Category Archives: System Center

System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 SP1 released

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Are your datacenter costs rising? Does your current infrastructure make it difficult to scale up or down quickly to respond to the changing needs of your organization? To meet these challenges, you need a more cost-effective, agile way to provide IT services—quickly, efficiently, and on demand.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 SP1 is a free, partner-extensible solution that allows you to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage datacenter resources. Using the Self-Service Portal, you can reduce IT costs, while increasing agility for your organization. The Self-Service Portal works with products and technologies you know and trust, like Windows Server and the System Center product suite. This solution delivers:

  • Automated web portals and a workload provisioning engine that integrates with System Center.
  • Tested guidance and best practices to help configure and deploy private cloud infrastructures.
  • Guidance to help partners easily extend functionality.
  • Localization in three languages: Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.

Self-Service Portal Technology Partners

The Self-Service Portal includes powerful extensibility features for Microsoft technology partners. Independent software and hardware vendors can customize different virtual machine actions (create, delete, stop, start, shut down, connect, pause, and so on) to take advantage of the unique characteristics of their infrastructure.

Citrix

Citrix Integration Pack for Self-Service Portal

The integration pack integrates Essentials for Hyper-V with System Center by automatically provisioning the storage whenever a virtual machine is commissioned though the Self-Service Portal.
Learn more >

Compellent

Compellent Solution Pack for Self-Service Portal

Utilizing Windows PowerShell® with the Compellent Storage Center SAN, Compellent’s Solution Pack enables the integration and support for self-service provisioning of data storage resources with Virtual Machine Manager and Windows Server Hyper-V™ through the Self-Service Portal.
Learn more >

f5

F5 Solution for Self-Service Portal

The F5 solution for Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal adds the option for traffic management by the BIG-IP application delivery controller (ADC) within the service role section of a user request. Executing this option automatically configures the BIG-IP for the request of VMs as they come online.
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HP

HP Services Using the Self-Service Portal

Accelerate your journey to the private cloud with HP’s Converged Infrastructure and HP Technology Consulting services. Begin with a short assessment, then continue to implementation based on HP’s deep experience in the datacenter. HP uses pre-developed scripts, portals, and cmdlets to integrate into your environment and build a self-service infrastructure.
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Intel

Intel Cloud Builder Guide: Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel Platforms

The Intel reference architecture will assist organizations that require their cloud data and assets to reside on premises and those that need to support a new business domain with a separate IT infrastructure that is scalable and flexible.
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NetApp

NetApp ApplianceWatch PRO 2.1.1

Accelerate virtual machine provisioning, and increase storage efficiencies in private cloud implementations managed by the Self-Service Portal with the integration scripts and PowerShell cmdlets included in ApplianceWatch PRO 2.1.1 that enable rapid provisioning of space-efficient VMs using NetApp FlexClone technology.
Learn more >

VKernel

VKernel Chargeback with Hyper-V

VKernel Chargeback with Hyper-V enables private clouds to automatically map virtualization costs to applications and customers by reporting on allocated costs and by measuring and expensing the actual consumption of server and storage resources by cloud customers.
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System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3 is out now!

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Today marks the release and availability of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3!  R3 includes a complete set of power management tools for more Green IT, mobile device management capabilities, and other enhancements.

Below are a few key points on what’s new with R3.  Go here to download the evaluation software, view demonstrations or try R3 via Microsoft’s virtual labs.

  • Centralized Power Management: Allows IT organizations to centrally manage the power settings of Windows 7, Vista and XP computers, helping reduce energy consumption and costs.  Detailed reports of trends and settings help IT pros make smart power management choices, and also validate Green IT projects with summaries of power, money and CO2 savings.  Learn more here.
  • Mobile Device Management: Licenses for System Center Mobile Device Manager allow users to run comprehensive asset inventories, deploy software, manage settings and enforce password policies for Widows phones.
  • Enhanced Scalability and Performance: Configuration Manager R3 is more scalable than ever, increasing the number of supported clients to 300,000 per site.  R3 is also more efficient in the way it communicates with Active Directory, helping you discover user or machine changes more quickly and allowing custom queries to define user, system or group attributes.

Additionally, just like Configuration Manager R2, R3 will be the foundation for the upcoming Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010.  By bringing endpoint security into overall endpoint management, users can reduce costs and inefficiencies, and also improve security and compliance..

Source;

http://bink.nu/news/system-center-configuration-manager-2007-r3-released.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/configuration-manager/cm-r3.aspx

Hyper-V Monitor Gadget for Windows Sidebar

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Created by Tore Lervik (mindre.net), The gadget can list multiple servers at once and also support vmconnect when double clicking on a VM. The gadget uses WMI to connect to the server so the user might need to follow John Howard’s guide remote WMI access (Step 5) on both the client and the Hyper-V server.

He has created a sidebar gadget so you can see what the Hyper-V server is doing from a workstation. The gadget can list multiple servers at once and also support vmconnect when double clicking on a VM.

PS: The gadget uses WMI to connect to the server so the user might need to follow John Howard’s guide remote WMI access on both the client and the Hyper-V server.

Some of the features are:

  • VM CPU graph
  • Wake on Lan support
  • VM RDP (If the host is running 2008 R2)
  • Multilanguage support.
  • Optimized performance releated to VM-RDP addresses.
  • Added ability to only display a number of VM at the time. (Good for people having more VM than fits on the screen)
  • If a VM not in the screen is off the host’s name will be red, if it’s paused or starting it will be orange.
  • Added ability to minimize a server in the monitor view. Holding mouse cursor over the Host will display information about the VM’s
  • Added option to choose what type of RDP setting to the host on a pr. host basis.
  • Added VM information when holding the mouse cursor over a VM (The gadget needs focus for this to work..)
  • Added Orange background to a VM that is running with the Health-status not beeing OK. (Happens when a VM is booting up by bluescreen)
  • Added Pause button to the VM controls.
  • Wibout Bootsma is now part of the gadget development. :)

Download here;
Hyper-V Monitor.gadget (50 kb)

Continue reading →

Citrix Connector for System Center Configuration Manager 2007

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Source; http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2010/07/01/citrix-connector-for-system-center-configuration-manager-2007.aspx

Microsoft have recently jointly released the Citrix connector for ConfigMgr 2007.  Through this release, the ConfigMgr SDK has been used to extend and support the management of application services through XenApp.  Very cool indeed.

Here is the announcement. Links are below.

Citrix® XenApp™ 6 introduces integration with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 giving organizations a single, integrated view and management of all applications across the enterprise including on-demand apps by XenApp. The Citrix XenApp Connector leverages the Configuration Manager console to deploy and publish applications and updates to XenApp servers with zero disruption to users and extends the reach of Configuration Manager applications to a broader set of users, devices and access scenarios

Some resources for you:

  • Jointly authored whitepaper is available here
  • A Video Demo can be viewed here