Somewhere between the physical and the virtual
More announcements ...
Hey everyone, the OS Deployment guys have blogged a new topic, this one is about offline servicing. Check them out here.
“…..In previous posts we have discussed changes to PXE and the Distribution Point, as well as new ways to manage and monitor content in your Configuration Manager environment. Now let’s discuss a feature to simply administration and reduce the total deployment time of your operating system images……”
You can read the rest of the post here.
Jeff Wettlaufer Sr Technical Product Manager System Center, Management and Security Division
On March 22nd at MMS 2011 this year, we announced the Beta for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Our customers are telling us it is about the “Service”. They want to better manage their infrastructure while providing more levels of self-service and faster time to implementation. With VMM 2012 our customers will be able to provide all of this.
But VMM 2012 is different from VMM 2008 R2 SP1, and it can be a challenge to understand all of the new capabilities. With that, our VMM Program Management Team has created a series of blogs that provide more depth and detail into the new features and scenarios that VMM enables.
Check out the VMM blog and all of the new posts detailing all of the new capabilities. Some of these have already been posted, and there are plans for many more. I wanted to point you to these, and let you know our plans for some future posts. Check these that are available now:
And more of the themes coming in the near future:
Thank you to the Program Management Team for giving us this detail and insight into our new Beta. Also, check out the Server Application Virtualization blog that explains in more depth Server App-V from the Server App-V.
Finally, if you are interested in a more guided evaluation, check out the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Community Evaluation Program beginning May 26, and go here to fill out the application.
Enjoy the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta, and please let us know how it is going.
Kenon Owens
Technical Product Manager
System Center Virtual Machine Manager
Hey everyone, the PM’s are blogging again, this is a really solid topic as well. We wanted to make you aware of it over here on this blog.
Their intro: In the last blog we covered Distribution Point Groups and the new ways to distribute and manage content. In this post we are going to cover monitoring the compliance of content and a new feature to validate content in the Configuration Manager 2012 infrastructure. After reading this blog, you will be able to see some new enhancements to Configuration Manager 2012 that will make troubleshooting content a lot easier (for both Software Distribution and Operating System Deployment).
Hi Folks - here's a re-post of Ed Anderson's piece which went out on the virtualization blog today. I thought it was a good read for System Center blog as well. Enjoy.
In speaking with folks interested in deploying virtualization, I tend to hear two things most:
1. they realize the benefits of adopting virtualization (especially the cost savings!), and the bridge virtualization can give them to private clouds in the future . . . 2. . . . but there are roadblocks preventing them from realizing those benefits.
The roadblocks mentioned vary, but a few themes do stick out. We hear your concerns that with some vendors, scaling-up virtualization instances scales up your cost, and that’s a hard pill to swallow when you’re looking to get more out of every IT dollar. We also hear your concerns that large-scale virtualization could lead to VM sprawl and cumbersome manual IT process overhead.
We are committed to helping you with these and other concerns. Today, Microsoft and Dell are announcing a strategic partnership that will deliver joint management and virtualization solutions to help you get more out of your investment by integrating Dell’s hardware, storage and virtualization management technologies with Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center technologies. Customers will benefit from this “better together approach” with solutions that span physical and virtual infrastructure as well as application and workload layers.
These jointly engineered solutions will make virtualization more cost effective and accessible, integrate management across the stack, and set you on the path to private cloud – but you don’t have to wait to get started. Dell’s Business Ready Configuration, based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track reference architecture, is available today and can help you start realizing the benefits of virtualization and begin your journey to private cloud.
You can find out more about today’s solutions, our new partnership and our plans for the future by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/dell.
Ed Anderson
Hi everyone
One of the things that we promote as being easy to do and incredibly powerful is the Opalis Quick Integration Kit (QIK) and how it can be used to create your own Integration Packs and compiled .Net code.
Well, this morning I did this for the first time myself. I am very lucky to have the Opalis engineering team to hand, so I sat down with Robert Hearn and Gp De Ciantis and worked my way from dangerous scripting marketing guy to Opalis IP creator in the space of an hour. OK, so this was a fairly straight forward case, but I learnt a lot about the process and wanted to share my experiences. I know a lot of you out there have significant PowerShell and other scripting skills, and I can assure you that they are fully leveragable in the Opalis and Orchestrator solutions!
So, lets take a journey of discovery
Where did we start?
For MMS, I did a SQL Migration demo, where I used Orchestrator to have DPM recover a database from one SQL server to another. The actual DPM commands where executed via a PowerShell script, as this is an action that is not provided for in the DPM IP.
This script was designed to be functional. It had credentials in plain text, and for the demo we simply took a copy of this script, did a search and replace using static string placeholders in the script and then ran it.
Functional, yes. Repeatable, sort of. Maintainable, no.
So, we picked up this script and did a few things:
After testing this in the PowerShell ISE to validate that our changes were functional and the script behaved as expected, we then took the command line and ran it through the QIK CLI.
Step 1 – the Opalis QIK CLI
Once we had the PowerShell script in a state where we could run it with input variables and parameters, we can take that and run it through the QIK CLI to create a .Net DLL that we can invoke directly, or that we can use to create an IP. More on that later.
When you start the QIK CLI, you define the name of the assembly and the file you want to create. You can also reload this file later if you want to modify and repackage.
Then we add in the Commands we want to be available in the assembly. We only have 1, but you can have more than this if you want to compile a lot of script functions together.
On the arguments tab, we take the command line that we used earlier, and use that as the basis for the assembly command. What we then do is take each of the variable inputs of the command line, and make them a Parameter. You can see that each of the input variables in the command line maps to a Parameter below.
This is also where we take care of the password. You can see above that all the inputs are plain text strings, except the Password parameter. This is an Encrypted Text field.
What this means is that when you enter your password in Opalis, all you see are asterisks (******) and unless you do something silly like echo the password, you will never see what the password is anywhere, including the logs and execution results.
And that’s it. We only have 1 command, so we can finish the wizard and our DLL is created. We can now use this in Opalis.
Using the QIK IP, we can invoke this assembly and execute it.
Drag this activity out onto the Opalis palette and we can configure it to point to our new assembly file.
And on the Properties tab of this activity, we can see the Parameters we defined earlier and can fill them out. Not the encrypted text in the Password field.
So we have completed Step 1. We have moved from executing a PowerShell script remotely on the DPM Server, which included plan text credentials, to having a .Net assembly file to trigger the same commands via PowerShell remoting, with encrypted password use.
Now for Step 2 … creating an Integration Pack from this assembly and being able to distribute this functionality across our Opalis environment. To do this, we click the “Build Integration Pack” button at the end of the QIK CLI wizard. Boy, this is hard stuff
Step 2 – Creating an Integration Pack
The first thing we get is an opportunity to name the IP and apply other IP specific information as well as attach a EULA if we desired.
We can also click the Customize Appearance button and choose a better icon.
Click next, and we can see the objects in the Integration Pack. We only compiled one command, so we only see one. But we can add more.
The next step is a critical one. The assembly we created above still executes the PowerShell script we created. One of the benefits of compiling an IP is that we can include the script in the IP and ensure that it is in place for execution.
We give the new IP file a name and we’re done!
We then deployed the IP using the Deployment Manager and the result is that we have a new IP in the Opalis designer.
Because we now have an activity to use, when we drag this out onto the Palette, we do not need to specify the DLL and class, we just need to enter the information.
And there you have it. In less than an hour, we went from an insecure script to a managed Integration Pack. Yes, I had Robert and Gp to help me with the PowerShell code, but given the proliferation of samples and skills out there, the answers were there to be found!
I hope you gain some confidence in giving this a crack yourself. If I as a Marketing Guy can work this through and understand what is going on, you most certainly can too!
Adam
Snr. Technical Product Manager
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