Day two at the Microsoft Management Summit started with the Keynote of Brad Anderson, the corporate vice president of the Management and Security Division at Microsoft. This Keynote was about “You. Empowered By The Cloud”, giving the vision of Microsoft about the Public and Private Cloud. During the Keynote some nice announcements were made.
The vision of Microsoft is that allot of services are moving to the Cloud. The Cloud can be a Public Cloud, when using services from Microsoft or its partners or the Private Cloud when using services from your own data-center. The key in this is automating, automating and automating 🙂 The first announcement of the day was that Opalis has been renamed to System Center Orchestrator. System Center Orchestrator is used to automate processes in the data-center, for instance to automatically deploy extra webservers when a web application is used often during a period of time. With this process based application you can automate almost everything, also for instance the creation of users in Active Directory after a Change Request is issued in System Center Service Manager.
To summarize all announcements in a nutshell see the list below 🙂
- SMS 2.0 is end of life at the 31th of March of this year.
- System Center Project Codename “Concero” is the new self sevice portal to manage services in the Public or Private Cloud.
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta was released during the Keynote
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager2012 can be used to deploy bare metal host servers
- Release Candidate for System Center Advisor was released duringcthe Keynote
- System Center Configuration Manager 2012 is going to be able to manage Unix and Linux servers
All new planned System Center products of the 2012 wave are finished in the year 2011.
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012
- System Center Configuration Manager 2012
- System Center Orchestrator
- Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012
- System Center Service Manager 2012
- System Center Data Protection Manager 2012
- System Center Advisor
- System Center Project Codename “Concero”
A good and informative Keynote if you ask me, with nice demos’.
The rest of the day was used to attend OS Deployment sessions, from troubleshooting Windows 7 deployment to enhanced System Center Configuration Manager OS Deployment issues and tips from the field. I will be get back on OS Deployment later.
The summary of the day 2, allot is going to change in the System Center world this year and during the technical sessions loads of deployment tips and information gathered to be able to use it during the current OS Deployment projects that are currently running.