First up today, breakfast! Then off to the first of two keynote speeches.
The key note presentation by Brad Anderson was very motivating, with great sneak peeks and tech demos of packages which are currently in beta and RC status. Heavily emphasized was the power of cloud computing, specifically private clouds. Working with MS Hyper-V, we witnessed how easy it is to deploy multiple cloud infrastructures, spanning multiple host types, such as Hyper-V, VMWare ESX, and even Citrix Xen. The highlight of the demo, at least to me, was the easy addition of resources to an existing cloud, all right within the next release of SCVMM.
Monitoring via SCOM 2012 was also highlighted, with the ability to see right down to the hardware level of the hosts, as well as the presentation of dashboards, both natively within the SCOM console, and via a Sharepoint 2010 page. The overall ease of creating dashboards within SCOM 2012 has been increased greatly over that of SCOM 2007 R2; dashboards can created in a few minutes, with information gathered from a variety of resources. Manager and director types will eat this up, since they will have a one-page, at-a-glance view into the state and health of the infrastructure or end-to-end view of the applications their teams are charged with monitoring and maintaining.
I just left the presentation on System Center Service Manager. Another great introductory lecture, we were shown how SCSM can be extended, with a minimum of fuss. The demonstrator not only utilized his test servers, but also showed us how things function in production at Redmond, from the initial user ticket creation, all the way through tier 1 incident resolution.
The process of extending Service Manager is very intuitive, and if you’ve had any experience in scripting or programming in a Visual Studio type of environment, you should have no problem at all either modifying the canned forms, or creating entirely new forms. In a nutshell, it’s as easy as creating your database fields, dropping controls on the form, and then binding the forms to the database fields to create a basic form.
Another good for today: Using MED-V to solve Windows 7 application compatibility. Tim Crabb and Mike Newsom did an excellent presentation regarding why you shouldn’t let application compatibility stop your enterprise from migrating to Windows 7. With an estimated savings between $34 – $243 per machine upgraded, why would you not upgrade. I can tell you we are working hard at my office to get the last compatibility hold out resolved.
The demos for MED-V v2 were quite well done, and each one showed how easy it can be to do some very quick deployment of MED-V and your troubled apps to Windows 7.