The Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Packs includes the following features:

• Local and Remote Monitoring of an Agent’s Health

• Operations Manager agents monitor themselves for events and performance indicators that signal an issue with the agent’s health.
• Management servers also maintain an external perspective of an agent’s health via the Health Service Watcher.
• The ‘Agent Health State’ view provides a side-by-side dashboard of both perspectives on the agent.

• Optional, Automatic Agent Remediation Capabilities

• If the Health Service Watcher determines that an agent is unhealthy, a series of diagnostics and recoveries can be enabled to further diagnose the problem and event take actions to attempt to fix the problem (e.g. Ping the server to see if it is completely offline, start a stopped agent, trigger a reinstall, etc.). Refer to the management pack guide for more details.
• Agents are monitoring their own process to ensure that memory utilization is not sustained at unacceptable levels. If this condition is detected then the agent will automatically restart itself to force the freeing up of memory.

• Detection of Problems and Misconfigurations with Run As Accounts and Profiles

• Checks are run on a regular basis to detect if any of the management group’s “Windows” type Run As Accounts have credentials which are about to expire. Alerts will be raised, and where possible this will be done in advance of the credentials expiring to avoid outages.
• Alerts will be raised if any errors are encountered during the distribution of Run As Accounts.

• Monitoring of problems with Running Workflows in Management Packs

• Numerous rules are provided to detect if workflows within management packs are failing. Examples of workflows include discoveries, rules, monitors, etc. Failures can range from bad configurations on the workflows themselves, script failures, permissions problems, etc.

• Reports for identify drivers of data volumes in your environment

• Introduced with the 6.1.7599.0 release of the management pack, these reports provide insight into the overall data volumes being processed by your environments. These reports can be used for gaining an understanding of current usage levels in order to establish a baseline and for identifying opportunities for tuning.

• Operational Data Reporting

For more information, see the Management Pack Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=61365290-3c38-4004-b717-e90bb0f6c148&displaylang=en

Please read the MP Guide before deploying! 

Specifically Synthetic Transactions, and QoE require special configuration steps.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=e7185068-6424-4e67-bf61-7bf1c53efb4a&displaylang=en

external source: www.compete.com

Compete.com recently published stats on e-mail market share, based on U.S. Internet users’ engagement with web-based email clients.

The System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 (SSP) is a fully supported, partner extensible solution that enables customers to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage their compute, network and storage resources to deliver a private cloud platform in their datacenter. Learn more.

Key Features:

· Automation and Guidance: To assess, plan and design your private cloud foundation infrastructure

· Customer/business unit on-boarding: Automated workflows to onboard business unit IT departments onto to your virtualized shared resource pool

· Dynamic provisioning engine: To rapidly provision virtualized infrastructure in conjunction with System Center and Hyper-V

· Self-Service portal: To empower consumers of IT to request and provision infrastructure for their apps/services

· Partner Extensibility: Enable partners to expose their unique hardware capabilities through familiar Microsoft scripting technologies while providing variety and flexibility to IT

Download SSP Now!

Simplify planning for upgrade or migration to the latest Microsoft products and technologies with the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.5 Beta. This multifaceted tool is now even better—with assessment for easier migration to Windows Azure and SQL Azure, heterogeneous database discovery (of MySQL, Oracle and Sybase instances) for SQL Server migration projects, Internet Explorer 8 upgrade assessment, and much more—MAP 5.5 Beta includes new features to help customers streamline planning for their next migration project.

Join the MAP 5.5 Beta.

The KB is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2264080

The Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program can offer invaluable help by delivering pre-validated reference architectures. T

Te Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track solutions are being offered by 6 hardware partners.

Hit the Fast Track site and you can browse solution briefs from all these partners, including:

• Dell
• Fujitsu
• Hitachi
• HP
• IBM
• NEC

Each partner will be enabling their own Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Web presence, containing information on their Fast Track configurations as well as related offerings and how to get started.

During TechEd Europe in Berlin Configuration Manager v.Next has moved to its official product name, System Center Configuration Manager 2012

The Exchange 2010 SP1 Visio stencil is available for download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=901d471c-8bd9-47ad-b6db-452309f12ebe

The table below illustrate the network settings for each of the five NICs on the cluster nodes (Yes, No, Optional). This shows the configuration based on Microsoft recommended Best Practices.

Need to maintain your current computers while migrating to Windows 7? Microsoft P2V Migration for Software Assurance automates delivery of Windows 7 by providing a safety net of virtual machines while backing up and converting legacy applications. P2V Migration supports both the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 deployment options.

• Download Now

Watch Jeremy Chapman demonstrate Microsoft P2V Migration for Software Assurance by walking through the management console and showing us what the experience looks from the user’s perspective.

P2V Migration for Software Assurance Beta with Jeremy Chapman

external Source: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1934

1: Email

Email is the lifeblood of many organizations, and as a result, many companies are not willing to let go of it. That is understandable. But hosted email providers have moved beyond the days of packing 5,000 mailboxes belonging to 300 accounts onto a cheap computer running with a basic POP3/SMTP setup. While basic email service is still out there, you can get hosted Exchange services from a variety of vendors (if you need it), as well as some upscale, non-Exchange offerings. Email architecture has become quite standardized, and there is really no value-add to keeping it inside your firewall other than mitigating regulatory concerns.

2: Conferencing software

Setting up and maintaining conferencing software is not fun. To make matters worse, when it is down, it needs to be up in a hurry. Like email, there is zero benefit to locating this within your firewall. Also like email, the setup and configuration can be complex enough to require an expert, unless you don’t mind tying up a staff member for a few days. For a low monthly or yearly fee, this weight can be off your shoulders. No one will notice or mind, and your staff can move on to other tasks.

3: CRM

The decision to outsource CRM can be scary. After all, like email, CRM is where so many of the company’s crown jewels are stored. But there are no technical benefits or advantages to having CRM in-house. It’s a fairly low bandwidth application with maintenance overhead you do not need. In addition, the licensing of many CRM systems can be a hassle. Moving to a hosted CRM system can free you to spend more time on more important issues.

4: Web hosting

Hosted Web space used to be as awful as hosted email, unless you were willing to spend big bucks on a dedicated server. Many vendors have shifted to (or offer) a virtualized hosting environment, which has dramatically increased uptime, reduced security risks, and allowed them to provide much more open and direct access to the servers. This is great news, especially for companies with custom applications that require a deployment path beyond copying some files over.

5: Development test labs

Building and maintaining test environments for software developers is a major undertaking. To do it right, you need all sorts of permutations of operating systems, patches, and relevant applications. You could easily find yourself with nearly 100 test beds for a simple Web application, for example. Why do this to yourself when there are quality vendors out there who already have these test systems set up or that allow you to configure them with point-and-click ease? And you can safely give the keys to the development staff and know that they can’t permanently mangle the test systems, too.

6: Video hosting

A few years ago, I was down on the idea of using the common video sites to host your video. Many companies would block those sites under the assumption that they were only for games, there was the real fear of having ads placed on your videos, and often the quality would be compromised. Now, the big name sites have upgraded their quality and few companies block them because there is plenty of legitimate usage. In addition, some sites allow you to pay a fairly low charge to give you more control over your video, like deciding where it can appear and enhancing its quality.

7: Email security

Even if you do not put your email with a hosted vendor, you will want to look at having a third party perform your anti-spam and antivirus duties, even if it’s only as a first-line defense. If you look at how much incoming email is spam, you’ll see that you can reduce your bandwidth needs dramatically by allowing a third party to perform an initial scan of your email. It will also allow you to have far fewer email servers. Speaking from personal experience, even a small company can have its email servers and network overwhelmed by incoming spam. Getting a good spam scanner outside the network can make a night-and-day difference.

8: Common application components

There is always the perpetual “build” vs. “buy” question for development projects, but the cloud adds a new wrinkle. Many functions that used to be the purview of components or libraries you could buy are now being made available as Web services, typically billed on a per-usage basis. Often, these services take a variety of lower-level functions and roll them into a complete, discrete offering. You would be surprised at how many of these Web services are available, and depending upon your usage scenario, it could make a good deal of sense to use them instead of rolling your own.

9: Basic office applications

If you need the full power of the Microsoft Office suite, by all means, this isn’t for you. But if you are one of the many organizations that use only a small fraction of the Office feature set, it may make sense to look at one of the new crop of online Office replacements (or even Microsoft’s online version of Office). I honestly never thought the day would come when this was possible, but it is a legitimate possibility for some companies. Just be honest with yourself before making this move and work closely with your users, since this directly affects so much of their workday.

10: Batch processing applications

One type of application that shines in the cloud are batch processing applications, such as data warehouses. As long as you can get the data needed into the cloud without disrupting your operations (such as “seeding” it with the shipment of physical media or synchronization over time), the ability to rapidly scale capacity in the cloud can result in tremendous savings. For example, if you need 15 servers’ worth of computing capacity for a once-per-week job, do you really want to have 15 servers sitting idle in your server room waiting for that? Or would you rather just modify the task to start 15 cloud instances, run the process, and shut them down again? In a scenario like this, it is clear that cloud computing can deliver significant advantages