HVR Failover Runbook The other day, I was messing around with the new Hyper-V Replica feature in my lab.  I quickly came to the conclusion that although it is nice to be able to right-click on a VM in the Hyper-V MMC to initiate a failover, it would...

So I ran into an issue I have run into now twice so in case there is a third time, I can refer back to this entry!  If after installing the Application Web Catalog web site and web service in CM 2012, you receive this when browsing to the site:  ...

In discussing the use of Service Manager for ITIL Service Desk needs, I have had a few customers desire a way to automate the assignment of a helpdesk analyst/technician. Through Service Manager’s workflow features, this is possible to accomplish...

One of my peers, Carmen Crincoli,  on the State/Local Government side shot a short video walking through the process of installing a Hyper-V server remotely to a bare-metal server.  Pretty awesome stuff.  Video can be found here: ...

One of my last webcasts for EDU where I team up with our good friends over at Quest Software (Patrick Rouse and Joe Dylewski).  See the recording and get our presentation here:   https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=16a234bc89d4386c&resid...

…or to put it another way, I have taken a role with my local US Microsoft district, known internally as the ‘North Central’ district or NCD.  The NCD encompasses the states of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota...

If you have nothing better to do on October 11, between 12PM – 1PM Central, why not tune in to my webcast?  In this session I will discuss the benefits of our current (and VERY near future) System Center and Hyper-V technologies.   Below...

It has been a great while since I have been a regular ‘blog poster’ and am looking to change that starting now!  As I continue to work with the US Education team in the area of Datacenter and Management technology, expect to see posts related to...

In System Center Service Manager, as an analyst works on incidents and other items that are related to system – desktops, servers, etc. – there are tasks that are made available within the interface for troubleshooting or other purposes.  For example...

One way I like to use this blog is to post responses to questions I get from my customers.  However, I typically don’t look to post unless the question meets these two pieces of criteria: It does not have a simple answer which can be found easily...

A while back, I posted a few articles on this blog that contained ‘no frills’ steps on how to get ConfigMgr installed, up, and running. Of all the System Center products, ConfigMgr seems to have more moving parts and therefore perceived to...

This is a pretty significant acquisition.  Opalis offers some great IT automation processes that snaps right into key pieces of System Center today (OpsMgr and ConfigMgr) as well as maintains several Integration Packs for some of the most popular...

My teammate Michael Greene created this link - http://bit.ly/edtech-virt – to reference when looking for MSFT Case Studies that reference EDU customers (K-12 and HED) when they involve out virtualization stack (Hyper-V, App-V, etc.) and/or System Center...

So if you want to see some webcasts that I have done recently on the topic of System Center and the like for EDU environments, check out www.educationwebcasts.com .  There you will find several webcasts I have conducted on various aspects of management...

…Really – please don’t!  As you can tell, I have taken a LONG hiatus from blogging these past several months.  No excuse other than just slammed busy and running around the country supporting the US EDU folks to help spread the good word that...

So a few weeks ago, Mr. Joseph Corey at Carnegie Mellon University presented on how they use ConfigMgr to keep their servers in their data centers updated and patched.  As one would imagine, they need to be able to tightly control the window of time...

LABMAN 2009 is slated for June 8-10 and will be held at the University of Notre Dame.  I have presented/attended at this annual event the past two years and find it to be a very nice (and economical) venue catering specifically to those folks tasked...

So I know I blog about once, oh, I don't know, every 2-3 months now!  :)  Anyway, I aim to rectify this as I really should blog more and yes do have a lot of half-blog entries that I just never got around to finishing so stay tuned... In any...

Here are some links to some useful resources to help you further evaluate System Center and other associated Management solutions as discussed during my workshop session at HECC 2008: System Center Homepage:  www.microsoft.com/systemcenter MSFT Virtualization...

So maybe I am the only one that has done this, but I have been dumb enough to now have done this twice so maybe there is someone else out there that is as 'smart' as I am!  In my demo environment, I have an OpsMgr 2007 SP1 RMS on a W03 SP2 server...

Technorati Tags: OpsMgr , ACS , Operations Manager , SecureVantage Our good partners, SecureVantage are going to be conducting free online seminars starting 7/10. To register for these free courses and to receive more information, go here: http://www...

Coming off the LABMAN conference from a few weeks ago, I know many in the EDU community rely on disk protection and lock down tools such as Faronic's DeepFreeze and SteadyState. At the end of last week, we made SteadyState 2.5 available for free download...

The ConfigMgr homepage may not be up to date yet but here is the direct download link to download SP1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5AAE62E8-4B7F-4AF7-BE01-AEFAA4BF059A&displaylang=en This release (among the usual bug fixes...

So I normally do not regurgitate generic technical information that you can find on one of a thousand different blog sites and podcasts unless I feel that there is unique significance to the EDU community. If you attended MMS 2008 or paid attention to...

So on a topic that is not by any means new, however one in which I have been getting a lot of recurring discussions around lately from my customers... So there seems to be a lot of different viewpoints on when or whether to re-package software for the...