I was invited to attend the EMEA Dell Partner Direct conference in Madrid last week, specifically to represent Microsoft, alongside Vmware at a discussion about consumerisation, hosted by Dell Wyse. There has been much written about this, the decline of laptop sales as other form factors such as phones and tablets go from strength to strength, so I don’t intend to paraphrase that.
However one question from the floor got me thinking and it was about the cost and speed of internet connectivity while we are out of the office. Simon and I have a lot of experience of this when we are trying to run our camps and this is despite trying to arrange connection in advance and paying considerably for them. We can also get stuck when we are just trying to do our other work in hotel rooms, at service stations and departure lounges.
So for many of our camps we have our demos with us, and for me this is my mighty “Dell-asaurus” a bright orange laptop (m6500) with 32Gb of RAM 3 x SSDs etc. etc. In fact we normally have several of these beasts to show off things like virtual machine mobility in Windows Server 2012, rather than rely on the servers we have back at the office. However if I am lucky enough to get a decent connection then I can get mail and chat on Lync, and best of all get back to the office file shares, and sites with DirectAccess, because we have standardised on Windows 8 clients with Windows Server 2012 servers.
So my advice is to pray for the connected cloud but plan to use a disconnected device like a PC.
However unless you want to show 20 virtual machines running all at once you don’t need to lug a round a huge laptop to work offline, You could simply carry a properly configured (and encrypted memory stick) with which you can boot from on any Windows 7 or 8 compatible PC. To find out about that and the other things we can do if and when your remote workforce have a connection to the office you’ll need to come to our latest round of Windows 8 IT Pro camps which will be focused on Windows 8 on the enterprise. Actually that also means we’ll be showing you the client aware features of Windows Server 2012 that we left out of our last round of server camps such as:, DirectAccess, Branch Cache, VDI, Dynamic Access Control etc. and so you might also need a laptop if you want to evaluate that ( note you can download a Windows Server 2012 trial here).
Finally if we get good internet at our camps Simon also plans to show you how to work with the Windows 8 store, and PC management using Windows InTune,
Simon and I are doing so many events that frankly our blogs are nearly dying of neglect so I am not even sure if anyone is out there reading this!
I am not apologising because it’s great to be out there meeting people at IT Camps, launch events etc. However not everyone can get to one of those, either because there are leaves on the line or your boss can’t let you out of the office and there’s no budget for travel anyway.
Also our IT camps fill up really fast, on one occasion in just ten minutes after it was published. To overcome this we have been asked if we can record them and to be honest our unplugged style makes each camp very different e.g. what the audience are asking us about, which of our demos work as planned and how much SQL Server Simon lets me talk about
Anyway Marcel our intern has put his foot down and ordered us to do a version of our camps for TechDays Online later this month. So all you need is a comfy chair (but not too comfy), a latte and a laptop. If you watch us live on the day you can ask us questions but if not we will be recording it for posterity.
TechDays will be spread over two days with a half day on each topic about all the stuff we think is jolly exciting..
Day One (30th October)
Day Two (31st October)
In the meantime download the evaluations of Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 or System Center 2012sp1 or tune into MVA so you can ask better questions.
I am being asked more and more often about how to move virtual machines onto Hyper-V and so I wanted to do a definitive post on the tools and techniques to do this. Whatever your reasons for doing this you’ll want to ensure your users have a good experience post migration and the secret to this is to prepare and plan. So step one is to understand what is to be migrated such as the spec of the physical servers and for each virtual machine:
These kinds of things can all be discovered by using the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit(MAP), a free download designed to accelerate your migrations and deployments of any Microsoft technology. It crawls your datacentre with credentials you supply so that it can access such things as what’s running on your Vmware servers, ,the specs of the servers (both physical and virtual) and precisely what OS and software is running on each VM to help you plan migrations and upgrades or just to keep on top of what you have as part of an audit. Note that MAP is continuously updated and already supports migrations to Windows Server 2012 so make sure you pull down the latest version.
However there are things that even MAP doesn’t tell you, for example VMs are often combined to provide n-tier services like SharePoint and it is the overall performance of that service that you’ll want to capture as well as how high availability, disaster recovery and backup are managed. It’s also important to understand who is responsible for each of these services and the business impact of these
Actually the easy bit of the process is the actual conversion of virtual /physical machines and, there are several tools out to convert virtual machines to Hyper-V.
Being ready for Hyper-v is also about the IT guys understanding it. This should just be a conversion process - understanding that the job is the same but is just achieved in a different way using different tools. My top three training tips for getting started with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012:
| would also recommend getting certified and MCSE Windows Infrastructure or MCSE Private Cloud are the two to consider (the latter includes exams on System Center 2012)
I have to be honest I gave up getting certified before I joined Microsoft mainly because the exams didn’t keep up with the release of SQL Server specifically the Business intelligence exams. I then had the same problem as an evangelist I was working on the next release of the SQL or Windows Server.
However that’s changed there are already exams out for SQL Server 2012 and also MCSE is back not just for Server and Desktop but also for the wider private cloud and for SQL Server. These exams are hard and you’ll need to take five of them to get the MCSE badge. Also there are tow MCSE qualifications relevant to SQL Server; data platform and business intelligence which I also wish had existed back in the day.
Unlike some simpler certifications, Microsoft don’t insist you take a course and then get a simple test out at the end of it – how you get up to speed is up to you and we all learn differently so there is no right answer here. This should see an end to the guy who has the certification but can’t really use the relevant technology in the real world. Please come back to me on that only if you have taken one of these new exams yourself.
So if they are hard why bother? You wouldn’t let anyone service the brakes on your car, or fix the electrics in your home and so why shouldn’t we as profession be asked to be competent at what we do as well.
Some employers don’t like to pay for training as they might not see the value or be worried that you will leave as soon as you’re qualified, but training and exams are free in my role, and that’s a huge incentive to stay. If you are a contractor retraining should get you better day rates and given that SQL Server 2012 is just you would have a definite edge.
Indeed there are loads of DBAs out there who may still not even know what is in SQL Server 2012, so I have been asked by Global Knowledge to do a couple of overview webinars on what is new . So if you have missed me at SQL BITS, SQL Relay then please register on 12th September from 13:00 – 14:00 for an hour’s overview of the database enhancements and/or register for the session on 10th October 13:00-14:00 if your focus is business intelligence.
I have been out in the US for the past four weeks, and during my absence the rest of the UK TechNet team have filled my diary with various events including the next series of IT camps. These camps will all be on Windows Server 2012 specifically around how virtualisation changes in this release not just with Hyper-V but other supporting technologies such as SMB 3, Networking, Active Directory and of course Powershell.
The dates and venues for these camps are:
London, 07 September – Cardinal Place
Southampton, 13 September – De Vere New Place
Manchester, 18 September – The Lowry Hotel
Birmingham, 19 September – Etc Venues, Maple House
London, 26 September – Novotel London West
London, 28 September – Etc Venues, One Drummond Gate
If you have been on one of our camps before you will have got the idea that these are designed to be interactive:
Separate to this is the launch event for Windows Server 2012 on 25th September which like our camp on 26th September is at the Novotel in Hammersmith. How does this event differ from a camp? The launch event is a larger scale affair where the agenda is set, the content is at a higher level for a wider audience and runs along similar lines to our other TechDays and launch events we have always done. You could of course go to both and that might be a good thing as the launch event will brief on the why and the what of Windows Server 2012 while at the camp we delve more into the how.
All of these events will fill up fast so you’ll need to book yourself in now, and please, please let us know if you can’t come, not only does it hep us plan but also allows those on our waiting lists to come along.
Over the last month I have been on tour with Dell showing what Hyper-V can do for small/medium businesses, and later this week I’ll be with them in Falmouth. The argument they put forward for Hyper-V is really simple:
You might argue that Hyper-v isn’t as good as the other stuff you can buy, and that’s OK with me as long as you can prove that for the scenario you have in mind you are getting what you are paying for be that performance, security, manageability etc.
As far as performance goes I think that getting an application like SQL Server or Exchange to run in a virtual machine at about 90% of the speed of the physical server the virtual machine runs on is an acceptable loss and is competitive with other hypervisors. You’ll want to test this yourself, but remember to compare like with like for example your compute, network and storage setting should be the same.
You might wonder if Hyper-V is secure? anecdotal evidence suggests that it is as secure as anything else because if it wasn’t you’d be able to reply to this post with the evidence from a competitors website or blog. For best practice on securing Hyper-V please refer to this earlier post of mine
However in the manageability space Hyper-V by itself runs out of road once you end up with more than X virtual machines – where X will depend on your infrastructure the size of the IT team etc. but if you have more than a hundred virtual machines, you’ll need to be very well organised or use additional software. Microsoft have a suite of tools called System Center (currently System Center 2012) and this is also has a DataCenter edition, licensed per physical server allowing you to manage however many virtual machines you have on there, but more importantly it’s designed to manage your applications. By this I mean deploying them, monitoring them, etc. rather than just looking at the health of the virtual machine they are running in.
I don’t see this lack of manageability as a problem for smaller businesses as many of them don’t have that many virtual machines and your organisation might well be OK just using Hyper-V and the tools that Dell provide with their servers and EqualLogic SANs.
Many things change with Windows Server 2012 and while the big headlines have been about massive improvements in scale for the next version of Hyper-V, that’s not really relevant for the smaller business. Rather it is things like multi server management with specific tools in the new Server Manager to monitor, and even update servers in a group. Powershell 3 has extensive support for managing all aspects of your servers from one place.
That’s not to say there’s nothing in Hyper-V, for smaller business and my top 3 would be:
So before you pay out for tools for virtualisation or management, see what you get included in Windows Server, and whether the return you get from additional software be that a different hypervisor or management tools is justified in your business with your IT team.
Finally the release Windows Server 2012 is end of August, so if you are planning a server procurement now you may well find it is shipped with it. To be ready for that rather than just downgrading to an earlier version, have a look at the Windows Server 2012 content on the Microsoft Virtual Academy and/or have download the Release Candidate
Despite common misconceptions Microsoft now has extensive interoperability with open source technologies for example you can run a php application on Azure, get support from us to run RedHat, SUSE or CentOs on Hyper-V and manage your applications from System Center. , So extending this approach to the world of big data with Hadoop is a logical step given the pervasiveness of Hadoop in this space.
Hopefully your reading this because you have some idea of what big data is. If not it is basically an order of magnitude bigger than you can store, it changes very quickly and is typically made up of different kinds of data that you can’t handle with the technologies you already have. For example web logs, tweets, photos, and sounds. Traditionally we have discarded this information as having little or no value compared with the investment needed to process it, especially as it often not clear what value is contained in this information. For this reason big data has been filed in the too difficult drawer, unless you are megacorp or a government.
However after some research by Google, an approach to attacking this problem called map reduce was born. Map is where the structure for the data is declared for example pulling out the actual tweet from a twitter massage, the hashtags and other useful fields such as whether this is a retweet. The reduce phase then pulls out meaning from these structures such as digram ( the key 2 word phrases) sentiment, and so on.
Hadoop uses map reduce but the key to its power is that it applies these map reduce concept on large clusters of servers by getting each node to run the functions locally, thus taking the code to the data to minimise IO and network traffic using its own file system – HDFS. There are lots of tools in the Hadoop armoury built on top of this notably Hive which presents HDFS as a data warehouse that you can run SQL against and the PIG (latin) language where you load data and work with your functions.
What Microsoft are developing in conjunction with a leading Hadoop developer Horton Works is to add integration to Hadoop to make it more enterprise friendly:
At the time of writing there these tools are still in development and there is only “by invitation” admission to Hadoop on Azure. However I wanted to write this up now after a talk I gave a couple of weeks ago at the cloud world forum..
..as looking at the deck in isolation doesn't really help as I don’t tend to use PowerPoint to repeat what I am saying!
23 march 2013: This post has been superseded my post on HDInsight as that is the new name of of tools that have now been released to public beta
It’s sometimes quite difficult to talk and think at the same time, and at our camps last week I think we may have caused some confusion around snapshots for virtual machines (VM) that are in production so I wanted to write this up from first principles so that I have somewhere to refer to in future.
All server virtualisation vendors have a way of creating a file that represents a physical hard disk – a virtual hard disk. In Hyper-V in Windows Server this is referred to as a “VHD” and currently has a .VHD extension limited to 2Tb in size. In Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 you can use this version of VHD so your existing VMs will work, but there is also the newer VHDX format which goes up to 64TB.
VHDs come in three flavours:
Fixed. You declare their size and this space is reserved at creation time. This is the fastest VHD as there is no overhead in growing the disk and if the VHD is created on a well optimised physical disk it will reside on contiguous blocks as well. You can expand these disks later if needed, but remember you will also need to go into the VHD and extend the volumes on it to get the operating system to use it as well Dynamic. As the name suggests these expand as required, and in fact they are tiny to begin with no matter what size you declare. There is a background process to expand them as needed so the guest operating system is never aware that the specified maximum size isn’t really there yet. However there may come a moment when the physical disk may run out of space in which case your VMN will stop gracefully until this is resolved. Differencing. In this scenario you have a parent VHD from which you create a new child VHD into which any changed data goes. For example my parent VHD might have a sysprepped Windows Server installation on and then as the VM comes up for the first time all the changes get written in to the child VHD, the parent never changes. This is important as you can then create another child form the same parent to create another windows server VM. This saves me loads of disk space on my demo rig, but the performance is not as high as it would be for a fixed disk and the savings in disk decline over time as each child VM would need to patched and service packed, as the parent cannot be changed. Differencing disk really come into their own for Virtual Desktop infrastructure where you have lots of windows 7 VMs that are little different form each other.Note also the at a differencing disks themselves can
Fixed. You declare their size and this space is reserved at creation time. This is the fastest VHD as there is no overhead in growing the disk and if the VHD is created on a well optimised physical disk it will reside on contiguous blocks as well. You can expand these disks later if needed, but remember you will also need to go into the VHD and extend the volumes on it to get the operating system to use it as well
Dynamic. As the name suggests these expand as required, and in fact they are tiny to begin with no matter what size you declare. There is a background process to expand them as needed so the guest operating system is never aware that the specified maximum size isn’t really there yet. However there may come a moment when the physical disk may run out of space in which case your VMN will stop gracefully until this is resolved.
Differencing. In this scenario you have a parent VHD from which you create a new child VHD into which any changed data goes. For example my parent VHD might have a sysprepped Windows Server installation on and then as the VM comes up for the first time all the changes get written in to the child VHD, the parent never changes. This is important as you can then create another child form the same parent to create another windows server VM. This saves me loads of disk space on my demo rig, but the performance is not as high as it would be for a fixed disk and the savings in disk decline over time as each child VM would need to patched and service packed, as the parent cannot be changed. Differencing disk really come into their own for Virtual Desktop infrastructure where you have lots of windows 7 VMs that are little different form each other.Note also the at a differencing disks themselves can
I mention this because taking a checkpoint/ snapshot of a VM is like using a parent disk - all the changes to a VM after a snapshot is taken are written to a new VHD (You’ll see this on your physical disks with a .AVHD extension where you specified to save your snaphots). If I create a subsequent snapshot then another AVHD is created and changes are then written to this newer AVHD file. If I delete a snapshot on a VM running in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 nothing really happens until the VM is stopped and restarted. At that time the data in the AVHD is merged into the parent be that an earlier AVHD representing a snapshot or the actual VHD itself. In other words you wont get the disk space back from a snapshot until reboot and moreover Hyper-V needs some additional disk space to do this merging. This changes in Windows Server 2012 in that merging will occur as soon as you delete the snapshot i.e. whether the VM is running or not.
So having understood all of that what about snapshots in production? Yes definitely as a fall back for applying changes to production but NOT as a backup or your only DR solution for mission critical services, which was the point Simon and I were trying to make at the IT Camp. For one thing you may have a multi-tier service that will respond well to rolling back one of its constituent VMs or there might be time sensitive code in there that will be confused when you revert to a snapshot. Also having a disk with snapshots in is slower than a fixed disk so there might be performance considerations until you can restart the VM and remove the snapshot. As I say this last problem goes away in Windows Server 2012 as snapshots get deleted while the VM is running, so you only have to retain a snapshot until you are sure the change you have made is working as expected.
The definitive Q&A on Snapshots is here on TechNet, and you can find out more about what’s new in Windows Server 2012 here as well as download the Release Candidate.
Back in the day I worked with this amazing guy James O’Neill (@jamesoneill) who really got into PowerShell and had it doing all sorts of clever things like geo tagging his dive photos based on data form his watch and camera. On the serious side he developed a PowerShell Configurator (which is still on Codeplex)with which you could manage a server core installation spin VM and change their properties. Sadly James is no longer at Microsoft, but hopefully he likes where PowerShell 3 in Windows Server 2012 is going, indeed some of the commands bear a striking similarity to his configurator.
My point here is that in Windows Server 2012 PowerShell is now embedded even more deeply in the operating system, so you can do far more, far more easily. My three simple examples are:
New simple commands:
Where James or you had to get deep into wmi calls to get stuff done with Hyper-V for example, there are now simple commands e.g.
get-vm
Which returns a list of virtual machines
Simple syntax
If you look at any serious Powershell 2 script you’ll see $_. cropping up somewhere. Essentially that is just a self reference to the object you are working on. For example if I then pipe the output of get-vm into a query to find out which VMs are enabled for Replica in Windows Server 2012 I would type ..
get-vm | where {$_.ReplicationState –eq ‘disabled’}
However this can be simplified In Powershell 3 to
get-vm | where ReplicationState –eq ‘disabled’
Simple testing
I like the new –whatif switch as in
checkpoint-vm –name “DC01” –whatif
will tell me what the command will do.
Then there’s the new version scripting tool PowerShell ISE in Windows Server 2012
and as you can see it has :
So I am now officially a PowerShell convert, though it will be some time before I would claim I am an expert.
To try this stuff I used Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate with the Hyper-V role enabled
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
EXEC sys.sp_configure ‘Contained database authentication’, 1
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
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
USE Master
ALTER DATABASE [DeepFat] SET ‘containment = PARTIAL WITH NO_WAIT
If I then create a login..
USE [DeepFat] CREATE USER [Deepfat] WITH PASSWORD = ********
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 )
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:
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:
4-3 recommendations for securing the virtual machines themselves
4-4 recommendations for securing a virtual desktop infrastructure
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:
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:
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
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
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
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
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):
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 premises, 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.
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 be 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 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 be 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.
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
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
• 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.
• 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;
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.
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!