Somewhere between the physical and the virtual
More announcements ...
As we previously announced Opalis 6.3 will include new Integration Packs for the 4 remaining System Center suite products – Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager, Virtual Machine Manager and Service Manager. These 4 new packs along with the existing Operations Manager pack provide deep, dynamic integration within the Datacenter. And of course you can go cross-platform and cross-application with the 26 other Integration Packs we provide!
We have now posted new articles with details of the activities that are available inside each of these 4 new Integration Packs. You can read these articles by following the links below.
We are very excited to be entering the final phases building up to the release of these new Integration Packs. I would love to hear your thoughts on the new activities.
Adam Hall Sr. Technical Product Manager, Opalis
At MMS 2010 and the Worldwide Partner conference, we articulated our holistic datacenter-to-cloud strategy. Specifically: a) How Microsoft's Server platform and Services platform uniquely enable delivering IT as a Service on your own terms - out of your own datacenter, service provider datacenters or Microsoft's own datacenters b) Microsoft uniquely provides a single set of familiar management, identity and developer tools that span across all your datacenter environments - traditional, private or public clouds - thereby allowing you to optimally build/operate applications for hybrid cloud environments.
System Center is integral to our Server platform and provides a single set of management tools to bridge the gap across your physical, virtual and cloud datacenter environments. So as you can see, System Center is front and center to our datacenter-to-cloud approach. Great, you may think. How can System Center help me solve today's datacenter management challenges while providing clear line of sight to the cloud? Is Microsoft shipping some of the above mentioned capabilities so we can start taking advantage of them? Can System Center help me build on top of my current investments? The answer to all of these questions is an unequivocal "yes". Let's see how.
We recently released our in-focus dynamic datacenter management solutions to address these questions:
As you can see, there's a lot of exciting stuff you can do today to solve your core datacenter management challenges while accelerating your journey to the cloud. What's more, these solutions build on top of the Microsoft technologies that your organization uses already!
Keep watching this space - we will continuously keep you updated with additional guidance on the above mentioned solutions. Watch for some cool demo-videos soon!
Cheers, Anant
System Center Product Management
ansundar@microsoft.com
The System Center team is pleased to announce the Opalis Community Evaluation Program (CEP). The goal of this program is to provide customers with a streamlined approach to evaluating Opalis.
For customers and partners who want to efficiently manage implementation, test scenarios, discover and contribute to Best Practices, the CEP provides a structured approach for connecting with the product group and a community of peers. Members of the CEP community will be asked to participate through the sharing of learning's, questions and experiences.
Program Participation
Here’s what you can expect from the program:
From Microsoft
From Customers
· Provide guided learning activities
· Participation in theme activities
· Product installation media and eval licenses
· Implementation of products in test environment*
· Ready-built evaluation VHD (Hyper-V)
· Sharing of Best Practices
· Product group access via virtual chalk talks
· Review of readiness materials
· CEP community access
· Willingness to share experiences
*Please note: Microsoft will not provide CEP participants with additional support for those wishing to deploy the product in production or upgrade subsequent product releases. As an in-market product, Opalis is supported through the standard Microsoft support structures. If customers wish to deploy or upgrade Opalis into production during the CEP, they should feel welcome to do so and are encouraged to share their experiences with the community.
Want to be involved?
Visit the Opalis Microsoft Connect site and fill out the CEP application.**
**All applications received by September 10, 2010, will be informed of their acceptance through receipt of an invitation email to their Windows Live ID account by September 13. Late applications will be reviewed, but accepted members will be asked to review any missed activities and materials independently.
We’re looking to build out a series of real-world and relevant Opalis scenario’s that *you* want to see. So the easiest way to do this, is for you to tell us!
For each scenario we build, we will publish a video showing how we built it as well as an export of the workflow.
So, please jump over to the poll and tell us what you would like to see!
I have recorded a new 2-part Webcast, showcasing the new System Center Integration Packs, and how we can respond to an Application’s State.
There are many things we can do in response to an Application State, and many different scenarios we can complete. In this scenario, we are monitoring an Application’s State in Operations Manager, and when we see that it is not healthy, we perform some basic automated remediation tasks, and when they fail we raise a Change Request, await approval and the restart the server which is a Virtual guest running on Hyper-V.
We could just as easily respond to an application’s performance issues by scaling out the application, and we can also complete these same tasks on alternative virtual platforms and integrate with other Service Management toolsets.
So, without further ado, here are the 2 webcasts. In Part 1, I show how we build out a workflow for a scenario like this, and then in Part 2, I show the workflow running so you can see how it works.
You can watch the webcasts over on The DDC