The Microsoft Virtual Academy (www.MicrosoftVirtualAcademy.com) is a free public training portal with almost 340,000 IT Professionals already learning from it.
The MVA has just released a brand new course for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012!
Course Overview
This course focuses on how using System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2012 can help your business build, deploy, and maintain a private cloud. After completing these three modules you will have learnt about the Virtual Machine Manger 2012 product, and the features it utilizes to build and support the virtualized and physical resources that are part of your private cloud infrastructure. The course will also expose you to cloud computing at the business level, from the perspective of Virtual Machine Manger 2012, and show how to extend that knowledge to the technical level. The last module will show you how to manage applications within your private cloud using Virtual Machine Manger 2012 to deploy, update, and manage them. At the end, we will have illustrated how using Virtual Machine Manger 2012 as part of your private cloud infrastructure will benefit both your organization and the IT Pro.
The VMM 2012 course has 3 modules with videos, slides and assessment questions.
Overview of Virtual Machine Manager 2012
This module explains how enterprise datacenters are evolving, and the evolution toward highly virtualized infrastructures. We explain how VMM 2012 enables you to evolve your infrastructure to the cloud by giving you a set of management tools to allow you to manage the environment, both the underlying physical infrastructure and the virtualized infrastructure. We will show you how VMM 2012 fits with Microsoft’s cloud and datacenter management vision, to deliver common management experiences across private and public clouds. Illustrating how to deliver IT as a Service on your terms with flexible, management across your hybrid environments.
Using VMM 2012 to Configure a Private Cloud
Through this course, you will see how using VMM 2012 to provision your private cloud infrastructure and applications can deliver a flexible and cost-effective infrastructure. This course will teach you the basics of deployment and upgrading your virtual environment, the fundamentals of fabric management, and private cloud usage scenarios. By taking this course and learning the fundamentals of building and delegating clouds, you will be able to better provision and optimize your application services and virtualization management practices.
Modelling and Maintaining Virtualized Services in VMM 2012
In this module you will learn the benefits of modeling and maintaining virtualized services in VMM 2012. After completing the course, you will understand the benefits of services in VMM 2012. We will show you this by providing a detailed overview of the services lifecycle, and how using the new Service Designer in the product can help you to create, and customize deployments. This will enable you to better deploy services to the private cloud, and ensure repeatable and predictable updating of a service. Overall, this will increase the capabilities and benefits to your organization and to the IT Professional.
Cloud computing is fundamentally altering the expectations for how and when computing, storage and networking resources should be allocated, managed, consume and allow users to utilize services globally. Due to the powerful computing and storage, high availability and security, easy accessibility and adaptability, reliable scalability and interoperability, cost and time effective cloud computing is the top needed for current fast growing business world. A client, organization or a trade that adopting emerging cloud environment can choose a well suitable infrastructure, platform, software and a network resource, for any business, where each one has some exclusive features.
RSA announced Monday that its SecurID two-factor authentication hardware and software can now integrate with Microsoft Windows Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2.0. Come December, the two-factor authentication system will also work with Citrix Receiver, a universal client that allows virtual applications and data to be delivered to any type of device.
Related reading: About Authentication Support for RSA SecurID.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/vmware-may-be-losing-dominance-in-server-virtualization-178252 (By David Marshall | InfoWorld)
The survey comes from Veeam Software, a third-party virtualization backup, disaster recovery, and management solution provider that has made quite a name for itself in the virtualization ecosystem. This is its second quarterly survey, and the ongoing series has been dubbed the V-Index report. The V-Index was commissioned by Veeam, who in fairness has been a longtime VMware partner. However, the company recently expanded its development efforts to include other hypervisor technologies, and the survey was conducted by U.K. market researcher Vanson Bourne, not the Veeam team.
According to the company, V-Index tracks the penetration of virtualization across the server estates of at least 500 large-scale enterprises across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Vanson Bourne surveyed 578 enterprises (34 more than were surveyed in the previous quarter), and the survey was conducted with fairly large companies in mind -- those with over 1,000 employees -- and wasn't limited to Veeam's customer base.
In the September V-Index, 86.5 percent of the 578 organizations that responded to the survey said they had some type of server virtualization in their data centers. Across each of these enterprises, the V-Index report found an average penetration rate of 38.9 percent, meaning that was the percentage of servers being virtualized. The survey also found 81 percent of enterprises using virtualization expect to see their virtualized server estate increase in the next 12 months.
Within traditional x86 server virtualization, VMware was the current ruler of the roost. Results showed 67.6 percent of companies running some version of VMware's ESX or ESXi hypervisor platforms as their primary platform. Beyond that, companies also reported operating on Citrix XenServer, 14.4 percent of the time; Microsoft Hyper-V, 16.4 percent; and other platforms, 1.6 percent. Red Hat's KVM technology is sure to make up part of that "other" category and is starting to show signs of taking off, especially within Linux shops, thanks in part to groups such as the Open Virtualization Alliance forming around it.
Beyond those typical findings, here's what's really interesting: Even though VMware continues to maintain the lion's share of the market, 38 percent of companies questioned say they are planning to change the hypervisor platform currently being used for server virtualization workloads. Why? According to the V-Index, the cost of the current hypervisor platform was cited as the No. 1 reason for the switch, coming in at 58.9 percent. This was followed closely by: features offered by alternative hypervisors, 47.4 percent; the licensing model, 46.8 percent; and increased maturity of alternative hypervisors, 41.6 percent.
This article, "VMware may be losing dominance in server virtualization," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.
The Microsoft Solution Accelerators team is pleased to announce the System Center Cloud Services Process Pack beta.
Download the System Center Cloud Services Process Pack Beta.
System Center Cloud Services Process Pack Beta is Microsoft’s Infrastructure as a Service solution built on the System Center platform. With the System Center Cloud Services Process Pack, enterprises can realize the benefits of Infrastructure as a Service while simultaneously leveraging their existing investments in the Service Manager, Orchestrator, Virtual Machine Manager, and Operations Manager platforms.
Corporate datacenters are in transition. The recent shift from physical to virtual environments is now being replaced by an interest in moving to the cloud—specifically both private and public cloud infrastructures. Private cloud management assets are being delivered with System Center 2012 and a key part of this solution is the self-service experience. This experience is now significantly enhanced by the System Center Cloud Services Process Pack.
The benefits offered by System Center Cloud Services Process Pack Beta for the enterprise include:
The benefits offered by System Center Cloud Services Process Pack for consumers of IT within the enterprise include:
The System Center Cloud Services Process Pack Beta offers a self-service experience to facilitate private cloud capacity requests from your business unit IT application owners and end users, including the flexibility to request additional capacity as business demands increase.
Download the System Center Cloud Services Process Pack Beta: Download the beta, and influence the development of this process pack.
Learn more. Visit TechNet Library page to learn more about this beta.
Tell Microsoft what you think! Test drive the beta release, and send Microsoft your constructive feedback.
The beta will be available for download on the Download Center through January 2012. Send your feedback at scsmtalk@microsoft.com.
Check out the Server and Cloud Platform Blog post by David Mills!
See http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/11/10/system-center-operations-manager-2012-release-candidate-from-the-datacenter-to-the-cloud.aspx . Download it now!!
Please be aware that this is data collect by ZDNed, this is not a an official Microsoft released information
The Microsoft Server Roadmap Webcast is now available on demand (registration is required, but if you’ve already registered for any ZDNet content before, you’re good to download).
Mary-Jo Foley also compiled a nice “cheat sheet” Microsoft Server Webcast ,” which also is freely downloadable with registration.
Microsoft Learning has just released our first White Paper on Cloud Computing: What IT Professionals Need to Know. The move to cloud solutions opens up new opportunities for IT professionals and they should look forward with both competence and confidence. Key technical skill sets become more critical to career success, including custom application development and deep technical knowledge of infrastructure solutions. With the capability to build and adapt their existing skills, savvy professionals should view new cloud opportunities as a chance to expand upon and grow their portfolio of skills. This white paper provides an early look at emerging roles and skill sets that IT professionals and Developers should look to acquire to build cloud computing solutions.
The below table gives a quick overview of Datacenter Qualification and what are the requirements for each of the different tiers
Tier level
Requirements
1
2
3
4
Please be aware that there are only a few classified Tier4 Datacenter out there.