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Microsoft Conferences in April 2012 – MS Network 2.0 and WinDays 2012

This month was very exciting. I participated in two Microsoft conferences as a speaker with three lectures.

The first conference was MS Network 2.0 in Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina) 4. – 5. April. On the MS Network 2.0 I talked about what is new in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager. The session was well attended, and grades at the end have been satisfying. Thank you all who attended my session.
Also, I would like to thank MS Network 2.0 team and very kind hosts for their hospitality Smile. It was great experience!

Few pictures from the MS Network 2.0 conference.

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The second conference was WinDays 12 I Rovinj (Croatia) 23. – 27. April.

I had two sessions. My colleague Ivan Kardum and I had common lecture about Team Foundation Server and System Center 2012 Operations Manager. We talked about how to unite developers and administrators Smile… Trust me, it’s possible Winking smile.

On the second session, entitled “Administrators, remove the mask” I talked about bad admins and how an administrator can destroy the entire company. It was a great lecture, I started  with a mask on the face Smile.

I would like to thank WinDays 12 team and especially I’m grateful everyone who came to my sessions and supported me.

Few pictures from the WinDays 12 conference.

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Hope to see you next year at the same conferences Winking smile.

Romeo Mlinar
April 27, 2012
Conferences, Microsoft, OnTheField, System Center, Team Foundation Server, Windows Server
1 comment

System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager

This year Microsoft release a new palette System Center 2012 products. Virtual Machine Manager is probably the System Center 2012 product with the most significant updates.
There are a lots of updates in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 to mention them all, but here are few of the most important enhancements.

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 – New features

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 new features can be divided in four segments as shown on picture below:

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1. Infrastructure enhancements

Highly Available VMM server. As Virtual Machine Manager is core of management infrastructure for virtual environment it is really important for this infrastructure to be highly available in todays big datacenters.

2. Fabric Management

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 can now manage even more hypervisors: Hyper-V, VMWare and Citrix XenServer. Also it can integrate with remote management such as iLO and SMASH. One interesting thing here is also ability for bare metal provisioning meaning that with Virtual Machine Manager 2012 you can provision Hyper-V even on bare metal computers without much manual work. Cluster creation with storage provisioning is also one of the interesting new features. Regarding the network management enhancements, Virtual Machine Manager 2012 can now integrate with load balancers. Besides that now you can also assign IP and MAC from pools. Dynamic Optimization and new Power Management features are also important updates as described in Cool Features.

3. Cloud Management

Virtual Machine Manager can now abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds, delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas. Also now it is rather easy to enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud.

4. Service Management

With Virtual Machine Manager 2012 you can now define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, OS images and application packages. Maybe the most important feature in service management is ability to leverage great and power full technologies like Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V).

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 – Cool Features

1. Support for cloud, fabric, and services management

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 has moved into the cloud and services management space. VMM 2012 adds cloud support, where the Cloud is defined as a collection of resources that can be assigned to users or groups. The cloud is composed of a Fabric, which is the underlying IT infrastructure, and Services, which are collections of virtual machines (VM’s) that perform a given task.

2. Dynamic Optimization

The addition of Dynamic Optimization is Microsoft’s answer to VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler. Dynamic Optimization provides cluster-level workload balancing for VM’s. Like the older VMM Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) feature, Dynamic Optimization lets VMM analyze workloads and dynamically move VM’s to different hosts by using Live Migration. Unlike PRO, Dynamic Optimization doesn’t require Operations Manager. The PRO feature will still be available in Virtual Machine Manager 2012.

3. Power Optimization

A feature closely related to Dynamic Optimization is the ability to optimize the placement of VM’s to minimize power consumption. Power Optimization in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 can use Live Migration to consolidate running VM’s onto fewer virtualization hosts, then power down the unneeded hosts.

4. Enhanced placement rules

Intelligent Placement enabled the previous version of Virtual Machine Manager to evaluate host capacity and suggest the most appropriate virtualization hosts for deployment. Virtual Machine Manager 2012 extends this capability with over 100 virtual machine placement checks and also adds support for custom placement rules. In addition, Virtual Machine Manager 2012 supports multiple virtual machine deployments as services.

5. Upgrade support

Nice feature in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is the ability to perform in-place upgrades from existing Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 with SP1 installations. Customers will be able to upgrade from Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 with SP1 to the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC, and then upgrade from the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC to the final RTM release of Virtual Machine Manager 2012.

6. Bare-metal Hyper-V provisioning

Another new feature in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is the ability to perform bare-metal provisioning of Hyper-V servers. This feature lets Virtual Machine Manager create new Hyper-V hosts on bare-metal systems by using predefined templates.
Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is also integrated with remote management technologies such as iLO (HP’s Integrated Lights Out) and SMASH (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware).

7. Manage multiple hypervisors

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is able to manage all the major virtualization platforms. In Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Microsoft added the ability to manage VMware’s vSphere Server via vCenter Server. With the release of Virtual Machine Manager 2012, Microsoft is adding the ability to manage Citrix XenServer. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and ESX 3.0 is not supported.

8. Cluster awareness

At the previous version of Virtual Machine Manager we did not have a cluster-aware application. Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is cluster aware and can be installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster, giving Virtual Machine Manager 2012 improved availability and the ability to fail over to a backup node in the event of a server failure.

9. PowerShell 2.0

Virtual Machine Manager provides PowerShell cmdlets for command-shell management, and actions in the Virtual Machine Manager console can be used as a basis for generating PowerShell management scripts. Virtual Machine Manager 2012 enhances this management capability with full support for PowerShell 2.0.

There are much more enhancements in System Center 2012-Virtual Machine Manager. Check them on technet and start your journey to the Cloud.

I can’t wait RTM, this would be/is a great product from Microsoft System Center team Winking smile.

Romeo Mlinar
March 29, 2012
Hyper-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, System Center, Virtualization, Windows Server
3 comments

DaRT 7 – Remote Connection scenario

As I promised in my last post about DaRT 7, today I’ll describe how to use DaRT 7 (Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset) in Remote Connection scenario.

We have created DaRT 7 recovery partition for Windows 7 x64. How to create DaRT 7 recovery partition you can read in my previous post.

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A user is working on his PC when he experiences a problem with it. The PC is now in a state, like BSOD, where normal boot is not possible.

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The user contacts the helpdesk over the phone, and is directed to boot into DaRT from the previously created recovery partition.

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Upon accessing DaRT, the user provides helpdesk staff with connection info from DaRT.

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User need to click on Remote Connection and click on Yes.

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After the user has confirmed that it wants to establish communication with the helpdesk staff parameters appears.

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Helpdesk guy opening DaRT Remote Connection Viewer and enters ticket numbers to establish the connection.

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A helpdesk worker remotely connects to the user’s machine, and uses DaRT tools to uncover a problem.

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As you can see, Helpdesk guy is connected and also at this moment keyboard and mouse are locked for user.
The helpdesk takes control over the user computer.

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It solves the problem, for example, originated caused by some updates, uninstall this updates and bring computer back to life.

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The helpdesk employee reboots the user’s PC and confirms it is working again. The employee returns to productivity.

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I hope this could be helpful for someone.

Romeo Mlinar
February 20, 2012
Administration, DaRT, Microsoft, Recovery, Windows 7
0 comments