Infrastructure Optimization

The second of three IT Pro resource guides explaining key IT capabilities necessary to move from one of four defined levels of IT services to the next more efficient and streamlined level of services is now available. The Core Infrastructure Optimization Implementer Resource Guide: Standardized to Rationalized is the resource guide to address the next step in the Core Infrastructure Optimization model after the Basic to Standardized Level Guide released in early March.

To learn more, download the Core Infrastructure Optimization Implementer Resource Guide: Standardized to Rationalized.

Also see the previously released Core Infrastructure Optimization Implementer Resource Guide: Basic to Standardized.

In a move to provide more “how-to” resources for IT Professionals related to Core Infrastructure Optimization, the Solutions Accelerator team at Microsoft has published the first in a series of Resources Guides. The Core Infrastructure Optimization Implementer Resource Guide: Basic to Standardized guide explains the key IT capabilities necessary to move from the Basic level of IT services to the next more efficient and streamlined Standardized level of services.  This guide highlights the extensive IT Professional resources found from TechNet, Solution Accelerators, and product guidance to explain the context and requirements of each Core IO capability as represented by the profiling questions of the Core Infrastructure Optimization Model. The guide provides descriptions of each requirement at a question level and points to relevant planning and implementation resources with a focus on Microsoft technologies.

Subsequent guides are in development for the Rationalized and Dynamic levels of the Core Infrastructure Optimization Model.

Core Infrastructure Optimization will be covered at the upcoming Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), March 26-30 in San Diego, CA.  MMS is the premier technical event of the year for IT professionals, covering the latest management products from Partners and Microsoft including the System Center family of management products.

Hello folks,

This is a good one...

Peter Weill, Director of MIT Sloan's Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), and Sandy Sharma, Chief Executive Officer, Advaiya, will be presenting next Tuesday, February 13 on the Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization (IO) models.  Plus, receive a free copy of "Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution". 

This is the first in a series of 12 sessions.  Register here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/itmanagerconnections.mspx

Here's the official description:

As an IT manager, you can use infrastructure optimization to help you understand the value of your company’s investments in IT infrastructure and to make your IT infrastructure a strategic asset that enables agility within your organization. Ultimately, infrastructure optimization strives to help customers create an infrastructure for a dynamic business that connects people, information, and business processes to increase market responsiveness and help eliminate inefficiencies. To measure and help customers optimize and secure their IT infrastructure, create agility, and reduce costs, Microsoft has developed three infrastructure optimization models: Core Infrastructure Optimization, Business Productivity Infrastructure Optimization, and Application Platform Infrastructure Optimization. In the Infrastructure Optimization webcast series, learn how each infrastructure optimization model can enhance business processes, providing a truly agile business environment.

This webcast provides a crucial foundation of the infrastructure optimization models, which the other ten webcasts in the series will build upon. While some of the remaining webcasts in the series may be more applicable to your business than others, you do not want to miss the information presented in the overview. (Targeted toward IT environments of 250 PCs or higher.)

Cheers,

Demorie

This came across my desk recently…

Virtualization Web Seminars will help you sharpen your skills, build your business, and increase your profitability.

Attend the up-to-date Virtualization Web Seminars where our Microsoft experts will inform you with the latest insights on virtualization technology, value, and licensing. February 1 to March 19 2007. 

What does Virtualization have to do with Core Infrastructure Optimization? Virtual Server is one of a number of Microsoft products that work together to help deliver integrated infrastructure solutions to enterprise and midsize organizations. Once these solutions are in place, IT can improve its ability to be more agile, manage complexity, and provide more secure, controlled access to information resources. Consequently, you can then focus on strategic initiatives to help maximize future opportunities for your business.

I hear so often from customers where can I learn about Virtualization…?  Don’t miss it.  This is it.

Cheers,

Demorie 

Virtualization is one of the key technologies redefining how datacenters will be architected in the future. As of Monday, November 6, 2006, Microsoft announced the VHD Test Drive Program, which provides customers with an enhanced server-based software evaluation experience that’s faster, better supported and more flexible.  You can now access the entire catalog of pre-configured Microsoft and partner products and solutions in VHDs and start evaluating and testing today. Click here to evaluate SQL, Exchange 2007, and more in a VHD now!  No more hours of installs and configurations!

  Almost half of all unplanned service outages happen because of system configuration mistakes or oversights. With that in mind, several tools are available from Microsoft to help you optimize your infrastructure and keep configuration issues under control in environments of all sizes and levels of complexity. These tools provide both the technology and the guidance you'll need to get started managing configuration.

  First, it's important to understand the concept of configuration management. Within IT organizations, configuration management is the process of identifying, defining, and documenting the environment, its components, and the relationships between components. Ultimately, you are trying to define a known, standard system state and to maintain that standard state across your environment. Part of this process entails discovering and updating configuration items (CIs) for your systems, as well as tracking and documenting these CIs as they change.

  If, for example, you have a known state for a workstation and define the CIs that represent that state within your environment, adding a patch represents a deviation from your defined state. Now imagine there's a tool that informs you of any such deviations. Each patch you install will trigger a number of alerts, telling you those patched workstations are not complying with the previously defined state. These alerts let you document any changes to the defined state, and future checks will therefore reflect the revised state you have documented.

  On one hand, this sounds like a lot of additional work just to accommodate planned updates. But there's another benefit: you'll also be warned if a rogue element changes one of your defined CIs. The consequence of not being informed of an unplanned state deviation can result in amounts of work much greater than the effort invested in defining and maintaining CIs. Managing and updating your CIs puts you in control of your infrastructure to make sure that only undesirable settings trigger alerts.

  So what goes into a CI? CIs generally consist of configuration attributes such as description, version number, component, relationships, location, and status. In an ideal state, that patch you just authorized and installed would be populated in a CI and all of the CIs would reside in a relational configuration management database.

  Most people aren't willing to check configuration items against a spreadsheet or database, despite taking the time and care to define them. Likewise, automating the compliance checking and alerting process has been difficult. Let's say you have 100 configuration attributes per computer, and a skilled tester can check 50 configuration attributes manually in an hour. Now think about a company that has 1,000 servers and 20,000 desktops and imagine the workload required to maintain a desired state and check all these computers on a regular basis. Even if all computers were in the desired state at deployment, there's no practical way to maintain a standard across all 21,000 computers—or even 100 computers—without automation.

  How do you define the configuration items and attributes so that a tool can automatically perform a configuration health check and tell you if your environment complies with the predefined standard? It's a fact that defining CIs can be difficult and time-consuming, yet the reward is having a controlled and auditable state where any unplanned changes in configuration automatically trigger alerts, often before those changes cause a service disruption or create a security risk.

Desired Configuration Monitoring Version 2.0 Released

  DCM automates the configuration management audits between desired or defined configuration settings and actual configuration settings. It accomplishes this by allowing the user to define desired hardware, operating system and application configuration settings in multiple configuration data sources and then using the supplied auditing engine, DCM compares desired settings with actual settings and then reports configuration compliance. DCM Version 2.0 now supports configuration monitoring of desktops and servers. (The overall process is shown in Figure 1.) Even though this sounds pretty straightforward, anyone who has taken a look at all the CIs and attributes that contribute to a healthy system will know that this is not a quick task. For that reason, Microsoft created baseline CIs for several core Microsoft desktop and server products, including Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange, ISA, and Windows servers.

Figure 1 Desired Configuration Monitoring Process

   DCM monitors configuration settings in the Microsoft Active Directory, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Metabase, file system, registry and SQL Server data source. It supports Windows desktop, x64 and .Net Framework 1.1 and 2.0. DCM 2.0 also adds predefined baseline Configuration Items for many Microsoft desktop and server products as well as sample SMS web reports. The DCM user interface enables users to easily define rules specific to their organizations.

  Configuration management is a key process and technical capability in Infrastructure Optimization and allows you to begin preparing for the convergence of system knowledge among developers, architects, administrators, and users through system configuration definition and auditing. It provides a deeper level of monitoring than directory-based configuration enforcement tools to help avoid unplanned outages and increase the availability and overall control of your infrastructure.

Where to Find DCM 2.0

  The SMS 2003 Desired Configuration Monitoring Version 2.0 is available from the:

Microsoft Download Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72132

Microsoft TechNet at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72131

Jeremy Chapman

Solution Accelerators - Infrastructure and Management

TechNet Webcast:  Agility Now Series

Tune into a special webcast 10-part series detailing steps on how you can grow your IT organization into a more flexible and integrated system.  As IT organizations have become more geographically dispersed and individual roles more specialized, some IT professionals have found it increasingly difficult to collaborate across roles and conduct typical management and maintenance tasks in areas such as deployment, user management, messaging, and security.  Hear from subject matter experts as they provide scenario-based solutions for infrastructure management, identity and access management, data protection, and client consistency, and answer your questions about improving your organization’s infrastructure.

TechNet Webcast: Agility Now (Part 02 of 10): Making Identity and Access Management a Reality (Level 200)

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

9:30 A.M.–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time

As network structures expand, IT administrators and managers face an increasing danger of losing control over their IT environments. Each server and resource that appears on the network must be managed by an individual, which can result in many different accounts that follow different password standards. This second webcast in our series looks at an example scenario at a fictional company in which some departments rely upon computers running Linux to provide certain services, and need a central platform for single sign-on to maintain them. Learn how Active Directory can be helpful in addressing these challenges, and see how to design and implement an Active Directory environment that meets the company's needs. We also show how to use a security template and other useful tools to achieve a "Standardized" level of infrastructure optimization

TechNet Webcast: Agility Now (Part 03 of 10): Making Identity and Access Management a Reality with Successful Implementation (Level 200)

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

9:30 A.M.–11:00 A.M. Pacific Time

In part three, we expand on the concepts presented in the previous webcast by showing how to move from a "standardized" to a "dynamic" infrastructure. Continuing with our example scenario, we show how a fictional company, Contoso, achieves the single sign-on (SSO) requirement with minimal complexity and cost. We illustrate several key objectives of the dynamic infrastructure, such as applying Group Policy and enabling enhanced control of desktops. Learn how to implement Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) for inventory, security, and patch management, and how to deploy Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) to integrate computers running the Linux operating system with SSO.

Demorie Crowe

Core Infrastructure Optimization

www.microsoft.com/io

On July 31, Microsoft, along with 9 other vendors, made a significant announcement...the standardization of a modeling language to be used in describing computing resources.

The new draft specification, called SML (Service Modeling Language), is a key milestone in the realization of the DSI (Dynamic Systems Initiative) vision that Microsoft has been talking about for the past 3 years. 

For three years now, Microsoft has been telling a story about how systems can become more intelligent, self-aware, automated and self-managing.  In some sense the vision was largely science fiction because many of the elements required to implement this vision hadn't been invented yet.  However, Microsoft has stayed true to the vision and has started releasing products that implement some of the key elements of the vision.  One of the foundational pieces has been the ability to create models that describe your environment.  The idea was that using models you could create a blueprint of the system and then use that blueprint to do pre-deployment planning, capacity analysis, and eventually an actual deployment...using the models as a template for how the system should be deployed and configured.  The vision went on to describe how these models could then be used to define an ideal state so that if / when systems started to drift from their original configuration, the system could recognize it and self-correct.

This concept was even more broadly expressed in the idea of systems being able to use models to identify which applications should be hosted, and where.  The system could also understand requirements and dependencies so that the necessary resources could be automatically provisioned to meet service requirements...also defined in the models.

How does all this relate to infrastructure optimization?  Well, the realization of these self-managing, dynamic systems is the same destination that the infrastructure optimization model expresses in the most advanced stages of the infrastructure optimization model.  DSI is a strategy for building infrastructure that is intelligent, self-aware and dynamic.  Infrastructure optimization describes a methodology for implementing the key technology elements that help a system achieve this dynamic state.

The announcement to standardize the language used to describe the models used in a dynamic environment is a watershed event for the industry.  Now vendors and customers can come together to build on a common foundation for describing computing elements from any vendor regardless of their orientation.  SML will be implemented by multiple vendors in their development tools, system services, and applications.  All this means that the vision to create more dynamic computing systems can now include technologies and solutions from multple vendors making the infrastructure optimization journey inclusive of everything.

Over time, we'll see more vendors, customers and industry groups adopt this standard.  Computer Associates (CA) is the latest vendor to endorse the standard and join the SML working group.  Others will follow.  In the end, everyone benefits, and the IO model is strengthened by its ability to embrace a much broader collection of service offerings.

Pratul Dublish provides some excellent insights into SML which I recommend for full treatment of SML.

Ed Anderson
Dynamic Systems Initiative

The concept of Infrastructure Optimization is one that is complex and challenging to any organization.  While technology is a major part of the maturity of IO and its supporting capabilities, there are also 2 other areas an organization needs to contend with in order to truly realize the benefits of infrastructure maturity.  These are people and process.  These 3 areas combined make for an environment that is not only secure and well managed but efficient, cost effective and productive for the user community.
The core model that Microsoft has developed is primarily made up of 5 capabilities.  These are:

·         Identity and Access management

·         Desktop Server and Device Management

·         Security and Networking

·         Data Protection and Recovery

·         IT and Security Process

Within these capabilities we define 4 maturity levels – Basic, Standardized, Rationalized and Dynamic.  In order to move in maturity ‘definition’ from one level to the next, for example -  Basic to Standardized, all 5 capabilities have to mature.  In the Core IO model, this is a necessity because of the nature in which the capabilities are inter-connected.  For example, the Identity and Access Management capability cannot mature without the Desktop Server and Device Management capability also maturing.  Likewise, Security and Networking has dependencies on other areas also advancing.   The technologies are interconnected.

There are some areas of IO that simply on their own can bring benefit to an organization, for example client level – like Windows XP SP2.  By itself, this current level of client has advantages, enhancements and abilities above and beyond Windows 2000 as well as NT4.  If, however, this client is deployed into a secure well managed environment, combined with Active Directory, Group Policy usage, as well as a Management tool like Systems Management Server (now referred to as SMS R2 and as SMS V4 or  System Center Configuration Manager) the costs are rapidly reduced.  This well managed environment provides the ability to benefit from the current client features, but when combined with a current back end infrastructure of identity management and configuration management, significant cost savings are realized at the same time as operational enhancements.   

Infrastructure Optimization is about improving all areas of an organizations’ IT processes.  These improvements lead to strong integration with business process, and can lead to in some cases competitive advantages (based on business verticals).  A large part of this  is the client.  The desktop operating system is a summary experience for the entire backend system, whether it be a desktop wired to the corporate network, a tablet or laptop roaming the wireless on a corporate campus, or a remote sales force team member who rarely connects to the main network.  The state, configuration, application level and stability of the hardware used is directly affected by the entire infrastructure.  From the level of OS configuration, to the application layer deployed, to the explicit targeting to that device that may occur for patching, all of these are affected by the maturity level of the technology adopted, the processes both end user and IT support staff employ in operations, and the current abilities of the IT staff all play a large part in the experience.

Through this blog we hope to communicate, connect and learn how users of Microsoft technology are enabling their business through infrastructure maturity.  The IO Team are looking forward to talking with you about Infrastructure Optimization, and to start, I would like to highly recommend you take a read of a new white paper we have released about the benefits of Infrastructure maturity. 

This paper presents the results of surveys and analysis conducted during 2005 at 14 private enterprises that used best practices and management software technologies to optimize their organization’s IT infrastructure and reduce PC management costs. Results of this study indicate a direct correlation between the number of best practices adopted, the management technologies used, and the reduction of PC-related labor costs.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards
Jeff Wettlaufer
Technical Lead, Infrastructure Optimization

Hello and welcome to the Infrastructure Optimization blog.   I hope that it will serve as an active two-way dialog about the key issues you face in driving your IT infrastructure forward.  I think we all realize that there is far too much complexity in environments today and while we have a vision to help, called the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), it is often the journey that is just as important as the destination.  What we hope to do in this Web site (www.microsoft.com/io) is help you with the journey, something we call “Infrastructure Optimization”.    To do this, we realized that we needed a structured way to think about this complex problem.  Thus the Infrastructure Optimization Model was born.    The model was in part derived from work we have done with industry analyst firms and with the Windows Client team who likewise were pursuing a model to help you drive down costs.   Many other people at Microsoft have also worked extensively with the Center for Information System Research (CISR) at MIT on their views in this area and that has contributed to the overall thinking.   We look at the model we have derived more as a guide than an absolute.  We welcome your feedback since we seek not to own a model, but want to show how your expertise combined with our software innovations along with our partners "know how" can uniquely address how to best move through each stage of optimization towards your ultimate infrastructure goals.  I look forward to the dialog.

Your host,

Samm DiStasio