Category: Virtualization

System Center Licensing examples by Marnix Wolf – Part 4

The fourth part of the interesting blog series of Marnix Wolf for System Center Licensing. Find the article here.

Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks by Mark Russinovich at TechEd North America 2012

Another great session by Mark at TechEd. In this session you can learn all bout the new IaaS capabilities of Windows Azure. Just watch the session and I promise you that this one hour won’t be wasted. The video is here.

Virtual Machine Manager Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) Guide Beta

VMM team is releasing the beta of Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Virtual Machine Manager 2012. The document can be download from the Microsoft Connect site here (you will need MS account). As this is a beta you review the document and send feedback to Microsoft at IPDfdbk@microsoft.com.

Lifecycle Virtual Machines with Service Manager and Orchestrator – A Real World Private Cloud Scenario

Anders Bengtsson one of Microsoft MVPs and author of System Center Service Manager 2010 Unleashed wrote an amazing article titled “VM lifecycle in Service Manager with Orchestrator magic”. Not only he provides the knowledge on how to built lifecycle scenario for virtual machines but also he provides for download the runbooks and the management packs used by him. Such service is often desired by customers and without a lot of effort you can build it by reading the article and taking advantage of provided for download content.

System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 CTP2

The second community technology preview of SP1 for System Center 2012 is out. Actually this is not an ordinary Service Pack, Microsoft is actually adding more and more features to System Center 2012:

  • Virtual Machine Manager
    • Improved Support for Network Virtualization
    • Extend the VMM console with Add-ins
    • Support for Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units and discovery of SAS storage
    • Ability to convert VHD to VHDX, use VHDX as base Operating System image
  • Configuration Manager
    • Support for Windows 8
    • Support for Mac OS clients
    • Support for Linux and Unix servers
  • Data Protection Manager
    • Improved backup performance of Hyper-V over CSV 2.0
    • Protection for Hyper-V over remote SMB share
    • Protection for Windows Server 2012 de-duplicated volumes
    • Uninterrupted protection for VM live migration
  • App Controller
    • Service Provider Foundation API to create and operate Virtual Machines
    • Support for Azure VM; migrate VHDs from VMM to Windows Azure, manage from on-premise System Center
  • Operations Manager
    • Support for IIS 8
    • Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services
    • Azure SDK support
  • Orchestrator
    • Additional support for Integration Packs, including 3rd party
    • Manage VMM self-service User Roles
    • Manage multiple VMM ‘stamps’ (scale units), aggregate results from multiple stamps
    • Integration with App Controller to consume Hosted clouds
  • Service Manager
    • Apply price sheets to VMM clouds
    • Create chargeback reports
    • Pivot by cost center, VMM clouds, Pricesheets
  • Server App-V
    • Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during packaging
    • Create virtual application packages from applications installed remotely on native server

If you want to try CTP 2 in test environment download it from here.