Even though Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 are two days from official preview release Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 8.1 Preview are available for download. This is great because in previous releases (Windows 7 and below) we had to wait even months after these tools are released.
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Description of Cumulative Update 2 for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Service Pack 1
Even a little late SCCM 2012 SP1 also received its CU2. A lot of bugs are fixed and some more support for Linux systems are added. You can download the update and read the full list of changes here.
New MP: Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012
The Hyper-V MP provides good monitoring but certainly that MP can be extended to provide more advanced monitoring. For Hyper-V 2008 R2 MP some Microsoft employees extended that MP and provided this extension MP at codeplex site. Now they are providing us with similar extension MP for Hyper-V 2012 MP.
New features in this release:
VMs Integration Services Version monitor
Hyper-V Replica Health Monitoring Dashboard and States
SMB Shares I/O latency monitor
Included features from previous release
Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical processor monitoring
Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual processor monitoring
Hyper-V Dynamic Memory monitoring
Hyper-V Virtual Networks monitoring
NUMA remote pages monitoring
SLAT enabled processor detection
Hyper-V VHDs monitoring
Physical and Logical Disk monitoring
Host Available Memory monitoring
Stopped and Failed VMs monitoring
Failed Live Migrations monitoring
Keep in mind that the management pack is with beta status. You can download it from codeplex site.
Test Lab Guide: Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Network Virtualization with System Center 2012 R2 VMM
Even though SC 2012 R2 and WS 2012 R2 are not released yet Microsoft published a guide to setup lab for Hyper-V Network Virtualization. There are no screenshot in the guide but you can have a sneak peak preview of the architecture of the new Multi-Tenant NVGRE Gateway. Check it out here.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service Technical Guidance for Hosting Service Providers
Microsoft published a guide for Hosting Service Providers that use or will use System Center and Windows Server. The guide just gives an overview from which you will be able to get the big picture on where to start but it is useful for starters. Download this document from here.
Cloud Administrator in Azure World 