Howdy - I'm Larry Grothaus, a product manager on the System Center team. To start out let me point out that there are two "Larry's" on the System Center business, with Larry Orecklin being the other. Larry "O" is the general manager over System Center...

On Tuesday at the Microsoft Management Summit we presented a breakout session on the new Microsoft Operations Framework 4.0 . It was really exciting to finally be able to show MOF 4.0 off, since we’ve been working on it for the last year. And today Brad...

Or, more aptly, SOME a-twitter… Twitter was going to be used at MMS regardless of anything we might do, but we wanted to provide a simple and easily understood structure for the real-time 1-to-many, short-form conversation that Twitter can foster. Accordingly...

On Thursday, June 3, 2010, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM. Pacific, we are hosting a Live Meeting presentation for the community, titled “Overview of System Center Management Packs with Demo,” presented jointly by Vlad Joanovic , Sr. Program  Manager, and Dan...

Hi everyone, we just wanted to let you all know that the Release Candidate for ConfigMgr 2007 R3 was signed off.  This update is now available through the Connect Beta Program.  RC is pretty much the last stage before RTM (Release to Manufacture...

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...

I am very excited to be able to post this article, welcoming System Center Orchestrator to the System Center suite! As was communicated by Brad Anderson in Tuesday’s MMS keynote and on the Nexus news bulletin , System Center Orchestrator is the official...

T oday we are excited to announce the Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V), and the Server Application Virtualization Packaging Tool. Microsoft Server Application Virtualization builds on the...

The System Center team is pleased to announce the Community Evaluation Program. The program is designed to provide IT professionals a structured approach to evaluating System Center and Forefront products before their final release. Members of this program...

The final release version of the System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure applications is now available. This monitoring pack enables you to monitor the availability and performance of applications that are running on Windows Azure. Previously...

As was posted in our Server and Cloud Platform Blog , I just wanted to let you know that the Release Candidate of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (VMM) was released today! You can either download the Full Install Package , or a pre-configured...

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...

For many years, IT client power management has been an area of challenge for many organizations. While energy-saving desktop and laptop hardware has been available for some time, power-saving settings are often disabled out of fears of data corruption...

Quick note to acknowledge that I've made some changes to this blog, mainly to update its appearance to bring it in line with current brand standards. Not everything has been optimized yet, in particular the older dark background meant we needed to use...

Hello from Las Vegas where we have just kicked off the 10 th anniversary edition of the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). We’ve started the event with an exciting keynote from Bob Kelly . The keynote outlined how Microsoft would enable customers to get...

[Updated June 17th: Corrected comment on Ops Mgr 2007 R2 trial length - is 180 days, not 160. Thanks Cleber!] Utilizing some of the new capabilities in Operations Manager 2007 R2, such as PowerShell hosting and new monitoring templates, the new Exchange...

When you combine the last day of a conference with that same day being the 'morning after'   that event's main party, it could easily be cause for miss out on some great sessions.  Those who did attend the Tools and Best Practices for Management...

Latest in our budding series w/ Brad Anderson, GM of MSD. This time, Jeff Wettlaufer chats with Brad about what's going on in terms of desktop virtualization and Configuration Manager 2007 R2, from the application level to the hardware level, the latter...

System Center-related Events, Videos, Interviews & More from the Expo Hall in Barcelona Find here collected System Center-related info, news, and more from IT Forum in Barcelona, Spain (November 12-16, 2007). See also the Virtual Tech-Ed site and...

As you’ve probably read throughout all of our product literature and all of our blogs—some of which you’ll see linked on the left in the blogroll—we feel we have an extremely strong, extremely functional product family. This product family continues to...

Hi, I’m Larry Orecklin, general manager of System Center product management and virtualization marketing. I’m in San Francisco this morning at a virtualization conference hosted by Bernstein Research, who provides investment research to institutional investors. It’s been interesting for me to see the investment community awaken this summer to the impact of virtualization software. The investment community is quickly realizing that the customer benefits of virtualization are very real and that customers will turn to established vendors with proven solutions. To that point, I’m happy to tell the audience this morning that we’ve released a public beta of Hyper-V within Windows Server 2008. You can read about it at the Windows Server Division blog. And be sure you register for a webcast with Mike Neil on Dec. 18 at 12:30pm PST [3:30pm EST] where he’ll discuss technical information and answer your questions about Hyper-V beta. But my job isn’t only about talking to investors, but rather working with partners and customers to optimize their investments in infrastructure software. My role of systems management and virtualization reflects the symbiotic nature between the two. It reflects the importance of systems management to customers’ adoption and deployment of virtualization to consolidate servers, implement business continuity/disaster recovery, and to make IT systems more responsive to business needs. As customers move to embrace new hypervisor-based software, like Hyper-V, the need has grown exponentially for management tools that fully unlock the transformative nature of this technology. Whereas management tools might have been seen as an important asset, today management tools have become an absolute necessity as more layers of the computing stack become virtualized at large companies and mid-sized companies. ...

Welcome to the new year of System Center blog posts. Scanning the many predictions for 2008 from various analysts, press and bloggers I can’t help but notice the sheer number of references to a staffing crisis in IT. (I saw this issue play out in detail...

We were recently informed that System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 has been named a finalist for 'Product of the Year' for eWeek Channel Insider ... in the Storage Management category. There are some other good finalists, but DPM is the only...

I’m pleased to announce that the new beta of System Center Service Manger is now available. This beta includes the updated infrastructure components that will both deliver the performance we are targeting for the release and support our objective of delivering...

As we move through fall in Redmond and head to Barcelona to meet with our EMEA customers for TechEd ITForum, there are a number of things hot off the press for System Center. We took a few minutes with Brad Anderson to talk about recent developments and...