Somewhere between the physical and the virtual
More announcements ...
Hey everyone, I wanted you to know about another blog posting from the OS Deployment PM Team, this is part 2 in a series regarding OSD Bootable media…….
I would highly recommend checking these guys out, they are placing some great material out there about the achievements in ConfigMgr v.Next. Here is an intro from this post……
“Continuing the blog on updates to Operating System deployment in System Center Configuration Manager v.Next. [In this blog] we are going to look at a couple of simple UI changes to bootable media to make the overall end to end automation experience simpler.”
Read more about the team and this blog here.
Jeff Wettlaufer Sr Technical Product Manager System Center, Management and Security Division
As I mentioned in an earlier post on this blog, David Elliott has been busy doing a production deployment of System Center Essentials 2010 for his small business. Now, SCE 2010 is really intended as a midsize business IT management solution (up to 500 PCs and 50 servers), but small businesses, as he shows, can also benefit greatly from its capabilities.
Here’s one of many money quotes from his latest post on his modest enterprise:
For the small business, System Center Essentials will provide a very high degree of control. If as in my case, you have temps or freelancers coming in to work with you on a regular basis, I think to will be worth it’s weight in gold. For supporting off-site virtualizations in temporary sites, again , gold. As I said earlier, my company produces and manages events, and I think that Essentials will be a huge benefit for that, in that I can preconfigure all of the event resources, all of the registration computers, off-site management computers, and then just get cheap, local rental machines, and run them as VM’s. therefore when the event is over, we’ll have all of the data, and we will not have to wipe any machines afterwards. I have a multi-city event planned for the first of the year which will be perfect for this sort of flexibility… it will be a multi-city event over 8 weeks outside of the US. therefore no freight costs, no import issues, and no security issues with any of our data. I’ll be able to remotely admin my SC Essentials server, which will be safely and happily sitting in an air-conditioned, UPS protected, Halon-ready environment, while I travel from city to city in Mexico with basic rental machines, or an army of net-books. Sweet.
Looks like the next thing he has in mind to do is to experiment with System Center Essential’s native virtualization features.
- dave //
Announcing two new 300-level TechNet webcasts on Service Manager 2010:
These two new webcasts add on to the Service Manager webcast series I announced in May. If you did miss any of the live webcasts, follow the hyperlink to access the recording.
Sacha Dawes, Sr. Product Planner System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters
Hi guys, in this post we continue our theme with ‘what we heard you asking us at TechEd USA 2010’.
We have seen a trend in many of you looking for information about troubleshooting WMI when you are trying to solve Client issues. A friend of ours Brian Huneycutt has written a great article about sorting through WMI issues on the client. Here is a small excerpt from his post……..
The Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) subsystem has evolved over time to become a key dependency for many applications, Configuration Manager being one of them. We've been intertwined since the .698 build of WMI shipped with Systems Management Server 2.0 (there was even a WBEM Inventory component in SMS 1.2).
Given this history and relationship it's important to know what to do when something goes wrong.
You can find Brian’s entire post here. It’s well worth a browse, or bookmark……….
It is with great sadness that we learned this weekend of the passing of one of our longest team members – Roberto Di Pietro.
Roberto was a Senior Premier Field Engineer based in Rome Italy. His focus was primarily SQL, but in the recent years, also SRSS. Throughout his 18+ year career, his focus was SMS and then System Center. With SQL and SRSS having such an important role in the way System Center Configuration Manager operates, his expertise was vital to our customers, our field, and those of us in Redmond who had the privilege to work with him.
As our products grew their relationships to SQL and SRSS, we found a need to provide deep training, sessions and other forms of readiness to our audiences and communities. The level of depth in this area is not widespread. Worldwide, it was hard to find expertise that could provide 75+ minutes of 400 level coverage on SQL and System Center. Roberto started to attend our bi annual internal TechReady events as well as our major annual event, the Microsoft Management Summit. At these events, Roberto was one of our highest rated speakers and was well liked as he delivered deep technical coverage on the role of SQL to our solutions. He used his customer experience and his deep SQL knowledge to help Administrators learn about the importance of databases and how they work- in content we had never delivered before. The results were extremely positive.
Personally, if you have seen any demo or deck from me that included SQL or SRSS, Roberto was a huge help in setup, configuration and troubleshooting. I have benefitted immensely from Roberto’s passion and deep knowledge over the past 4 years. When I asked him to speak at events, his enthusiasm was overwhelming, and his ability to explain the technology was authoritative. I remember him coming into Redmond bearing gifts from Italy, basing himself out of my office for the week and sharing stories about experiences. That continued at other events, he always found me in an event, with a huge smile, a thank you and welcoming conversation. He would work through the night and over weekends to help me, always with positive energy and perfect results.
I am really sad to hear about Roberto, and I would like to thank him on behalf of the entire System Center team in Redmond for his tireless contributions.
Warm regards, thank you Roberto