There has been a lot of chatter on the wires lately about infrastructure virtualization, and I have been thinking to myself, ‘when is someone going to chime in and talk about the client side of virtualization'?’

A lot of great debates are popping around the various communities and forums about what is the best infrastructure to host your virtual environment, and while this is incredibly important, most organizations today also have significant investments in their client landscape, and well frankly, there aren't a lot of people out there talking about how Virtualization reaches to client systems, or how investments in infrastructure virtualization can also benefit an organization’s managed client landscape.  While it is important to think about the best way to spend ever shrinking budgets, it is even more important in today's economy to be strategic with your investments, and get the most pop for your dollar. 

It is easy to get buried or focused in a niche topic of research (my organization needs to consolidate X old servers, that have workloads that need to keep running) – and it is even easier to dive and look for solutions that do ‘ABC’ capabilities, there will always be a search hit that shows some product can do that.  But what about the bigger picture?  What about managing both clients and servers, that are a mix of both physical and virtual instances, from 1 console, 1 solution?  What about thinking about more than just a tool to patch my servers, or a solution to push virtual applications, but 1 solution for software distribution,  patch management, OS Deployment, Asset Management, workflow, performance management, security settings and help desk toolsets?  Ok Virt is important, but what about managing virt, and doing that for servers and clients?

I talk to a lot of our customers, partners and field experts about customer scenarios, pain points, and yes competitive technologies.  I was also once a customer myself.  Its so important for an organization today to ask the question, what else can I do with this technology when they talk about their solution investments.  

In any IT shop, there are some pretty regular things that happen on a daily basis whether a target is virtual or physical:

• HW/SW Inventory
• OS Deployment
• Application management (packaging, delivery, update, removal, prevention)
• Patch Management
• Performance Management
• Security Settings Management
• Green IT
• Compliance
• Help Desk

Yet, organizations are looking at buying capability solutions for their clients for just App-V,  or just Presentation Virt, or just the Hypervisor, or just the Desktop Virt –etc.  The question to ask about those technologies, is what else can they do?  Can that App-V technology do patch, soft dist, OS deployment, NAP, inventory, or help desk work flow?  Can that presentation layer solution also in the same console provide performance management, or workflow, or connectors to your help desk product? 

When we look across the matrix of client virt capabilities -  it is spotted with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers by the different vendors out there, I wont go into listing them.  But only one, Microsoft, has the ability to say we provide Software Distribution, Application Virtualization, Presentation Virtualization (and Virt app in that layer), managed Hypervisor integration, and Desktop Virt.  All of these, in_addition_to those same products providing bog standard management capabilities. 

Can your choice for App-V also do your patch and OS Deployment?  Can that same tool manage both physical and virtual targets?  Can that tool deliver full app installs as well as virtual streams of apps? 

Point solutions have not proven to be cost effective.  Check out some of our latest Management and Virtualization content at these resources.

Jeff Wettlaufer 
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center
e – jeff.wettlaufer@microsoft.com
- jeffwettlaufer

Listen to Microsoft Virtualization Technical Product Manager Kenon Owens describe VMM 2008 R2 on this Network World podcast here. This 30 minute interview provides an easy way to learn about the new Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 release as well as learn more about how System Center supports Microsoft’s virtualization efforts. The podcast can be downloaded via this link here, too.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has RTM’d and GA via volume licensing is set for October 1. This is great news for all and I’d like to especially thank our VMM 2008 R2 Development, Product Management, and Test teams. Lots of hard work fueled by their passion in virtualization and management has resulted in a very good software release.

A 180-day evaluation version is now available, too, on the Microsoft Download site. You can access it here.

Please experience for yourself what the 10,000+ people who have previously downloaded our ‘Release Candidate’ plus organizations such as Continental Airlines, Lionbridge Technologies, and Indiana University have seen with VMM 2008 R2!

I encourage everyone to explore the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and its new features such as quick storage migration, live migration, and many others. We even offer support for vSphere 4.

To learn more on the new features and capabilities of VMM2008 R2, please try to attend our upcoming TechNet session ‘Technical Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2’. Presented by our Technical Product Manager Kenon Owens, it will be chocked full of new and cool VMM 2008 R2 items. Go here to register for this Wednesday, September 09, 2009 (10:00 AM Pacific) event.

Thanks!

Zane Adam

Senior Director, Virtualization and management

This month, three SC folks headed down to Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg in South Africa to support Microsoft TechEd 2009 Africa.

TE Africa had a great turnout on their own, and it was really exciting to visit with our African customers around DPM, SCCM, SCOM and Service Manager.  In all, our three speakers delivered 11 sessions covering:

• CM 302 – Deploying SCCM 2007 – part 1: Site Deployment
• CM 303 – Deploying SCCM 2007 – part 2: Client Deployment
• CM 304 – Deploying SCCM 2007 – part 3: Hierarchy Design & Best Practices
• DPM 200 – Technical Introduction to DPM 2007 sp1
• DPM 300 – Protecting Applications with DPM 2007 sp1
• DPM 400 – Advanced Features of DPM 2007 sp1
• DPM WB – What is coming in DPM v3
• OM 203 – What is new in Ops Mgr 2007 R2
• OM 310 – Monitoring UNIX/Linux with Ops Mgr 2007 R2
• SC 201 – Microsoft System Center for the Data Center
• SM 204 – Cost Effective Incident, Change & Problem Mgmt with Service Manager

As part of the TechEd event, we were very grateful to have all of our demos hosted on demonstration gear from IBM.  This was my first recent experience with an IBM Blade Server (HS22) and we were very impressed.   Our blade had 2 Xeon 5520 processors (lots of cores), 40GB of memory and 600GB of storage.  Between just Operations Manager and Data Protection Manager, we had nearly 20 virtual machines spinning – showing how System Center can protect/recover and monitor almost every Microsoft platform, including a variety of Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Windows file services, etc. – plus some Linux machines too.   Other teams had similar blades and everything just rocked!  So, a huge note of thanks to IBM for loaning TechEd a very cool system !

After TechEd, we did one-day and two-day System Center events in Cape Town and Johannesburg, respectively – and again, really enjoyed meeting the customers and partners that are so passionately interested in deploying the System Center family of management solutions.

And for the weekend in-between, we were able to sneak away for a photo safari.  Pictured above from the Pilanesburg National Reserve are the three SC speakers, along with our phenomenal Microsoft South African hosts (L to R) – Francois Smith (MS-SA), Jason Buffington (DPM), Sacha Dawes (SCOM), Wally Mead (SCCM) and Riedwaan Bassadien (MS-SA).

To our hosts (Francois & Riedwaan) and the MS SA team – thank you so much for the memories, and the opportunity to meet so many of your customers and partners.

To all of the great South African partners and customers whom we met this week – thanks for taking the time to learn more about System Center, and we hope that you got as much from the events as we did.

-- Jason, Sacha and Wally

Hey everyone, I wanted to get an update out there for all of you in case you were wondering about when Configuration Manager will be able to support Windows 7.  Support for Windows 7 will be released within ConfigMgr Service Pack 2.  This is currently in open beta, and I would really encourage you to check that out.  You can get the beta download from the MS Connect site here.  

Service Pack 2 is not just about Windows 7 support, although platform support is the main driver.  Service Pack 2 will do the following:

We have had a lot of questions about timing, so we wanted to get some comments out to you about when we can expect to have this formally available.  All of us here in Redmond absolutely understand that for many organizations - installing Beta, or Evaluation software into production is simply not possible. 

So, I’ll say that these dates could change. Something might come up, but we won’t release SP2 until the quality gates have been passed through. Here are some timeframes you can use for your planning:

Open Public Beta – Currently available here on MS Connect. Go get it!

Release to Manufacturing – End of October.  This means we have signed off the Service Pack for release, and we send to our Microsoft release process owners to get media and other forms of the product made available for you.

Release to Web –  Also End of October.  RTW means we take the signed off release, and we post to our websites for download.  This is usually done right after we can get RTM signed off, usually a couple of days max.  This is just the service pack, you will still need to install the base product (ConfigMgr SP1). Worldwide replication to all websites can sometimes take a few days, its quick but we have seen delays in the past.

General Availability – Beginning of December.  GA is when all of our licensed customers can get access to the full product, slipstreamed media.  Slipstreamed means 1 install of the product will take you right to ConfigMgr SP2, noi need to build up RTM, SP1 then SP2 installs.   

If you need more information about Configuration Manager you can check out our website here. And keep checking back here on this blog, or on Twitter, we are entering a VERY exciting year for the System Center business, with lots to share in the coming months.

If anyone is thinking about what to do this November, why not join us at TechEd Europe? Its in one of my favorite cities in the world, Berlin. More information about the event is  here.

Keep in touch

Jeff Wettlaufer 
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center
e – jeff.wettlaufer@microsoft.com
- jeffwettlaufer