Hey guys, we just wanted to get you a heads up that the TechNet landing page for the Configuration Manager VHD Test Drive program has updated, so the VMs should now be a little easier to find. You can find the link here.
Jeff Wettlaufer Sr Technical Product Manager System Center, Management and Security Division
Hello everyone, recently the Beta 2 of MED-V was released, and we wanted to make sure everyone on this blog was aware of it. Originally announced on the MDOP blog, and the Windows for your Business Blogs, MED-V is an incredibly cool Desktop Virtualization technology that builds on System Center Configuration Manager. For situations where App-V does not resolve your application compatibility challenges, MED-V may in fact be a solution. App-V is an application to application compatibility solution, but may not remediate an app to OS issue. This is where MED-V becomes interesting. MED-V is a desktop virtualization technology that allows an app to be isolated from the host (Windows 7 ) OS. In addition, MED-V provides:
Some resources for you:
The System Center team is very excited to announce the release of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3. This release is a significant accomplishment for the engineering team for a lot of reasons. Not only does ConfigMgr R3 drive new scenario support to existing world class capabilities, it raises core functionality to new levels of industry leading status.
ConfigMgr is already known as a product capable of managing the world’s largest enterprise infrastructures, across the biggest, most distributed and most complex of customers. With ConfigMgr R3, we increase this to 300,000 managed clients per hierarchy, a number unmatched in the market today. In achieving this unparalleled position, the team managed to revisit a number of areas of the core product, and drive use case scenarios towards the concept of real time management.
By tightening our key relationship to Active Directory with finer, more granular polling and delta monitoring, and marrying this with a new ability to rapidly populate those changes into collections; organizations will find a more responsive platform that meets their business needs, not just those of IT. Real world scenarios have impacted these changes, and we are excited to demonstrate our response to these challenges.
In addition to all of these performance improvements, we have listened to our customers, and understand that with technology demands, you also need to save money, and lower the cost of IT in running a business. When combined with competitive, environmental and regulatory pressure, it is really exciting to deliver centralized, policy based Power Management “in box”. This feature alone will drive down the cost of running systems, from the same admin console ConfigMgr Admins have used for over a decade. Using the same client, the same policy system, and the same processes our other features take advantage of, Power Management is going to drive down the cost of IT like no other feature. Organizations are already sharing unsolicited data about their savings. A 20,000 seat organization recently reported that through early conservative power management policies, they will save approx. $500,000 per year. These kinds of capabilities make a real difference.
ConfigMgr R3 sets a new bar in the evolution towards user centric client management. Elements now available within R3 are early looks at what you can expect moving forward with ConfigMgr v.Next.
The core capabilities in System Center Configuration Manager R3 are extended by offerings from a number of partners. 1E NightWatchman software extends administrative flexibility, user empowerment and reporting. When combined with R3, these provide an example of a best of breed power management solution for PCs. The below links provide some additional information about 1E as well as partners Verdiem and Adaptiva. In particular, about how these partner solutions extend our core functionality.
Microsoft is excited to announce the acquisition of AVIcode, Inc., a leading provider of .NET application monitoring solutions!
So, what does AVIcode technology do? For those of you who are big Xbox live fans, you've already been experiencing the power of AVIcode's 360 degree application performance monitoring capabilities, which help Microsoft keep this service up and running - can I get an enthusiastic head-bobble on that one?! This acquisition will deliver great new functionality to the System Center family of IT management capabilities and will help us offer a more complete solution to our customers. AVIcode’s product capabilities help ensure the availability of business-critical applications and services, regardless of where they are deployed. Additionally, as more customers move to consuming cloud-based services, Microsoft will address concerns about the gap between existing applications and those designed for the cloud by providing unified management across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Today, customers can benefit from AVIcode capabilities by:
• Simplifying management with automatic discovery of application dependencies
• Optimizing business productivity with real-time monitoring, and rapid error resolution of business critical applications
• Lowering the cost of managing datacenter services by establishing enterprise-wide standards to manage custom and disparate applications
For more information on this acquisition, please check out Management and Security Division Corporate VP Brad Anderson's blog and visit the new AVIcode section on Microsoft's Pathways site.
Thanks for reading!
David Mills | Sr. Product Manager | Management & Security Division
Hi everyone, we have been working hard to get all of our labs posted to the TechNet platform. Today we are pleased to let you know that they are live and available! We have a collection of Beta 1 labs now available for you to access on demand to learn about the next release of System Center Configuration Manager.
You can find the labs all on the TechNet Virtual Lab page here. Don’t forget, tomorrow the Community Evaluation Program for ConfigMgr v.Next starts. More information on that is here.
Onur is a Sr. Program Manager and has been in Microsoft for 10 years. For the first 5 years Onur was in Microsoft Consulting Services specializing in the architecting and deployment of MS Management technologies in large enterprises worldwide. For the last 5 years Onur has been in the product team designing these same technologies. For the last 3 years he has been on the System Center Configuration Management team. Onur is responsible for the ConfigMgr 2007 R3 release, and power management and desired configuration management features in Config Manager V.Next. This post is the first in a series of posts by our product team about the Power Management feature set. Stay tuned for more great content from the team that wrote the code…..
R3 power management mission and design philosophy
Hi everyone, the purpose of this blog post is to give you more information about our vision and design philosophy behind the new power management feature which will be introduced in Configuration Manager 2007 R3.
Our Mission: “Our mission is to make a positive impact in the environment in which we live through software.”
You are all aware of the diminishing natural resources of our planet and the efforts across different disciplines and industries to decrease the carbon foot print we generate. Information Technology (IT) organizations are not any different. Our customers want the ability to understand current power consumption in their IT environment, determine when resources are not used and then put these resources into states where they do not consume energy. While doing this it is super important not to impact user productivity. Because, in many cases user down time for a few hours is much more expensive than the potential annual power savings that can be obtained from power management. Finally by putting these controls in place organizations would like to save money and make a positive impact to their bottom line.
Our design philosophy: In the light of the mission detailed above, we identified the following engineering philosophies when designing the Configuration Manager 2007 R3 power management feature set.
1. Windows is the foundation of green computing: At the heart of our investment lies the Windows operating system as the foundation of green computing. We made significant improvements in Windows Vista and Windows 7 to make sure that the operating system provides the core infrastructure to support efficient power management. We wanted to make sure that Configuration Manager 2007 R3 leverages these investments and also provides a rich set of controls and reporting.
2. User Centric: User activity is extremely important for us and aligns with our vision for Configuration Manager v.Next. Configuration Manager 2007 R3 power management is designed to detect and honor user activity. We also provide reports that clearly differentiate user and computer activity in order to determine typical business and non-business hours.
3. Sleep state is the key: The power consumption saving between shut down and sleep states is virtually zero. However, we get two significant benefits from using the sleep state (hibernation) . The first is the ability to wake up computers to receive critical patches. The second is the user experience. Imagine how long it takes to restart your computer from the power off or hibernate states compared to the sleep state. With the improvements to battery life in hardware, we may not even have to shut down our systems in the future. All Configuration Manager 2007 R3 defaults are optimized for the sleep state.
4. Wake up to receive critical software updates: Configuration Manager 2007 R3 leverages the wake timers that are available in Windows. You do not need to have hardware dependent wake on LAN technologies or send magic packets to wake up computers (a feature which is disabled in many enterprise networks). The administrator can, for instance specify that computers wake up at midnight, the computer will check it’s policy and if nothing is found, it will then go back to sleep.
5. Built to save money for customers: Configuration Manager 2007 R3 provides daily and monthly power consumption, cost and Co2 emission saved reports designed for non IT personnel such as executives to clearly see trends and the impact of policies they applied to their environment, similar to the energy bill you receive for your house.
That’s all for today. In my next blog I am planning to explain how Configuration Manager 2007 R3 calculates power consumption, cost and Co2 savings which is a common question I am asked.
Onur Koc Sr Program Manager System Center Configuration Management
Hey everyone, we just came out of a meeting in Building 37 with our friends Stephen Rose and Jeremy Chapman, talking about the European Bus tour. Building on the North American tour from last year, the boys are off to travel through Europe with some great cities on the list.
What is the Springboard Bus Tour? The tour is a rolling show, in the US literally on a bus, that travels to you to talk about Windows 7, MDOP, Office and of course System Center. Last year the tour covered a list of Canadian and US destinations, and at the moment they are running through Europe. The sessions are technical, run by experts from Redmond and our MVP community, and on our current, latest technology.
If you are thinking about Windows 7, MDOP, Office and System Center interoperability, this tour is something you will really benefit from attending. For a list of the locations and dates, check out the tour schedule here, where you can also register.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Monday, 25 October
Schuberg Philis Boeing Avenue 271 1119 PD Schiphol-Rijk The Netherlands
Register Now!
Stockholm, Sweden
Wednesday, 27 October
Microsoft Campus AB in Akalla Meeting Room: Vision Finlandsgatan 36, Akalla Stockholm
Helsinki, Finland
Friday, 29 October
HTC Helsinki Kolumbus Auditorium Tammasaarenkatu 1-5 00180 Helsinki, Finland
Reading, UK
Monday, 1 November
Microsoft Campus, Reading Building 3, Ground Floor, Chicago 2 Thames Valley Park Reading
Rome, Italy
Wednesday, 3 November
Viale Avignone, 10 00144 Roma (RM) ITALIA
Vienna, Austria
Thursday, 4 November
Microsoft Campus, Austria Am Euro Platz 3 1120 Wien
Register Now
Hi everyone, we have had incredible interest in our Community Evaluation Program for ConfigMgr v.Next, that starts this week. The program application is still open, and we are still accepting entry. Are you thinking about some free training, or do you want to learn more about what is available to you? Last week we blogged about the options that are available here.
We hope you can join us. The CEP is designed as a series of experiences to learn about the next release of ConfigMgr. 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 learnings, questions and experiences.
This Wednesday October 6th we start the series, so we hope you can come along. Does the 6th not work for you? That’s ok! For CEP members, the session will be available On-Demand after the live event, to help with your own calendar , time zones, or day job .
For more information about the CEP for ConfigMgr v.Next, here are some resources for you:
We really hope to see you join us.