 21 May
• Manchester 22 May
• Birmingham 23 May
• Bristol 24 May

and the following we’ll be in London on 30 May

Please register, and then drop me a tweet (@deepfat) or a drop me an e-mail with your questions comments or suggestions, and I’ll see if I can get some swag for those who send me ideas

If you have looked at any of the new components of System Center 2012 you may have noticed that everyone seems to have a bunch of reports, some of them have data marts or data warehouses and some of them have analytics in the form of analysis services cubes.  Apart from the confusion over when to use what, why has so much effort been put into this?

In order to answer that let’s consider what information we need from System Center. I use the term information here deliberately as you may be aware that System Center chucks out tons of data, e.g. virtual machine X is running SQL Server, this update failed, that server has restarted, etc.etc. A good example of this how a badly setup Operations Manager will swamp the IT team with all the messages it throws out.

Rather than all this noise what we need is answers such as:

• What tasks are assigned to me?
• Is everything that needs to be running actually working OK?
• How can I predict demand and so be more proactive?

This isn’t an exhaustive list rather these questions characterise the way you might interact with the information coming out of System Center, and help frame an understanding of how business intelligence fits into the picture.

What task are assigned to me ?

This is operational reporting also referred to as consumption reporting because in the process of acting on the report the data in it becomes obsolete.  In this case If I action a task assigned to me from a report. it’s then closed and won’t appear on the report if I run it again.  This is the simplest type of report  and is usually directly sourced form the operational database (hence the other name).  In System Center 2012 these reports are usually built in to things like management packs in Operations Manager and Service Manager.

Is everything that needs to be running actually working OK?

This often expressed as a dashboard and is often found running on a large screen in a large helpdesk or operations room. In order to answer this type of question you might need data from more than one source and a deeper understanding of the source data is needed, for example to understand what systems need to be monitored and what the components of those systems are. In the BI world we might use a dashboard for this kind of analysis which might be interactive rather than static, enabling the end user to drill into a problem area to see more detail. Dashboards typically get their data from a data warehouse which is nothing more than a specialised database where the design (schema) is optimised for reporting rather than input. System Center does include some dashboarding capability but this a set of components and tools rather than a finished solution as dashboards are very individual to an organisation so there’s no right answer than can be implemented in a product. For example your System Center dashboard would probably compare actual performance against service levels, across time across business units. However the SLAs in your business will vary considerably e.g. “server uptime bust be greater than 99.999% between 8am- 6pm on working days”  or “client login time on our corporate internet site must be less than 500ms “ so you’ll have to do some work to get those to show up.

How can I be more proactive?

In order to answer this kind of question a data warehouse is also needed because the answer might depend on what’s happened before where operational systems e.g. Operations Manager are routinely purged of older data to maintain performance.  However writing endless reports and running them to get an answer as vague as this would take too long what is need is an interactive way to navigate through the data to understand the trends and discover patterns that might not immediately be apparent. This is the realm of OLAP and data mining both of which are built into SQL Server standard edition, (which you get with System Center 2012), and there’s an option to use this as part of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 for this kind of reason. 

Hopefully that’s got you thinking, but if not let me leave you with a though and a question

• The question: With so much reporting and analysis in Systems Center how can I make sense of it?
• The thought: I spent ten years in business intelligence and saw numerous attempts by software vendors to deliver vanilla BI on the back of their erp systems which were of only limited value.

Dogfood is the commonly described term for running your own beta software, however I prefer the term drinking your own champagne and to that end I have spent  a days leave today playing Window Server 8.   Yes its very different to what you have seen before and rather like having the decorators in while you are away it can  be difficult to find your old stuff when you return. However the new UI is a lot cleaner and once you know what your doing you will be more productive than you are now. 

Anyway a server OS is not much use without services running on it so I thought I would see if SQL Server 2012 would be at home here now that it’s been released.  The first thing I do when installing SQL Server is to declare the server as an application server by adding that role, which adds in the .Net framework.  SQL Server 2012 needs the >Net Framework 3.5 sp1 and to get that onto Windows Server 8 you’ll need it connected to the internet when you add the feature in, as it’s not included in the install media (as I found out at #SQLBits).  So having got that installed..

I can then crack on with the install.  notice that the SQL installer does tell you about this in the install screen bottom right below..

I imagine the SQL installer will do this for you but you’ll need that internet connection for it to work.

Anyway after a clean install I know get a load of icons on my metro desktop..

Right clicking on any of these means you can remove them and of course drag them round as you need to.  You might wonder what that interface is doing on a server OS.  My answer would be that many of us manage servers via remote desktop and if your client device has touch then this interface will work well with that.

I also included Reporting Services in my install to see if that would work and it does..

Although I had to turn on IE compatibility mode as it didn’t render quite as it should.

Of course this is all just evaluation as we are a long way from releasing Windows Server 8 and I would imagine that there will be a service pack of SQL Server 2012 that will fix any issues when Server 8 does come out.

I will be doing SQL Relay for Tony Rogerson in May (Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham & Bristol) and I’ll have this running if you want to know more.

Cooks would rather not wash up, and the best chefs have someone else do the shopping prepare the vegetables etc. and often end up planning and managing the menus and kitchens. In our IT professional world I would rather not worry about patching, I hate doing all the repetitive boring stuff and would rather work on projects.  Essentially that’s the promise of the cloud, so I am continually surprised that so many of you don’t get it, possibly you don’t think this stuff applies to you.

I have been trying to explain this at the various IT Camps we have been running up and down the country, but I also got a cameo role on cloud at SQL Bits with my good friend Buck Woody.  We were filmed so that should be out on the SQL Bits portal in the next month, but we also shot a 2 minute intro while he was making pizza at my house..

Which I hope you enjoy as much as we enjoyed his proper American pizza!

I have covered some of what we do at IT camps in a couple of previous posts, but what we did in Birmingham and London this week was to launch a new kind of camp, on Private Cloud.  This builds on knowledge gained at a Hyper-V IT camp and on Microsoft Virtual Academy and explain the how and why of managing virtualisation at scale in your data centre..

Virtualisation at scale obviously means that you are working in a larger organisation, and the concepts of a private cloud such as charge back, scalability and self service are really only appropriate to those business with lots of physical servers, a departmental structure and a group of dedicated IT professionals (although these might be outsourced). 

System Center 2012 is designed to make the private cloud work and that’s what we show in this camp.  However the individual components in the suite can also be used to proactively manage servers and applications in organisations that only have tens of virtual machines rather than hundreds.  So some of what we talk about at a private camp is relevant to the IT Professional in a smaller business but the main thrust of the camp is Private Cloud. Please bear this in mind when registering to come along.

I also realise that the the term private cloud is not popular with IT Professionals because it is either seen as marketing spin or its all about reducing costs and IT jobs.  I disagree this stuff is important because

1. a.  The standardisation and automation that the private cloud brings to a data centre frees you up from fire fighting and lets you concentrate on the projects the business want to implement as the business changes.

2. Tools like System Center track what is being done to your data centre be that in response to fixes or requests for change, so you don’t have to.  For example if a new virtual machine is deployed it will show up as an asset you will know what operating system and applications are on it who owns it and how long it is needed for

3. Both of which go to make  the IT department look more like a service and less like and overhead.  On an individual level you will have more respect from the business and that can be more important than a pay rise in my opinion.

Back to the camps we are running just one more thing; if you are coming to our camps on Hyper-V and you are already running Hyper-V in production then we may well be covering the basics you are already aware of. However because Hyper-V has its place in the smallest of businesses, then this camp is a great introduction for an IT Professional in any organisation, and we know this because we have had some really good feedback from running these camps.  

I remember hearing about a Project Houston about a year ago, a cunning plan to allow Microsoft to check the heath of your SQL Server databases and the operating system it sits on. It is now live and it’s called System Center Advisor. It works by using an internet gateway server you setup which in turn gathers information about your SQL Servers and submits this to the System Center Advisor cloud service every day.  The service has all the latest best practice gathered from Microsoft’s premier filed engineers and support teams, and process the supplied telemetry against this database to provide a list of warnings and alerts.

Here you can see what it made of my demo rig, not too healthy!

 

and here you can see the details of those alerts..

System Center Advisor makes use of the System Center Operations Manager agent to gather the data on each server but this service does not replace Operations Manager as it won’t provide real time alerting and only monitors SQL Server, and Windows Server (including the hyper-V and active directory roles). However the service is now live and it’s a free service for those with Software Assurance, and there’s a free 60 trial if you want to take a closer look.

The other reason I thought it was worth mentioning is that shows how what can be achieved by a cloud service with an Azure front end coupled with a SQL Azure database be scaled up as demand takes off and it’s output is available to anyone running a browser that supports Silverlight

Simon and I did our first IT camp in Leeds on Tuesday, and I would like to say thank you to those that cam along as you were the beta testers for this new kind of event.  As you can see we had a much more informal setup of groups of 8 or 9 around tables with a lot more collaboration and interaction around an agenda set by the audience.  

While most of the day went well we hit a problem with our iscsi target gizmo, which didn’t seem to want to talk to more than 3 machines, so we couldn’t hook up those brave enough to donate their laptops to our mashup cluster.  Other than that we were able to get through what we were asked to talk about within the broad topic of server virtualisation with Hyper-V, plus some stuff you didn’t know you needed to hear about like setting up proper time synchronisation.

We mentioned quite a few useful utilities and guidance that are essential to a good Hyper-V experience such as  :

I used the built in command line utility DISM (Disk Image Service Management) to add features to the hyper-v server installation

Control panel utilities can be got at from the command line e.g. iscsicpl will bring up the dialog for setting up the iscsi initiator.

Simon called out the Virtual Machine Servicing Tool (VMST) that allows you to patch offline virtual machine (details here). Note that this won’t work with Virtual Machine Manager 2012 just yet.

I showed you the Core Configurator which can be used to perform basic task on a server core installation of Windows Server or Hyper-V Server

Simon explained how to manage time synchronisation issues with virtualisation and the definitive TechNet post on this is here

Rik Hepworth from Black Marble called out John Howard’s HVRemote to enable remote management of Hyper-V server, however I was able to set this up just using the sconfig utility included in Hyper-V Server

We mentioned that if you didn’t have dedicated iscsi hardware, there is a free Microsoft iscsi target that presents virtual hard disks as iscsi drives.  You might want to watch my friend Adam Carter set this up if you haven’t used it before.

The SQL server Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) has a load of white papers on running SQL Server on Hyper; essentially don’t over commit CPU resources and use either pass through or fixed size disks.

The Enterprise Server Group has done some performance testing of Hyper-V running various Microsoft workloads, like Exchange Sharepoint and SQL Server, and their finding are here

My rough guide to setting up Hyper-V server and working with iscsi is in this deck..

Most of the current round of IT camps are now full so I have a huge favour to ask; if you can’t make it please let us know, not so much for our benefit but so those on waiting lists can attend. If you can’t get on to a camp just now please be patient, we are adding more dates and of course more content like how hyper-V looks in Windows Server 8, which we weren’t able to cover on Tuesday.

Finally camps currently come in four flavours and for some odd reason we don’t seem to be getting take up on camp three, Simon’s favourite topic, Consumerisation.  I find this odd as we are always being asked how to get non Microsoft smart phones and slates to be good  citizens on your business infrastructure and that’s exactly what he’ll be showing you.  Not only that he’s also planning to show VDI (Virtual desktop Infrastructure), which if you believe some people is something we don’t do properly. So if you have an open mind and and want a more open policy to allowing users to bring their own devices to work come along and find out more.

Most of us like have the proper tools for the job; trying to undo Phillips screws with a penknife, using your gold card to get the ice off the windscreen or using notepad to write F# is no fun. I would argue that the proper tool for running a modern Data Centre is System Center not just to save money as this report from last year’s War on Cost event by Inframon suggests..

but so that IT keeps pace with what the business demands of it.

That’s easy to say but how do you justify the expense of implementing it, I don’t mean the license costs rather the time and effort  taken to adapt its potential to the needs of your business.  I would liken this to investing in an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning):

• You could mash together a series of tools and utilities that you have in place already or that cam bundled with some of your infrastructure.  However the ability of each part of an ERP system to understand the resources, people and assets and have one mechanism for creating business process automation does offer economies of scale and the ability to adapt process far more quickly than would be the case otherwise
• ERP systems are about managing all of your resources, while System Center this is just limited to your IT infrastructure, however the similarities are striking
  • You define process and and standards with the business.  Service Manager and the
  • the approval processes for getting resources automatically spawns the task to create those services 
  • The use of resources needs to be accounted for
  • You use reporting and analytics to monitor activity and predict demand
• As any ERP consultant will tell you, there’s a great career to be had in implementing these systems and I am sure that individuals who embrace this vision as well as companies like Inframon will find plenty of projects to work on. Not only that there is a whole ecosystem around this implementation from, audit & compliance to security and business intelligence.

I mentioned the War on Cost event earlier and General Nathan Bedford Forrest was once misquoted as saying  winning a war is about getting there “fustest with the mostest”. Applying that to your career in these increasingly cloudy times I would advise you to get there fustest by learning about System Center 2012 on the Microsoft Virtual Academy  or at our rapidly filling IT Camps before your peers and getting their mostest by looking out for the upcoming System Center 2012 certifications

Hybrid cloud is the term applied to the increasingly common scenario where a business runs some of its services in the public cloud but retains some on premise, although it is also possible to use assets from both to provide a service as well.  For some business this is just a transitional step as more and more services are moved to the public cloud but for many organisations this might be the long term situation as some services can only be run internally.

For services /applications running in your own data centre you have a large degree of control over everything that application runs on, and you can tune and tweak that as you see fit. You get slightly less control as you outsource use hosting or run on someone else’s Infrastructure as a Service cloud platform.  However with Platform as a Service like Microsoft Azure there is less to manage; you loose control of the operating system and only have limited ability to set storage, and compute resources.  This is a good thing as it increase agility and reduces management overheads, but it does still need management.l

This loss of control reminds of the early days of banking, you lost control of where your money actually was in fact you couldn’t point to a fiver in a bank vault and say that it was yours. However you still had control of which types of accounts to put your money in and you would be foolish not to request and make decisions on the bank statements you were sent. In the electronic world of the cloud you don’t have bank statements you have something like the Azure Management Portal..

which shows you how your services are deployed and allows you to change them as you see fit for example to deploy more web front ends, change the schema of your SQL Azure database..

and so on..

That’s fine if you run all of your services in the public cloud, however if you also have a data centre you’ll probably want to see an overview of how everything is working and be able to report to management on how all your services are performing no matter where they are.  Not only that you’ll want one set of tools to make whatever changes you need bearing in mind the limitations of what can be changed in a cloud service.  There are several tools in System Center 2012 to directly interact with Azure and whatever you have running in your data centre to provide the monitoring and control you need;

System Center Operations Manager has an Azure management pack to report on your Azure performance and setup in addition to a raft of other management packs to manage databases, switches, hardware, various operating systems, and numerous applications.  The Azure management pack has to e configured with certificates and then uses Azure storage as an intermediate cache for storing and then transmitting the required telemetry down to the local Operations Manger database.

Note this can all be done in Operations Manager 2007 R2 (CU3 or later)

System Center Application Controller is a new tool for System Center 2012 that provides a web portal showing what is running in your private and public clouds.  The private cloud works by pulling in data from System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012.  This latest release of Virtual Machine Manager now allows private clouds to be created and managed on different hypervisor platforms;  Citrix Microsoft Hyper-V and Vmware.  Application Controller also connects to your Azure services using a management certificate (as Operations Manager does) to secure this ..

Delegated users can create or enhance their own services from here. 

However for more control you may wish to create more rigorous but still automated process using your help desk (e.g. System Center Service Manager, Remedy etc.) hooked up to these tools.  For that there is System Center Orchestrator which allows run books to be setup with approval process, to capture additional data such as cost centre department etc. and carry out additional configuration tasks.  

One thing to note that is this is all IT Professional stuff, System Center 2012 is designed for us, not for bank managers, marketeers or accountants. With my business intelligence background I would also recommend that for large and complex organisations you overlay System Center with a BI solution like SharePoint, coupled with web parts for them to be able to initiate service requests. A lot of the tooling for this is already in System Center 2012 e.g. there are optional analysis services cubes in Virtual machine Manager, and extensive reporting services reports in Operations Manager.

So plenty to think about and keep us busy in 2012, and if you want to see some of this in action before trying it out yourselves (System 2012 betas can be downloaded here), you can come to one of our IT Camps on System Center.

In his second guest post Greg Charman from Kelverion has a look at BMC integration.

Many customers have made large investments in both Microsoft System Center and BMC Datacenter Management Tools. Historically integrating these two vendors product sets has been challenging and time consuming.With the purchase of Opalis (an IT Process Automation Solution) in December 2009 and the release of Opalis 6.3, but particularly with its replacement System Center 2012 Orchestrator, Microsoft has laid the foundations for a much easier and speedier interaction between the two product suites.

The challenge with any integration and automation product is keeping the interfaces to vendor products current and when a vendor has many management products, like BMC does, this only becomes more complex. In the newer versions of their Enterprise Management products BMC have updated the product APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to web services APIs. This now means you can now build your own interaction to a BMC application in Orchestrator if it has a web service API using the Standard Activities within Orchestrator particularly the Invoke Web Services Object. To create a DIY interaction with a web service API in Orchestrator you need to have completed the following tasks in your runbooks:

1. Understand in the Published API so that you know which methods to use interact with the API and know how the results will be returned to you from the API.

2. Create a Pre-processing Runbook to generate the Security Key which has to be passed to the Insert Into or Extract From API Interaction Object

3. Create the Insert Into API Interaction Object which formats data from the published data bus into the right XML format for the API method

4. Create the Extract From API Interaction Object which submits the correct XML format for the API method so that the data you want is extracted.

5. Create a Post Processing Runbook to manipulate the output of the API extract call into a format which is easily useable within Orchestrator

This DIY solution often takes 3+ days to create, per interaction you want to achieve with the target system. This is fine, in principal, if you only want to do one or two simple interactions with the target system but if you are looking at say a Service Desk application as a target you won’t be looking at just one or two interactions, you will want many interactions; create incident, update incident, close incident, create change, update change, close change etc.

However if building it yourself all sounds too complicated then there is an alternative, Kelverion announced recently the planned availability of 4 new Integration Packs (IPs) for both Microsoft System Center 2012 Orchestrator and Opalis 6.3. Kelverion already have a close partner relationship with Microsoft, including the development of third party Integration Packs, and have partnered with BMC to bring the new IPs to market for the benefit of joint Microsoft and BMC customers.

The new IPs announced target integration with:

• BMC Atrium CMDB 7.6 - Federates data from across IT into a single, logical data store.

• BMC Bladelogic Server Automation 8.1 - Management and enforcement of server configuration changes

• BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.5 and 7.6 - Platform for managing Service Management business processes

• BMC Event Manager 7.4 - Proactively correlates and prioritizes events within a real-time business context

Beta Release Schedule Update

• BMC Atrium for Opalis 6.3 Released

• BMC Bladelogic - Released (Opalis and Orchestrator versions)

• BMC Remedy February 2012 (Opalis and Orchestrator versions)

• BMC Event Manager February 2012 (Opalis and Orchestrator versions)

• BMC Atrium for Orchestrator March 2012.

Summary

If these integration packs are of interest to you and you want to know more updates will be posted at http://www.kelverion.com/new-integrations/ or you can contact David Wooster for more information.

Editors note Kelverion have also written quite a few of the new Orchestrator Integration Packs for Microsoft, and you’ll see these being released as we gat closer to the final release of of System Center 2012 itself

Following on from my last post about getting started with System Center 2012 Orchestrator, I asked a good friend of mine Greg Charman from Kelverion, to share some of his experience.

 

System Center 2012 Orchestrator and its predecessor Opalis 6.3 are a very new subject to many IT Professionals and using IT Process Automation tools is not just as easy as install them and then learn on the job. Each ITPA tool is fully customizable to support the business process you wish to implement so they largely start as a blank sheet of paper.

It is very easy to install Orchestrator or Opalis and create simple workflows but very quickly people find themselves hitting problems when they want to do more complex activities like branching, looping, persisting data and monitoring process completion. There are pitfalls to be avoided when implementing the solution and although some information exists, the reasons why you should avoid these and the correct approaches are not so well documented.

After more than 4 years of using and implementing Opalis and Orchestrator I have learn what to do and not do to make the implementation successful. Some of the key points for success are as follows.

Things to do before you start:

1. Configure the Designer Client – in Orchestrator and Opalis you can define the behaviour of the Runbook/Policy Designer Client. There are a number of settings you can adjust but the key ones you want to set are;

• Turn on Show Link Labels – Then you will be able to see the Labels that have been added to the Links in the runbooks
• Turn on Automatic check out – The benefit with Auto Checkout is that it is easy in Orchestrator to make modifications to a Runbook and then find you haven’t checked it out which means all your changes are lost. Orchestrator does not prompt you to Checkout if you try to make a change.

Things to be avoided:

1. Counters - Never use Counters in Orchestrator as they are Global Counters and can thus be modified by any Runbook at any time. You cannot therefore rely on their value at anyone point unless you are running in a Single Thread. This defeats the fundamental benefit of Orchestrator - parallel execution and multi-threading.

2. Variables - Variables in Orchestrator are also Global. When you export a Runbook all the variables in Orchestrator are exported not just the ones in use in the Runbook, it is therefore very easy to pollute your installation with variables gained from imported Runbooks. Therefore use them sparingly; they are ideal for Database Server Names, Table Names etc.; which will be used in many runbooks.

3. Text Files for data storage or processing – using text files for persisting data or data manipulation in a Runbook is a recipe for disaster. Text files can only be accessed by one process at a time, the file is locked whilst interaction takes place, you therefore force Orchestrator to become Single Thread. This defeats the fundamental benefit of Orchestrator - parallel execution and multi-threading. You will also find you will do a huge amount of post processing manipulation when you try and extract the data back out of the text file and the post processing is not a simple or pretty activity to implement in Orchestrator.

Best Practices:

1. Implement Orchestrator with a Runtime Database – if you want to persist data, have a run time variable in a Runbook, dynamic input data, complex look up logic, audit History, you are struggling to parse data or have got XML/CSV as an input or have got to manipulate the data, then put it in a Microsoft SQL Server Database and use the Database Activities to process it.

Why put it in a Microsoft SQL Server Database? Because all the database objects are much more powerful against Microsoft SQL than any other database type.
You design this database to meet the needs of the IT Processes you are automating in Orchestrator and the needs of the Runbooks you are creating.

2. Keep Monitor Runbooks very short - Got a Runbook which starts with Monitor some enterprise tool and when new/update event do something?

Keep the workflow very short for maximum performance. Grab the event and write it to a Microsoft SQL Server Database and use a Database Activity to process it. This way there is less chance of Orchestrator missing a new event because it is still busy processing the last set of events.

3. If you are not already a database guru then Kelverion also offers a Database Integration Pack for Orchestrator and Opalis, which gives you easy script free interaction with databases from within Orchestrator or Opalis and formats the columns selected from a Database Table into individual items of published data – no more need for the dreaded [Field(…..)] statement.

Summary

It is difficult in a blog to emphasise how powerful Orchestrator becomes when implemented with its own run time database. There has been nothing I haven’t been able to achieve using Orchestrator and a runtime database but there has been many instances where things could not be achieved if a database was not in use.

There is a good Microsoft MVP book by SAMS press called System Center Opalis Integration Server 6.3 Unleashed which provides information and guidance on Opalis implementation. Although written for Opalis all the principals apply to Orchestrator.

If you don’t fancy learning everything from a book or you would like more hints and tips then Kelverion provide a range of training courses and offer bespoke training offering based around specific customer requirements. Kelverion is an established systems integration and software development organisation specializing in IT Process Automation solutions, founded in April 2010 by previous employees of Opalis.

For more information on Kelverion Training and our other offerings got to www.kelverion.com/itpa

One of my frustrations to date when showing off System Center 2012 is that it doesn’t quite fit together yet; each of the individual products is in beta and works pretty well, however joining them up is not there yet.  This is not because there’s a flaw in the line up or missing functionality, it’s just that the bit that really makes System Center an integrated suite, namely System Center Orchestrator hasn’t had the integration packs available for it to work with the other new versions of the suite.  Until now that is..

The new 2012 integration packs are available here, and in time will be incorporated into the System Center 2012 unified installer when the suite is released to manufacture (rtm).

The integration packs then need to be applied to Orchestrator (this can be downloaded individually or as part of the whole suite here). This is process is broadly similar to how you setup management packs in Operations Manager if you are familiar with that, but I thought it would be useful if I walked you through it, and I have put a slide deck together of the steps to get you started including setting up Virtual Machine manger 2012 inside the Runbook designer once the IP is configured..

One thing I find a bit counter intuitive when designing run books is the way you pick up variables in each step, so I wanted to put that in the deck as well.  The trick is to remember to right click on any filter or text in any of the details properties in an Orchestrator activity to pick up variables that are flowing along as each activity in a Runbook is processed. For example in this screenshot I want to stop a VM and to do that I need the VM ID.  Upstream from this step I have entered a VM name and then used an intermediate step to get the properties of that VM including the ID.

and from there you can select any variable on the Orchestrator data bus to match against or use

If I then test the Runbook it will run for real and I can see that it’s calling Virtual machine Manager to stop my VM by opening the Virtual Machine Manager console and looking at the most recent job..

I can go on from here and maybe reach out to  Operations Manager and put the server into maintenance mode or hook the Runbook up to Service Manager and hook it up to a service request but you get the idea.

To conclude this is one of the key ingredients in Microsoft’s Private Cloud and now the IPs are there to make calls to the other parts of the System Center suite.  I’ll be showing this off on our IT Camps as we tour the UK this spring/summer and there will be more in depth content on line at the Microsoft Virtual Academy

Albert Einstein once remarked that you don’t need to remember everything, you just needed to remember where to look.  When it comes to learning about Microsoft products this can sometimes be harder than it ought to be and what resources there are can be fragmented so you do have to remember where to look.  That’s why I have been trying to get you to remember look at the Microsoft Virtual Academy as that is a great learning resource for all things cloud including, Azure, Hyper-V and more recently System Center.  

However that resource is never going to have anything on the other technical love of my life, SQL Server, and getting up to speed on that is hard if only because it has been around for longer and you will want to learn about the version you have and possibly the version you would like to have. Until now that is because the some of my colleagues in the UK have  decided to do something about that and created the Application Platform Knowledge Hub.  A quick glance at the opening screen gives you the idea:

As you can see each topic (in my cases High Availability) has content for SQL Server 2005 through to SQL Server 2012, and is skill ranked as well so you can get as deep into a topic as you need to an also find that whitepaper to waggle under your managers nose that he’ll understand.

Like the Microsoft Virtual Academy there is also a section on Azure and because this is hub is about development there also some good resources on there about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

So now you’ll only have remember where this portal is and all I’ll have to do is to remember I wrote this post!

This is a guest post by Allan Mitchell MVP, and one of the top speakers at SQL Bits

 

The launch of SQL Server 2012 is not too far away and the SQL Server team have been hard at work adding new functionality and also improving upon existing features.  I am lucky enough to have been working with SQL Server since version 6.5 and have seen it gradually become the great product that it is today and will be in the future.
My passion has always been around data quality and the movement of data.  Microsoft in SQL Server 7 introduced a new tool called Data Transformation Services (DTS) for which I still have a special place in my heart.  In SQL Server 2005 they completely rewrote this tool and gave it a new name "SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).  SSIS was a paradigm shift from DTS and took some getting used to.  SSIS in SQL Server 2012 is certainly a release that improves on the existing release and this article will put forwards my two favourite things in SQL Server 2012 SSIS.  Your choices may vary but this is my article and I get to choose my two things ;)

The SSIS Server and Catalog.

At first I did not like this at all.  When I spoke to people like Matt Masson on the development team I was never very positive about it.  Looking back though I think I was being stubborn and not wanting to accept change.  I am quite happy to admit I was wrong.  It is my opinion that if you want to use SSIS in SQL Server 2012 properly and get the most from it then you are going to want to look at the new Project Deployment mode and the SSIS Server.

Using the SSIS Server and catalog gives you a huge amount of functionality including but not limited to;

• Data Taps: The ability at runtime to "tap" into a part of the data flow and extract the data flowing through.  Incredibly useful for debugging.

 

• Environments:  Think configurations but better.  You create an environment in which your package will run.  You specify values for parameters and properties in your package and map in them from the environment and off you go. 

 

• Reporting:  Reporting in a version of SSIS prior to SQL Server 2012 was pretty basic, frustrating and even bordering on pointless.  Not any more.  The team have obviously thought about what we want (and they have been told through Connect).  Now you can get proper SSRS reports showing you phases in your package along with durations and trending of performance over executions. 

WARNING.  If you are an SSRS pro then the reports are functionally very good, aesthetically not so much.  You may also want to look at Jamie Thomson's reporting pack to compliment what comes out of the box

The User Interface.

For a long time now I have been telling anybody who will listen that the weakest part of SSIS is the Business Intelligence Development Studio environment.  Once SSIS is into runtime it is pretty stable and does exactly what it was asked (not necessarily what you wanted, but what you asked).
The SSIS toolbox for example is currently mashed in with the Visual Studio toolbox meaning a whole load of things have to be loaded that have no relevance to the package you are creating
Precedence constraints just disappear from the UI.  They are there underneath the covers you just can't see them.  To this day I have no idea why this happens occasionally but what I do know is that it is almost impossible to develop a package when this happens and you have to restart the package for the designer to redraw the lines.
The UI for developing SSIS packages in SQL Server 2012 has been rewritten in the Windows Presentation Framework.  The edges on the tasks and data flow components have been rounded off resulting in a 10% improvement in speed due to less resistance (only kidding about the speed improvement).  The UI has the look and feel of a proper Visual Studio UI.  The SSIS toolbox lives by itself.  No more loading of not-needed components.  I am very happy with the new UI, very happy indeed.

Summary

This article has covered two of my favourite things coming in SSIS for SQL Server 2012.  By no means are these the only changes.  Go take a look at parameters for instance.  The SSIS team have been hard at work for this release.  There are some things I don't like but there probably always will.  That's why we have Microsoft Connect so we can tell the team about these "opportunities" for improvement.

• Great SSIS Resources
      The official SSIS team blog
•    Jamie Thompson MVP with his SSIS Junkie’s blog 

Go on, give it try and download SQL Server 2012 RC0

Back in December Simon and I invited a few friends along to help us beta test a different kind of event, an IT Camp.  The idea is simply to do smaller, more interactive events where discussions and questions are encouraged.  The presenters, (Simon and I) being a bit more in the background.  The first of these events went down very well, but in this spirit of interaction we were keen to understand what we could do to make the camp even better.   Having made some changes based on the feedback from that test event we are now ready to go on the road and our events team are looking out for regional venues so we can come and see you rather than you travelling down to London or Reading.

There are actually four types of camps designed to complement the online resources we have on the Microsoft Virtual Academy site:

Camp 1. Server Virtualisation. This is for those unfamiliar with the latest version of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2.  We will explore all the basics including networking and clustering and run through a short introduction to using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Camp 2. An Introduction to Microsoft’s Private Cloud.  This builds on the first camp and explores all the  key features in System Center 2012 that enable cloud like processes and capabilities in your own data centre.

Camp 3. Server Migration.  Specifically the tricks and tools from migrating your various server workloads from Windows Server 2003 to 2008 R2,

Camp 4.  Consumerisation of IT.  This explores the issues and benefits of integrating your users’ own devices with your infrastructure, such as slates, smart phones and laptops.

You’ll see more coming out about this in the TechNet newsletter and the various dates and venues are on the IT Camps page on the UK TechDays site, shortly, but I wanted to specifically mention that the first of these camps will take place in Leeds on 28th Feb.  This will be a  Camp 1 server virtualisation event. Our plan on the day is to work together to build a Hyper-V cluster using your machines as well as our own kit. You don’t have to use your own machine if you don’t want to but if you have a laptop with 20Gb of free space on and 4Gb of RAM and it can run Hyper-V then we’ll take you thought the steps to set up Hyper-V without affecting what you have on there already.

If you follow the links you’ll see that this event is by invitation and this is because we want to try and ensure the right people attend as it is limited to 70 delegates.  So who are the right people?  For this event it will be Techie IT professional types, who are only now becoming interested in what Microsoft is doing with server virtualisation, perhaps because they are using something else or their business for whatever reason is only now considering a move to use this technology, i.e. it’s not really for Hyper-V experts.  If this sounds like you or a colleague then drop me an e-mail and I’ll send you the code, and you’re in.

It’s Work Anywhere week but working anywhere isn’t working everywhere. By that I mean that not all organisations allow their staff to work away from the office even where this is possible and even sensible. So here’s my bluffers guide as I do this quite a lot. At first sight working away form the office might seem all good for the employee with no obvious benefit to the employer, however the reality is that there are downsides for employees and loads of benefits for employers.

Lets look at the employer first and the downsides of Anywhere working.  I guess the obvious concern is loss of control, not knowing if your staff are doing what they ought to, and vague concerns about productivity. 

However there is a big price to be paid for having all your staff on site, not least the cost of that site. If a business implements anywhere working then it might only need desks for 60% of the workforce and not 80-90%.  My counter to the productivity argument is threefold:

1. Your workforce are dependant on personal and public transport to get to work and failures in these also lead to a loss in productivity.  If I cast my mind back to the snow and ash clouds last year, our anywhere working and unified communications meant that very few customer meetings and events were cancelled.

2. Work Anywhere doesn’t just mean working at home.  If your workforce can get unified communications and some sort of VPN access to get at internal resources form a remote location. They can work on a client site, at public events like trade shows, and in coffee shops, hotels etc.  In my own case I worked at my mum’s house while she got over a cancer op at the start of the year, so I could care for here and get stuff done, and then when I was at a big show at Olympia the following week I could access internal SharePoint sites to get answers I needed to the many questions I was being asked .

3. The other major loss of productivity is sickness and if you can work at home in a reduced capacity they won’t bring their germs to work and affect the rest of their team.  This happens all the time at Microsoft and its not just colds it’s post trip jetlag, sports injuries and in my case working at home after an emergency appendectomy.  Of course this requires two trust between managers and staff but that should be there anyway. Migraines are  my problem here and I can just work round them with the trust in place between me and my manager.

The upsides for us employees are all pretty obvious, in my case looking after mum after her cancer surgery,  burning the midnight oil in the week to  make a swift exit on Friday lunchtime, and working in New Zealand for a day  while on holiday as you can’t really have 5 weeks off back to back without doing a check-in and some e-mail triage.  Another great benefit is having stuff delivered at home rather than endless trips to the post office track down your latest Amazon & EBay purchases.  However there are some downsides:

• It’s all too easy to check e-mail whenever so you need to set aside time to unplug from the office
• If you are unable to work you need to say so and take time out, no one is indispensable! 
• You’ll save money and a lot of time by not commuting to work but season tickets on public transport aren’t economical for a once or twice a week trip to the office.
• Another cost is that your energy bills at home will rise as you’ll need to heat & power home office.
• Most employers will cover your broadband costs, but the cost of having your own home office will be down to you

So  I think Anywhere working is a good thing and while I am more than happy to work for Microsoft even if they didn’t support this, I am more effective and productive because they do in principle and in practice.  Check out Anywhere Working for more on this and encouraging your organisation to think about it, for example I punched in my daily commute and assumed I would work at home 3 days a week..

Data Transformation Services is the bit of SQL Server that helped pay for my house, car and some really nice holidays.  I first got to use it some 12 years ago and after working with BCP (bulk copy program) it was just so easy, I was sucking data out of AS400/RPG, Oracle and Sybase to create data warehouses in weeks rather than months. However to be fair it did have its faults,  but for a free utility bundled with SQL Server (7 & later) there was no comparison.

However those faults became more important as it was used more widely and it lacked many of the capabilities of the standalone tools that were also around at the time:

• It didn’t really have many good transformation tools so you either wrote your own in ActiveX or you did the work in views/ procedures on your target database.  This generally resulted in lots of temporary tables in your data warehouse and lots of disk activity.
• Flow control was pretty basic, for example if you wanted to pick up and load all the excel files in a folder, you would have to do that in code yourself.
• Parameter passing was pretty basic if memory serves.
• The moving form development  to test, to production was tricky because data sources were fiddly to manage.  In fact I remember embarrassing myself by issuing a truncate table statement on the source instead of the target at one client site, fortunately they had backups! 

DTS Packages like this can be really hard to understand (thanks to Neeraj Nagpal for the screenshot)

There was no easy way to modify DTS to add these capabilities and so SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) came out with SQL Server 20005 late in 2005.  However You could still run those old DTS packages  inside SSIS and even edit them if you needed to (details are here for running DTS in SQL Server 2008 R2).  This side by side capability continued in SQL Server 2008 & R2 but DTS was  specified as a deprecated feature in SQL Server 2008 and this is advanced warning that running DTS packages won’t be supported in the next version.  That next version SQL Server 2012 is now out in beta  and as stated there is no support for DTS in it.   

I first wrote a post about this problem nearly four years ago,  and my advice at the time was to do a gradual migration from DTS to SSIS where when a significant change was needed to a DTS package you would reengineer it in SSIS.  Another option is to use DTS xChange from Pragmatic Works which does cost money but makes a very professional job of automating the conversion into a well designed SSIS package with good design and proper logging. Finally you could just get in some data warehousing experts and they’ll do the work for you.

Whatever you decide DTS is pretty nearly dead, and while I do have a soft spot for it, once I learnt SSIS I realised how much was missing in DTS.

I have spent a lot if time recently briefing Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) on SQL Server 2012,so I thought a consolidated post on the subject might be useful for those planning to develop solutions on top of SQL Server 2012. 

New Features that will just work

By this I mean there are some new things in SQL Server which you can take advantage of without changing your application.

Always On allows you to make an application highly available by combining the best parts of mirroring and clustering without the need to have a SAN or other shared storage. Not this is in enterprise edition.

Report Alerting allows end users to setup conditions in simple interface on any report and get an email when those conditions are met.  This needs SQL Server standard & SharePoint Foundation (the free one) or higher.

New Features that you can take advantage of in your application

Development  SQL Server now has SQL Server data tools that you can deploy to Visual Studio 2010 to make application lifecycle management easier. For example simple tools to edit and compare schemas and data tier applications to make deployment of your application easier.  There is also Distributed Replay, which allows captured profiler traces to be replayed on another environment which might be a later version of SQL server or simply a test server. the tools can either be installed as part of installing SQL Server or via the web platform installer

Security.  The key security feature in SQL Server 2012 for ISVs will be contained database security which will allow you to have all the security credentials built into the database you are using.

File Table.  This builds on filestream to expose a new type of table a file table as a folder that can be used as any normal file folder except that each file and subfolder will now be stored as a row in the File Table.  This might be useful in storing any unstructured data as part of your application.  Note that full text search and the new semantic search work well with File Tables. I have post here on setting that up too

T-SQL. There are a few new functions in T-SQL, that might be relevant.

Self Service BI

In many situations the end user will want to combine data from your application with other sources.  The new self service BI capabilities in SQL Server 2012 can make it easier for users to do this in Excel and for this work to be scaled up and deployed to the rest of the business. To get the best out of this in your application you might consider:

• Creating a suite of reports designed to expose the dimension type information (product lists, chart of accounts etc.) that can then be consumed by the user as odata feeds in PowerPivot for Excel (odata is built into reporting services). 
• Creating a BI Semantic model to map how your data is structured and add extra business logic (calculations and aggregations) so that business users can quickly build their own analytics and report in such tools as the new Power View.  note: This requires SQL Server BI edition and SharePoint enterprise

What won’t work

There are a only a few things that won’t work in SQL Server 2012 that are in SQL Server 2008 R2. Microsoft has a process for announcing which features will go; in any given release there are a list of deprecated features, those that won’t be supported in a future release. This means there is plenty of advanced warning, both to stop using the feature if you are already and not to use a deprecated feature in any new design work.

In SQL Server the list of features that are no longer supported is very minor; i.e. if it works in SQL Server 2008 / SQL server 2008 R2 it will also work in SQL Server 2012:

• System stored procedures:
  • sp_ActiveDirectory_Obj
  • sp_ActiveDirectory_SCP
  • sp_ActiveDirectory_Start
• the Surface area configuration (SAC) tool
• and various command line switches to install SQL Server so if you are deploying SQL Server as part of an application you’ll need to change the install script. I mention this because various tools like the upgrade assistant will pick up what code is in your database and profiler and the SQL Server deprecated features object will track your usage of features that are going to be obsolete, there aren’t really any tools to check your installation process.

Upgrade Advisor and Upgrade Assistant

Two confusingly named tools exist to put some science into your upgrade planning, the SQL Server Upgrade Advisor is a Microsoft tool, and the Upgrade Assistant is also free and provided by a top gold partner Scalability Experts.  The Upgrade which does a high level check of compatibility issues moving from one version to another, and the Upgrade Assistant is a detailed tool for preparing making trace replays to confirm that the code that is actually executing in an application works in the new version, so this can be used to track an installation code executing in multi tier applications as well as the objects inside any given database.  If you’re an ISV you’ll probably want to use both in your testing.

DTS

DTS won't be supported in SQL Server 2012 for more on this check TechNet and my post on the subject.

 Anyway I hope that’s useful, full details on SQL Server 2012 Editions & Licensing are here, and for more information on those new features visit the main SQL Server 2012 Resource Centre.

Simon and I have spent most of last week on stand duty at BETT one of the largest education events in the world. We were there to field questions from teachers and some of the hardest working IT Professionals, those supporting the IT in schools.  Agility is essential to cope with the new influx of students every year as well as is the need to deploy every more applications to keep up with the latest standards for the curriculum and the way each subject is taught.  Some of these questions are relevant to all of us so I thought I would post some of the discussions..

Teaching the next generation of IT Professionals. 

There was a lot of coverage in the press last week about teaching coding and development as part of ICT, however I had two separate requests from ICT teachers about teaching how to maintain and fix problems on PCs, because that’s what their students had asked for.  We discussed setting up virtual machines on Hyper-V and using snapshots to allow a damaged desktop to be fixed and then being reset with the problem for the next lesson.  I also think some of the information on clustering and virtual machines on the Microsoft Virtual Academy could be reused in class rooms. 

Remote Desktop Services & App-V.

One way to deal with the problem of matching up students and teachers to the applications they need , irrespective of where they are working is to use App-V (application virtualisation) as this deploys a virtual copy of an application to a desktop based on the groups a user belongs to i.e. it won’t show up in programs in control panel and can run side by side alongside earlier versions of the same application which it would normally conflict with.

Another approach is to use Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and it was no surprise at BETT to see all the hardware vendors sporting their latest thin client devices, and personally I like the LG and Samsung offerings where the thin client was just part of the LCD panel.  However not every application likes running as a remote desktop and you can end up creating a lot remote desktops for each type of user.  The trick here is to use App-V with RDS so that the applications run virtually inside the remote desktop session and a given user only gets the applications they need even though you only have one or two standard desktops in RDS (the guidance on how to do this is here). 

Another good thing about RDS is that it reduces heat in the classroom if thin client devices are used and also reduces the background noise, although the noise from pupils will still be the same!  It is possible to implement RDS without also deploying Citrix or Quest technologies on top, however both of these partners’ offerings add ease of use and manageability to what the raw RDS experience delivers.

Digital Inclusion

RDS can be setup so that these personalised remote desktops are available to staff & students working at home or other locations and this means they can use their own devices to interact with a school.  Of course laptops are expensive and can be difficult to justify on a limited budget, so to level the playing field there is Get On Line @ Home, which provides affordable reconditioned hardware with Windows 7 + Office 2010 with telephone technical support included.

..and Finally

One of my colleagues was asked for a whitepaper so he naturally wanted to know on what topic as we have loads of them,  the answer came back “no I just want some whitepaper” and the delegate grabbed some blank A4 sheets off the stand!

If ITIL is the Why , the What and the When of IT operations System Center provides the how..

 

I have been quite harsh with the tick boxes here, for example you could argue that part of Service improvement could be to redesign a process and this could be done in System Center (Orchestrator), and validation and testing management is in yellow as this requires Visual Studio Team Foundation Suite with its Lab Manager extensions to Virtual Machine Manager.  However I can’t see System Center being used for evaluation management particularly as one of the choices being evaluated could be System Center itself!

ITIL is vendor agnostic, and so it isn’t dependant on anything from Microsoft and because of this it is more focused on the management structure rather than how things get done.  To turn those broad concepts into practical reality in a Microsoft world, there is the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).  This is not a product, it’s a free solutions accelerator designed to help you get the most out of your Microsoft infrastructure using ITIL like best practice, and included in it is a cross reference between MOF 4.0 and ITILv3. 

MOF is constantly updated, not just to keep up with the best practice to deploy the latest versions of SQL Server, Exchange etc. but also  to stay abreast of current infrastructure thinking like Private Cloud. 

No one seems to have time to change how to do IT in a very lean economy and adopt these processes, however we do all seem to have time to rework, patch and fix the the less than efficient methods we have in place today.  Therefore all I am suggesting is to free up a little time planning and getting to grips with ITIL (and MOF if you are a Microsoft based outfit) to save lots of time fixing later, which I believe is more rewarding for you and for your business.

In the last guest blog post from Erin Palmer he looked at how to manage IT chaos with the adoption of ITIL infrastructure.  In this second guest post he takes a more detailed look at five key points from the TWDC case study that can help plan a successful ITIL implementation process of your own.

1. Generate the Buzz

ITIL adaptation takes skilful planning, a strategic implementation schedule, and the participation of key players who will be in full support of the transition. Follow the success of TWDC’s strategy and help your constituents see how the adaption of an ITIL infrastructure can address current IT concerns and will help them use IT more efficiently. Implement a top down educational plan and select key players for advanced training, or bring on talented ITIL leaders with the experience to help make the transition as seamless as possible. Once the people in the organization grasp the positive potential of ITIL for the company’s growth, then the process begins to form a life of its own. This process cannot take place without the commitment to funding resources, time, and human resource development necessary to achieve success.

2. Assemble Powerful Teams

Taking the time necessary to build talented teams with leaders that have both the technical experience and the strong communication skills to articulate the overall vision and goals for the team is essential for success. The TWDC case study underscores the fact that successful ITIL adaptation takes time. Looking at the current role of IT in your organization and being clear about what you would like to see with regard to data management, reporting, efficiency, delivery, maintenance, etc. is vital to building a plan with clear goals and measurable outcomes. Selecting a team that will help you implement the changes necessary to reach your new profit and efficiency goals is easier if you are clear about what you want to truly achieve with the adoption of an ITIL infrastructure. Putting the time in to train and assemble strong leaders for the project will build overall trust in the process and will help safe guard against breaks in service and diminish other challenges as the project gets underway.

3. Keep Clear and Regular Communication a Top Priority

From the moment you start to generate the buzz, until the process is complete and running smoothly, communication is vital to keep all constituents informed and connected to the momentum of the project. Every leader needs to be fully fluent in best practice methods for communicating technical and non-technical aspects of the process to a wide variety of users. The message needs to be adapted to the recipient, not the other way around. Skilled ITIL leaders are aware that the CFO, the help desk worker, and the marketing manager have differing IT related roles and will need to hear about the ITIL infrastructure engagement process in a language that makes sense with examples that are relevant. Throughout the process regular updates and the celebration of milestones builds confidence in the process and builds a more cohesive team.

4. Strategically Build an ITIL that Serves Your Needs

The best part about the ITIL infrastructure is that it is flexible. You can integrate what works without “reinventing the wheel.” Taking time to collect insightful research gained from involving all teams who use IT in the beginning of the project will lead to a stronger ITIL implementation with less adjusting later. Strong ITIL leadership can ensure that the ITIL infrastructure will grow with you. A strategic ITIL infrastructure bolsters revenue by streamlining processes like ordering, and delivering products. Redundancy in storage is decreased thus speeding up servers. Everyday processes like scheduling, stocking inventory, maintaining client communication, performing system maintenance, and generating specific data to track progress in key areas, are all made more efficient, timely, and profitable with ITIL adaptation. Data security also increases with ITIL which can bolster client confidence. In order for ITIL to serve you well, you need to be clear about the realistic goals within your budget and then proceed if the resources are there to support the project.

A strong ITIL infrastructure generates the data that is needed to make maintenance and long term adjustments efficient, leaving more time for growing your business and leading your organization into new markets with confidence. Engaging in industry-wide best ITIL practice methods will help you build the strategy you need to assure you have a successful and integrated ITIL infrastructure with all teams in your organization driving the momentum forward to new goals and profitability. As e-commerce continues to expand and competition in the global market place increases, ITIL data can be a powerful tool to guide your growth. Case studies show that implementing an ITIL infrastructure can increase profitability; these case studies also reveal that the plan takes time, company-wide support, and team cooperation to succeed -three important factors to weigh heavily when considering an ITIL plan for you organization.

 

As I mentioned last time Erin works at Villanova University and this article comes from their new ITIL training course. This course is part of the overall IT Service Management training program.

I have to confess I don’t know too much about the detailed mechanics of ITIL, but I couple of months ago I got chatting to an expert, Erin Palmer from Villanova University in the US, and over the Christmas holidays he’s written up a really good post by way of an  introduction..

 

So you think you have IT chaos to manage? Imagine the IT services needed to tame the chaos of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate of 11 large-scale theme parks, two water parks, over 40 resorts, and a pair of cruise ships – and over 118 million customers annually. Did I mention these services also operate in all time zones across many languages and international borders every day all year long? Can you imagine an IT department of 1000?

These are the statistics from the Walt Disney Company (TWDC) case study as they took on adopting ITIL best practices in the mid-2000’s. Used since the 1980’s in the United Kingdom to manage the IT services of large governmental entities, ITIL has proven its value time and time again in a variety of large, medium, and small business settings worldwide. The IRS which processed over 236 million tax returns and collected more than $2.3 trillion dollars in revenue in the fiscal year 2009 uses ITIL, so does N.A.S.A., and a host of other business entities that aren’t nearly this big or complex. One of the reasons why ITIL structure continues to grow in popularity is that it is adoptable and flexible in nearly any business setting that uses IT to conduct its commerce.

Looking at recent ITIL case studies, several important points emerge when thinking about how ITIL might help you manage the IT chaos in your business setting, no matter how large or small.

1. ITIL processes are flexible and help manage the services IT provides as the business grows:

· Working with existing IT structures, ITIL grows the business efficiently

· Reducing redundant data storage, ITIL saves room on servers

· Centralizing data storage means increased security of company data

· Generating reports for monitoring progress is easier and more efficient with ITIL

· Increasing consistency and dependability is an ITIL goal; business is streamlined

· Maintaining the ITIL is efficient, resulting in less down time and “work-arounds”

2. ITIL best practices generates data to address IT and departmental problems pre-emptively

· Self-monitoring applications reveal areas that need attention before they become a problem

· Generating reports to track how various IT factors work together is easier and you can assess for glitches in the system before they cause a problem

· Measuring data and comparing goals across departments increases productivity and accountability

· Implementing company- wide IT standards and guidelines means less is overlooked, or repeated and that there is increased communication and cooperation among departments regarding company goals

3. Client Trust increases

· Less outages and down-time due to IT issues means increased client satisfaction

· Increased data security is a strong selling point

· ITIL provides strong back-office support which positively impacts the user’s experience

· ITIL means streamlines services that lead to faster response time when a client needs assistance

4. The ITIL structure helps team building

· When company goals are ubiquitous across all sectors progress is easier to monitor

· Each team plays a unique role in reaching company goals and can keep track of contributions toward the goals

· Teams know that company-wide standards are in place so everyone is on a level playing field when striving for a goal

· Reports are easy to generate and share regarding company-wide progress

· Communication between teams and with team leaders is more streamlined so response time can be faster when team members request changes or observe a situation where an IT adjustment would streamline services even more

· Help desk requests are processed more efficiently and data tracks trends that need more careful attention

As a business grows, the chaos of IT grows as well. By implementing an ITIL, not only can you harness some of that chaos, but you can make it work for you. By analysing the huge amount of data available to you in the ITIL framework, more specific reports are possible that indicate progress toward goals. Team building within the company is increased through the implementation of standard language, goals, and processes from one department to the next. Increased efficiency can mean increased profits, a more enjoyable IT experience, increased client satisfaction, and more “free” time for managers to promote company growth and increased profitability.

Even though your company goals may not involve IT that provides a literal thrill ride for your clients, through examining case studies of companies that have successfully adopted ITIL best practices, you may just find that the lucky star you were wishing for is closer than you think. With its internationally recognized standards of best practice, ITIL offers the possibility for unlocking greater potential and momentum for increased growth, efficiency, security, and profitability in your company no matter where you are and what service or product you provide. Chaos in the global marketplace will continue to increase; ITIL offers a proven method for harnessing the chaos and riding it all the way to the bank for those willing to put the time in to prepare, invest in, and utilize an ITIL framework to its fullest potential.

This article was submitted by Villanova University’s new ITIL training course. This course is part of the overall IT Service Management training program.