Nexus SC: The System Center Team Blog

Reducing IT Costs in the Datacenter with System Center

sdawes — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:39:09 GMT

A few weeks ago my colleague Brett Williams and I presented, “Reducing IT Costs with System Center Datacenter Management” as part of the Microsoft Thrive Live! series. The webcast is now available for viewing on-demand through Microsoft TechNet Edge.

The webcast focuses around the War On Cost research that Microsoft undertook using a double-blind study, which effectively means that participants did not know that Microsoft was behind the questions. Focusing on 6 key workloads including email, collaboration and more, the research really highlights how implementing activities around automation of server management, virtualization of workloads, and integration of systems management can really help drive down the cost of running and maintaining a business’ IT architecture.

If you are interested in finding out ways where you can demonstrate return on investment and increased productivity with IT, this information presented within this webcast is a must. You should also take a look at this Microsoft site, which focused on how you can save costs with Microsoft, and presents a huge amount of useful information, news, reviews, and more!

To see how and where System Center can assist you with implementing the cost-reducing activities presented in our webcast, browse our website on System Center solutions for dynamic datacenters or contact your Microsoft account team or Microsoft partner.

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

Latest IIS 7 Management Pack delivers support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2

sdawes — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:31:31 GMT

Just released, an update to the Operations Management Pack for the Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 adds support for IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2, and extends support for IIS 7 running on Windows Server 2008 SP2.

Now at version 6.0.7600.0, the IIS 7 management pack provides proactive monitoring of incidents that could affect the performance and availability of the different services provided through IIS, which include:

Web Sites
Application Pools
FTP Servers
NNTP Servers
SMTP Servers

To help troubleshoot common issues the management pack contains helpful product knowledge and inline management tasks. Operations Manager also provides the ability to extend this knowledge through adding your own company or organization information.

The updated management pack can be downloaded immediately, and will shortly be available to customers running Operations Manager 2007 R2 via the online catalog. Customers running Operations Manager 2007 SP1 should review KB article 971541 and apply the Operations Manager Service Pack 1 update before installing this updated management pack.

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

Configuration Manager and Intel vPro integration

jeffwettlaufer — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:09:25 GMT

Hi everyone, recently at the Intel Developer Forum, we sat down with our friends at Intel and recorded a demonstration of the integration between ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 and Intel vPro. The video is now live, and is available here on Edge. I hope you find it useful.

For more information, please visit:
System Center Configuration Manager website
Technical Documentation on vPro integration
Intel vPro Expert Center website
Great blog post on vPro planning and deployment

Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

Scale and Performance improvements in Configuration Manager 2007 R3

jeffwettlaufer — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:20:32 GMT

Hi everyone, recently we recorded a look into the new scale and performance improvements we will ship in ConfigMgr 2007 R3. There are 3 main areas of enhancement being made to the core capabilities of ConfigMgr. These are as follows:

Delta Active directory Discovery – AD discovery has 2 main tasks. Discovering changes to users or machines that may effect targeting. Also, periodic full scans capture users and machines last logged time, ensuring active users or systems are not made obsolete. The AD queries that this is supported on include User, User Group, System and System Group.

Fast Collections – Combined with Delta AD Discovery is a concept called ‘Fast Collections’. When a Collection Membership Rule is configured to dynamically add new resources, a few things happen. This applies to a few resources. Those that are initially discovered, OSD provisioned systems, HW inventories scanned systems, or ConfgMgr Client version upgrades. When Fast Collections are configured, a Resource ID is inserted into the change tracking table where a separate collection evaluator thread is run (5min) and evaluates collections marked for fast evaluation. This setting does not apply to known machines , and full evaluations are still processed the same way. The result is significant gains of time savings to get advertisements to users and systems.

Admin Console Improvements – There have also been some improvements to the Admin console, helping the Administrator save time in their daily tasks. For example, new right click options off a resource to add to collection (existing) add to new collection, remove from collection and add resources, are all designed to save console steps.

Here is a short video demonstrating these improvements.

Bookmark this on Delicious

We mentioned yesterday that the System Center team is travelling to Europe next week, drop us a note if you are around and would like to share a coffee……

Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

Have you tried Service Manager yet?

sdawes — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:43:17 GMT

Service Manager is soon to be the latest offering in the System Center product suite, and delivers an integrated platform to help organizations automate and adapt their IT service management best practices (such as those found MOF and ITIL). Focused on incident, change and problem management, Service Manager connects knowledge and information across System Center to centralize the management of configuration and work items, allowing organizations to triage, manage and track their operational activities.

We’ve shown glimpses of Service Manager over the past year, including MMS, TechEd USA and TechEd Europe. Planned for release later this year, many of our customers, MVPs and partners are already working with the current bits, Beta 2. For example, Microsoft Partner Provance have created an IT asset management add-on for Service Manager, a Beta of which is available for download. The Microsoft Solution Accelerator Team is also working on a compliance add-on that helps organizations map technical controls to control objectives defined through the Unified Compliance Framework (UCF). We’ll be providing more information on that in the very near future.

If you are interested in investigating Service Manager further, you can download the Beta 2 of Service Manager, or check in with your Microsoft account team or Microsoft partner for a discussion and demonstration.

To find more information, take a look at the following resources:

The Service Manager web page, where you can find more information on the product as well as follow links to whitepapers, videos, demos, and more. We’ll be revamping and updating this site in the very near future, as well as launching a TechCenter for the product.
The Service Manager blog where our lead Program Manager, Travis Wright, and his team have been posting some great tips and insight into the product.
Resources from our System Center MVPs, such as blog postings from Patrik Sundqvist and Anders Bengtsson, on their respective community and blog sites.
Peruse the sessions and hands-on-labs that we’ll be presenting at MMS 2010 (17 breakouts amongst other activities at the show)!

Take a look at Service Manager today!

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

The System Center team is heading to Europe

jeffwettlaufer — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:06:09 GMT

Hey everyone, the System Center Team is heading to Amsterdam for the week of Feb 8th. We will be in town presenting to the EMEA Infrastructure, Deployment and Management Council at the Microsoft Netherlands Schiphol Office.

While the event is not open to the broader public we are around and would love to meet you! If you are a customer or partner of the System Center products, and would like to talk about anything, please feel free to contact us at the below information.

Even if it is just for a coffee, we would love to hear from you…

Kind regards

Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

Influencer Review of the 2.2.10 Live Meeting: SharePoint and System Center

davemorehouse — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:50:54 GMT

Hat tip to Bob Cornelissen for his write up of our most recent Live Meeting on SharePoint and System Center, given as part of the System Center Influencers Program (wait… what’s that?). At the end of his write-up, Bob has this to say:

It is no secret that I just love the System Center line of products and have been working with these a lot. I believe the added possibilities in the SharePoint 2010 management pack for SCOM will make the product much better manageable and give some control back to IT personnel that is less specialized in SharePoint. I have been working with DPM 2010 Beta for some time now and am very happy with its workings and self healing possibilities. And the coming additional features in the release candidate will bring even more enthusiasm.

Next one that’s officially on the books (though we may possibly schedule another one) will cover our midmarket solutions in greater depth, as we all gear up for the upcoming releases of DPM and SCE 2010. Scheduled date is March 9. Watch this space (and Twitter and Facebook) for updates.

Cheers!

- dave // (whose sig is without a doubt the lamest, most austere on the team)

Monitor the health of your Distributed File System (DFS) Namespaces on Windows Server

sdawes — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:58:34 GMT

Available for download today, the Operations Management Pack for Distributed File Server (DFS) Namespaces (version 6.0.6321.0) monitors the DFS Namespace Service on Windows Server® 2008, Windows Server 2003 R2, and Windows Server 2003. It can also be configured to monitor the health of DFS Namespaces from client computers running Windows Vista® or Windows® XP.

This management pack monitors the overall health of DFS Namespaces and alerts you to critical issues across the following:

Namespace health
DFS service health
Namespace server health
DFS folder health
Folder target health
Namespace server Active Directory communication
Namespace root directory health
DFS client-based monitoring

The DFS Namespaces management pack can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center. Customers using Operations Manager 2007 R2 will be able to download it from the online MP catalog shortly.

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

System Center Configuration Manager Reporting Dashboard Beta released

jeffwettlaufer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:14:59 GMT

We are pleased to announce the Beta release of our Dashboard Solution Accelerator.

The System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Dashboard lets customers utilize a browser based graphically rich reporting experience that showcases the robust reporting capabilities of the world’s leading system management product. The dashboard will help you stay informed of application and operating system deployments, security updates, system health status and more; whether on the plasma screen in your operations center, or your administrative desktop.

Some key benefits of the Dashboard are:

Provides dependable, timely access to key information: The dashboard lets you easily stay on top of deployments, security updates, client health, and compliance status.
Easy to install and configure: The dashboard allows customers to quickly integrate your data in just minutes. Utilize either the base set of datasets “out of the box” or choose your own.
Easy to customize: The dashboard can easily be customized to meet the needs of your different departments. Any dataset in the Configuration Manager database can be presented on the dashboard, in chart, gauge, and table formats.
Flexible & interactive: Administrators can easily filter data and create ad hoc, custom views. Filters allow users to quickly drill down from high-level to more specific data.

We welcome you to download and evaluate this add on to Configuration Manager 2007 today. Here are some key links and resources:

System Center Configuration Manager Dashboard website link
Direct link to the Connect site for the Dashboard beta program
Link to send feedback
System Center Configuration Manager website

Thanks for your time

Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

Hear of new/updated Management Pack releases via new Twitter hashtag (#mpreleases)

sdawes — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:32:39 GMT

One of the more common requests we receive from you regarding management pack availability is to communicate when new and updated releases become available. While we are looking to improve such an announcement capability in Pinpoint (the site of our new System Center Catalog – see my earlier blog for more information) the product team recently created a Twitter hashtag, #mpreleases, to help communicate of new and updated management packs.

Of course, given the open nature of Twitter it’s not just for Microsoft to leverage. Our partners, such as members of the System Center Alliance, MVPs, and more, can also leverage Twitter to announce and post links to more information about their management pack releases.

For more information on Twitter, check out http://www.twitter.com. Details on hashtags can be found here.

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

Hockey Helmets, PCs and Laptops

SystemCenterTeam — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:25:42 GMT

If you’re an IT administrator working in a smaller IT department, I’m sure you feel like banging your head sometimes as you find yourself reacting to end-user issues throughout your busy day. Somebody needs that new application installed, someone else is running out of disk space and yet another person sent you email saying their laptop is running …“S-L-O-W-L-Y.”

Next thing you know, the boss wants to know how many copies of application “X” are installed on computers in the company, but you don’t have a quick and easy way to gather that information. According to my friends who work in the IT departments of midsize businesses, this isn’t an unusual scenario during any given week. There just aren’t many good IT management solutions out there built with the ease-of-use you would want while still having enterprise-class capabilities.

The System Center team at Microsoft is changing that with the soon to be released IT management solution for midsize businesses; System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010. In addition to being an end-to-end solution for managing physical and virtual servers, hardware and software, it also integrates management capability for optimizing your PCs and laptops. Click on the video to learn more…

Click on the links below to download pre-release versions of these products and give them a try!

System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010 provide an easy to use and integrated solution for managing and protecting data for PCs and laptops so you can cut the time you spend reacting to desktop issues and keep everyone productive. With this System Center solution you can:

Monitor PCs and laptops for software and hardware alerts like application health, operating system health, disk space usage
Reference provided troubleshooting information to diagnose and resolve issues if a problem should arise. In many cases there are in-line links to click and remotely fix issues
Centrally configure update policies to deploy Microsoft AND third-party software updates, plus things like BIOS and other hardware updates
Automatically gather hardware and software inventory for all your managed PCs and laptops
Easily and quickly package and deploy MSI and EXE based software including the Office suite of products – no more time consuming long roll-outs to branches and remote offices
Quickly and safely back-up and restore your Windows based laptops and PCs

Let’s be careful out there…

David Mills

Sr. Product Manager

System Center

Technorati Tags: DPM 2010,SCE 2010,System Center,Midsize Business,Data Protection Manager,System Center Essentials

Application Compatibility Toolkit Connector Update

jeffwettlaufer — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:43:56 GMT

To help our customers accelerate their testing and deployment of Windows 7, we are really pleased to announce an update to the ACT Connector for Configuration Manager. The Application Compatibility Toolkit Connector (ACT Connector) assists administrators with collecting the necessary computer and application compatibility information to help plan for a Windows deployment.

With this connector update, Administrators will be able to utilize valuable Application Compatibility information right from within the Configuration Manager console. The ACT Connector provides the following functionality within the Admin console:

Inventories installed software applications and creates reports that will assist with determining which applications are Windows compatible.
Retrieves device driver compatibility for installed devices and creates reports that will assist with determining which device drivers will need to be upgraded to support the Windows operating system.

The ACT Connector can be downloaded here.
Here are some additional resources:

Configuration Manager Homepage
Configuration Manager Techcenter
Application Compatibility Toolkit documentation for ConfigMgr
ACT documentation on TechNet

Have a great weekend!

Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

Monitor the Health and Performance of Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010

sdawes — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:53:53 GMT

The Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 is the solution to allow your employees to safely use the Internet. To assure that it is operating optimally, the Operations Management Pack for Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 – released earlier this month (version 7.0.7695.1) - includes monitors and rules to track the deployed topology & features, performance, availability, and reliability of Forefront TMG 2010.

With this management pack you can proactively manage your Forefront TMG 2010 deployment, enabling you to analyze performance trends and metrics, manage bottlenecks, and identify capacity requirements. Some of the key features incorporated into the management pack include:

Topology and feature deployment
Events indicating service outages
Alerts indicating configuration issues and connected data source changes
Verification that all dependant services are running
Configuration storage synchronization

Download the Operations Management Pack for Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 today! For more information on System Center and Forefront, click the following links:

Customers still running the Microsoft Internet Security and Accelerator (ISA) Server can also monitor the health and performance of their environment with the following options:

Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 Management Pack for OpsMgr 2007 at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C576FCDF-42F0-4EB5-990D-E8E7C7E9C07E&displaylang=en&displaylang=en
Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 and 2006 Management Pack at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6BF3B468-0473-41A1-9EA1-F3BCEC7AA562&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

Operations Management Pack for Windows 2008 R2 Direct Access Server Now Available

sdawes — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:58:06 GMT

Now available for download, the Operations Management Pack for Windows Server 2008 R2 Direct Access Server supports a rich set of Alarms, Monitors and Agent Tasks that can be used to successfully and efficiently manage a Direct Access server.

Through Operations Manager, the Direct Access Server Management Pack supports the following features:

Automatic discovery of the Direct Access Server and its components, including:
- IP-HTTPS Gateway
- ISATAP Router
- Network Security Component
- 6to4 Router
- Teredo Relay
- Teredo Server
Monitors that identify:
- Status of Direct Access Server and its components
- Denial of service (DoS), spoofing, and replay attacks
- ICMP and data traffic queue overflows
- Utilization of available IPsec states on the Direct Server

This new management pack can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center, or via the integrated MP Download wizard from our online service.

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

Happy Data Privacy Day … from System Center

JasonBuffington — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:36:35 GMT

Yes, it really is an established day. Check out http://dataprivacyday2010.org/:

This is a great day to think about “How private is your backup?”

System Center has some capabilities to support Data Privacy Day within Data Protection Manager.

Check out our blog post on Because It’s Everybody’s Business to read the rest of our post.

Thanks for reading.

Jason Buffington
Senior Technical Product Manager – System Center

System Center Data Protection Manager
System Center Essentials