Over on our Service Manager Engineering Team blog Travis Wright has blogged about some cool new solutions from our partner Link Development.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2011/05/25/new-scsm-solutions-from-partner-link-development-arabic-portal-blackberry-connector-what-s-up-gold-connector.aspx

Check out the information shown on the partner solutions for:

1. Connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) to sync Blackberry mobile devices configuration items into Service Manager
2. An Arabic language Web Portal for the Service Manager 2010 Self Service Portal
3. Connector to What’s Up Gold that brings alerts from What’s Up Gold into Service Manager as incidents – similar to our Operations Manager Alert Connector.

Happy Reading!

Sean

Sean Christensen Senior Technical Product Manager, ITIL v3 Expert System Center Service Manager, IT Process & Compliance System Center, Management & Security Division Email: sean.christensen@microsoft.com Twitter: @SeanC_MSFT

Have you had an opportunity to look at the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta, yet? Are you confused as to all of the new features and capabilities and how do I learn about all of this good, new stuff?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a place where I can get a guided evaluation of this product? Perhaps, I could join a community where I would have these new features all broken down for me in digestible chunks, taught to me by the folks that make the product, and have a forum for asking questions and sharing ideas with my peers.

Well, you can!

Starting Thursday, May 26th, 2011 the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta Community Evaluation Program begins. This program provides IT professionals a structured approach to evaluating the pre-release version of Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Members of this program are able to evaluate the Beta version of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 with guidance from the product team and by sharing of experiences and best practices among a community of peers. As an internal user, you will have the same access to information as the external customer and partners.

Learn about all of the new features, like Cloud Creation/Delegation, Service Templates, Fabric Management (Compute, Storage, and Networking), Server App-V, and integration with other System Center Products.

So, for now, please go to the Connect Site, fill out the enrollment survey for the VMM 2012 CEP (don’t forget to check out the other CEPs starting soon), join the call this Thursday, May 26th 9am PDT, do the homework, and join the community.

Kenon Owens

Technical Product Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

We have released System Center Updates Publisher 2011 to the web today.  This release was primarily driven by customer feedback over the past year.  It all started last year at MMS (2010) where we got a lot of great feedback regarding the existing product.  Out of that feedback a plan was created to greatly improve the product for both customers and partners.  Updates Publisher 2011 is packed full of new features and additions with just a few of them listed below.

New in System Center Updates Publisher 2011

• Simpler setup with no database installation
• An improved user interface that allows better control of managing software updates
• Improved applicability rule authoring experience
• Improved performance when importing and managing software updates
• The ability to create software update bundles
• The ability to define prerequisite and superseded updates as part of a software update definition
• A new “Automatic” publication type with which Updates Publisher 2011 can query Configuration Manager to determine whether the selected software updates should be published with full content or only metadata
• A new Software Update Cleanup Wizard that you can use to expire software updates that exist on the update server, but are not in the Updates Publisher 2011 repository

To download and learn more about SCUP from TechCenter visit here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/bb741049.aspx

Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr Technical Product Manager
System Center, Management and Security Division

Hi Service Manager fans,

If you’re after Tech Ed Session recordings and materials check out the tables below – highlighted are those sessions featuring System Center Service Manager specifically. 

Enjoy!

Sean

Sean Christensen Senior Technical Product Manager, ITIL v3 Expert System Center Service Manager, IT Process & Compliance System Center, Management & Security Division Email: sean.christensen@microsoft.com Twitter: @SeanC_MSFT

Wow, I can’t believe TechEd 2011 is over. It was a fantastic show, and I enjoyed every minute of it. From the Sessions to the TLC Booths to the different treks from different buildings. It was all worth it. One thing that was going to be difficult, however, was how do we setup the demo environments at the different SIM Pods for all of the different products we have. With System Center our products are working together, and it isn’t something that we can show with just 1 VM. We can’t really rely on RDP’ing back to Corp, and it is really challenging to bring extra equipment (Pelican Cases, extra baggage charges, breakage, etc.) What we were able to do, was a brilliant little plan concocted by us and  one of our partners, HynesITe.

They built us a Private Cloud to host all of the demo vms for the SIM TLC Pods. Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta, they created a “Cloud” for each POD, and we were able to log into the system and only see the VMs we had access to, but could manage them ourselves as needed. This showed the true tenants of Private Cloud. We had a shared environment, that was elastic as resource needs changed, it allowed for Self Service, and we were metered by use.

Here is a description of the solution:

Challenge

TechEd offers our demo stations a workstation class machine with 8GB RAM. Product teams in the System Center and Identify Management tracks are showing environments consisting of dozens of VM’s at times with high disk and memory requirements. Examples.

1. Service Manager: 9 VM’s, 40GB RAM, 450GB Storage

2. Orchestrator: 24 VM’s, 40GB RAM, 250 GB Storage

In addition, we wanted to showcase some of Microsoft key private cloud solutions and how we are actually using those solutions to solve our own challenges.

Hardware

Sponsor HP provided two C7000 bladecenter systems containing 4 blades each. Blades were 72GB RAM per blade, with SSD local storage. The enclosures were connected together with a 4GB fiber backplane for storage and 10GB Ethernet.

Storage was provided by an HP EVA storage array containing 24 400GB SAS drives configured as RAID 10.

Storage and Hyper-V hosts were configured and deployed using VMM. Entire build time for the solution was 8 hours, including operating system installation, storage provisioning, cluster creation and management.

Clustering

Each bladecenter was configured as a failover cluster (named StormCloud and Cyclone). Storage was 4GB Fiber with multiple paths of redundancy.

Individual demo VM’s were deployed as highly available resources and assigned a primary node. Live migration was used to move running demo environments between nodes as needed for maintenance. In addition this allowed the intelligent placement and dynamic optimization features in SCVMM 2012 to ensure that all demo environments were equally balanced across all nodes.

Cloud Implementation

SCVMM 2012 includes the ability to present physical resources as “clouds”. A cloud is an abstract view of resources that you own, which hides all aspects of the underlying physical implementation. In addition, clouds can be shaped to ensure that no one cloud or cloud owner can consume more resources than they have been allocated.

1. SCVMM was used to bare metal deploy the Hyper-V hosts.

2. SCVMM was used to allocate storage to the servers.

3. SCVMM was used to deploy and configure the cluster.

4. SCVMM was used to create clouds representing slices of the overall fabric (hardware) to be allocated to users.

5. SCVMM PowerShell was used to create the clouds and self-service roles as a batch.

6. SCVMM PowerShell was used to manage cloud and VM properties.

Sample: Get-VM –Name *ERDC* | Set-VM –Cloud (Get-SCCloud –Name *Orchestrator*) was used to assign all VM’s in a group to a cloud.

For each demo station, three steps are performed.

1. A cloud is created.

2. A self-service user is created.

3. The VM’s are dynamically provisioned to the correct cloud.

Each demo station owner is provided a standard Windows desktop and a copy of VMM 2012 administration console. When a demo station owner launches the VMM 2012 administration console, they are prompted to choose a self-service role. Each self-service role is mapped to one or more clouds with specific rights. The following series of screenshots depicts aspects of the solution.

Figure 1 Choosing a role

Figure 2 Delegated view of a cloud as a self-service user

Figure 3 Delegated activities for each self-service user

Figure 4 Administrator view of all clouds

Figure 5 Cloud shaping to control resource usage

This was a fantastic solution for the SIM Pods, and allowed us to showcase our solutions on our solution. Some key Benefits Realized

Benefits Realized

1. Users do not need to know anything about the physical implementation to access resources. All details of physical implementation are fully hidden from the cloud manager, while still giving the cloud manager administrative access to all resources.

2. Resources are automatically highly available and fault tolerant. VM’s are migrated between cluster nodes as needed for maintenance and capacity management.

3. Deployment and setup was very quick and easy. Platform was deployed from bare metal to fully operational in under 8 hours.

4. Automation via PowerShell has resolved most troubleshooting and support issues. Powershell scripts were used for repeated tasks such as cloud creation, troubleshooting, and VM management.

5. SCVMM offers extensive control over user resource consumption allowing fair managed allocation or resources.

If you would like for information on the solution, please contact HynesITe at the details below, or comment here. We would love to hear your feedback.

Contact

Technical contact - Corey Hynes | info@HOLsystems.com | HynesITe, Inc

Microsoft contact (users) – Kenon Owens | kenono@microsoft.com | System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Also, don’t forget that the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Community Evaluation Program starts May 26th, 2011. Go to http://connect.microsoft.com/site1211 for more details, or email mscep@microsoft.com for more information