NYMetro Core Infrastructure Specialist Team : MMS

MMS 2002 – Day 2 Recap

ekamor — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:06:51 GMT

(from Boris Nisenbaum, Server & Networking TSP)

Today began with Brad Anderson's keynote. This year's topic for his keynote was "Dynamic Datacenter" and he did a good job show casting a number of Microsoft technologies which enable a truly agile and dynamic datacenter, capable of providing seamless integration and transition between back end server technologies and desktop functionality. From the Windows Server 2008 perspective, Brad demonstrated the synergy between Terminal Services Web Access, virtualized desktop and application virtualization for accessing individual's data from anywhere in the world at any time.

The other part of the keynote was dedicated to the enterprise service management, especially SaaS (Software as a Service) and S+S (Software + Service) models. He raised an objective of managing the attached Services (those that provide higher level of functionality compared with basic services available in the cloud) and provided a glimpse preview of Microsoft System Center Attached Knowledge Services. These attached services can allow enterprises integrate monitoring solutions with business intelligence so that data center infrastructure can be leveraged in the most optimal way. He provided an example where monitoring of the average CPU utilization of the servers in certain geography can allow the organization to develop an optimized approach to the server consolidation task.

Another interesting session I attended was also about managing a virtualized data center. It was called "Dynamic Duo: hardware and Software solutions for Virtualized Clients and Servers" and was delivered by Intel. This session showed how advanced Intel technologies, such as V-Pro and Intel-VT provide unprecedented levels of manageability and performance when used by virtualized clients and servers. An interesting demo of the performance enhancements provided by Intel-VT architecture used in Hyper-V was shown. Here the SQL Server virtualized workload implemented as table indexing task took actually less time on the Hyper-V guest than it took on a physical server! Of course, in real life the performance of the virtualized workload is not likely to be better than physical, the Intel-VT performance enhancements are obvious.

All in all it was another productive day, filled with information and interesting customer interactions.

MMS Day 1: Operations Manager Cross Platform Extensions in BETA now!

ekamor — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:11:06 GMT

Now that we are through the first full day of MMS 2008, I thought we'd share some of the happenings of the day.

This year's big announcements focused on our heterogeneous support and virtualization – here's the link to press release. With the cross-platform extensions for System Center Operations Manager 2007 folks will be able to monitor both Windows and Linux. This puts the plumbing in place using industry standard communications (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus which then enables you to leverage management packs to provide the rich monitoring capability that Operations Manager provides. To learn a bit more, watch this video.

The cross-platform extensions are available for beta testing now on the connect site. For more on this and other info direct from the System Center team, visit their blog.

MMS 2008 Experiences – part 1

ekamor — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:55:25 GMT

(From Boris Nisenbaum, Server & Networking Technical Specialist)

Ok. So we kicked off the event this year on a really good note. The Welcome reception seemed extremely popular with attendees as there seemed to be not enough space in Expo hall to accommodate everyone.

I Staffed TS Pod during Expo Reception and was very excited to see overwhelming enthusiasm related to our server solutions. First thing first:

Lots of customer interest related to Terminal Services technologies in WS08. Every pod staffer, including myself, was involved in multiple conversations. Discussions raged from the very basic questions "What is it?" to advanced architectural discussions where we had to actually demonstrate the possible approach to the particular architecture. Surprisingly lot of folks were interested in TS farm design and TS Broker functionality. The TS gateway was a star with everybody getting really excited about the possibility of tunneling RDP inside HTTPS. I personally had, probably around 10 advanced discussions of this kind during 3 hour shift.