Today I’m in London for what I expect will be one of the most valuable events of my calendar – Inframon’s now annual War On Cost event, this year held at The Cabinet War Rooms in London’s Westminster.
Inframon, headed by Gordon McKenna and Sean Roberts are old friends of ‘The Circle’ since we attended their System Center Train the Trainer workshop in November 2008. Since then we’ve kept in touch at various events & launches, and when they are hosting they always deliver a cracking event.
Indeed, a fair summary as I wrote to some colleagues only a few weeks ago..
Coming up on the 5th November is Inframon’s War on Cost which is basically a 1-day systems management focussed preview of TechEd Europe which starts the following week in Berlin.
A whole bunch of senior Redmond folk come over the week before TechEd to present at this event, hit the town for a few beers (limited for me am afraid this year), stay the weekend in London before going on to Berlin for yet more & possibly better beer!
So, click on http://www.waroncost.com/ to register – I’ll absolutely guarantee you, if you have an interest/responsibility in managing a Microsoft estate then you will get a load of value from this event.
The official agenda is below, and if I made notes I’ve added them in-line with the agenda:
Event Schedule
Inframon, the UK’s leading specialist in the Microsoft System Center suite present "War On Cost 2010", a very exclusive event which will be taking place in the Cabinet War Rooms in the heart of London, an historic underground complex that housed a British government command centre throughout the Second World War.
The aim of this event is to give you valuable information on how you can help your organisation drive down the cost of managing your Windows and Non-Windows based infrastructure using the Microsoft System Center Suite of products.
Featuring two dynamic tracks aimed at both Business and Technical decision makers, to give you the knowledge you need to make a difference in your organisation.
09:00 – 09:30 INFRAMON KEYNOTE
Introductory keynote from Gordon McKenna, CEO at Inframon setting the scene for our theme "The War on Cost"
Unfortunately I missed the start of Gordon’s keynote as I was unable to enter the Cabinet War Rooms due to an ‘entry lockdown’ whilst waiting for the PM to arrive and enter the building… okay I was slightly late in the first place… but no, not a Churchill impersonator, but Mr David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister!
‘Dave’ as he’s known to his mates was at the war rooms for an interview with ITV – maybe related to the recent UK Government spending cuts and the UK’s War on Cost…? 
David Cameron speaking about The War On Cost..?
I eventually got in the building to then wander around the maze that was the cabinet war rooms and haunt of another famous conservative PM.. a certain Sir Winston Churchill! to eventually find the Inframon team, Gordon, Sean and the guys in a War on Cost bunker that looked like it certainly did cost! great venue!
Gordon McKenna ..it was this BIG!!!
Partners (allies) in the battle of the war on cost…
ComTrade – MPs for Citrix & Seibel
Silect Software – MP Studio, CP Studio, ConfigWise
Flexera – Win7 migration application challenges (packaging & sequencing)
Savision – Live Maps & Vital Signs for System Center (extends SCOM with mapping and real-time performance dashboards)
BridgeWays – helps you convert from VMware… Also free Hyper-V MP @….
Odyssey Software -
prize draw for an Windows Phone 7 device, the HTC HD 7 – went to European Market Oct 21st, won’t be in the US till Nov 8th! and they are as rare as rocking horse sh1t in the UK with one distributor saying to me on Friday 5th Oct “Unfortunately we are not likely to be able to supply the HD7 as all three of the new HTC devices are going to be network exclusives.”
ROOM 1: 09:30 -10:30 MICROSOFT KEYNOTE – RYAN OHARA: DATACENTER TO THE CLOUD
Join us in the main auditorium for a first keynote from Microsoft’s Senior Director of System Center Product Marketing, Ryan O’Hara who will be giving us an insight on how Microsoft’s Datacenter and Cloud strategy can help you in the battle your organisation faces around reducing the cost of managing your IT infrastructure whilst trying to increase efficiency. Learn also how System Center can be a key business enabler in both on-premise and off-premise scenarios.
Ryan O’Hara & Justin Buffington (AKA The Professor)
Google, Salesforce, Amazon – don’t provide services that can run in your Data Center / stand up within your service offering
Ryan reckons that MS is the only single vendor that provided the widest reach of cloud based services to provide ‘IT as a service’
Self Service Portal for VMM – version being shown today along with VMM vNext. Capability for business process owners (application owners) to request and provision new data center services through a web portal.
VMM 2012 CTP demo
Moving from a server centric model to a service model – detaching the application from the O/S.
Create Cloud Wizard! what’s your job? I’m a cloud creator!
Demo of service maps – Opalis 6.3 available at the end of the month to all data Center management suite registered customers… & partners?
Acquisition of AVIcode allows 360 degree monitoring in delivering IT as a service. Black box & White box monitoring… Wazzthat then?
OpsMgr watcher nodes running outside your environment
SCOM2012 / OM10 – now with dashboards and can manage network infrastructure (at last! 
)
ROOM 1: 10:50 -11:50 MICROSOFTKEYNOTE – ANDREW CONWAY: DESKTOP AND SECURITY CONVERGENCE
With end users increasingly mobile, consumerization impacting IT, and security and compliance needs converging on the business you are likely considering options for desktop virtualization, endpoint protection, cloud management and application delivery. IT has an opportunity to simplify their investments, tools and processes in order to be ever more responsive to the changing face of their customer. In this session, we’ll focus on effective solutions that will help you in the War on Cost – we’ll do this and take a forward look at upcoming System Center and Forefront technologies
ROOM 2: 10:50 -11:50 BREAKOUT – SEAN ROBERTSSIMON SKINNER INFRAMON: MICROSOFT PRIVATE CLOUD STORY
Join Sean Roberts and Simon Skinner of Inframon for a walk through Microsoft’s new private cloud story. Learn how to build your own, internal private cloud solution with Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and the new Self Service Portal 3.0. See how you can drive more efficient use of your IT infrstructure using batch processing and chargeback reporting putting you back in control of your costs.
Sean Roberts & Simon Skinner …how many MVP’s needed to… don’t ask! 
ROOM 1: 11:50 – 12:50 BREAKOUT – JUSTIN INCARNATODANIEL SAVAGE MICROSOFT: OPERATIONS MANAGER R2 AND V.NEXT
This session will cover updates to Operation Manager 2007 since the release of R2, including the latest new features included in R2 CU3. We will also go over the next major release of Operations Manager including the vision and product demonstrations. This will be a demo packed session with plenty of time to interact and ask questions
OpsMgr R2 Sizing Helper
OpsMgr R2 Core MP updates
Service Level Dashboard 2.0
Cumulative Updates 3 (CU3) for OpsMgr 2007 R2
OpsMgr Sizing
OpsMgr sizing helper to address the unknown around sizing – ‘ask 5 MS engineers an OpsMgr sizing question and you’ll likely get 5 different answers…’
target environments:
Small to Medium deployment – 250-1000 computers
Large deployment – 1000-10000 computers
Use in conjunction with the OpsMgr design guide, an introduction is at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735403.aspx
OpsMgr R2 Core MP updates
Cumulative Updates 3 (CU3) for OpsMgr 2007 R2
Get it from the download Center at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9f1e1154-52ae-42df-aeea-b3ee83247e6a&displaylang=en
The KB article describing the fixes, changes, and instructions is at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2251525
The high-level fixes are:
Feature Addition: Azure Application Monitoring
Feature Addition: Parameter Extraction in Web Application Synthetic Transactions
Multi-selection in the alert view is not maintained during a view refresh
Upgrading MPs that include new properties may not recreate views correctly
The Operations Manager Console stops working when a high number of instances of State Views / Alert Views are left open for extended durations
The Operations Manager Console stops working when creating an override on the cluster resource group monitor
When using a remote console the notification wizards does not work in certain situations
The SDK Services stops working due to an unhandled exception, and the operations console becomes unresponsive
The SDK service may stop working due to an arithmetic overflow error in very rare circumstances
The notification scheduler does not compensate correctly for different time zones
Alerts using the “Specific Time Period” criteria are not included during automatic alert view refresh
Generic performance reports consume a large amount of temporary database space and can fail for Windows Server 2003 Computer Groups
SCOM 2007 SP1 Reports do not run after a shared Data Warehouse is upgraded to SCOM 2007 R2
Monitoringhost.exe does not work reliably on Windows 2003 SP2 X64 Domain Controllers
The total transaction response performance counter in URL monitoring is not accurate
MPs with empty knowledge elements cannot be imported in Operations Manager 2007 R2
Language packs authored for a previous version of an MP cannot be imported once an updated MP is released
Language Pack import fails if the MP contains strings which are not contained in the English Management Pack
When Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) is set up to use SharePoint, reports from Watson are blocked
Some ACS reports do not work as expected with Windows Server 2008
ACS forwarders with 15 character names in workgroups are unable to communicate with the ACS collector
CU4 should be out at the end of Jan’11 – plan is to have quarterly updates
There is a great post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2010/10/04/opsmgr-2007-r2-cu3-rollup-hotfix-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx which covers in-depth on CU3 and its deployment – essential reading!
OpsMgr v.Next 2012, Daniel Savage, Senior PM Operations Manager
Support for network device monitoring
Support for Java EE (J2E) Web Service Monitoring – server level, not currently site/app level
Release roadmap – Public Beta in Q2 CY11, RC Q3 CY11, RTM Q4 CY11
ROOM 2: 11:50 – 12:20 BREAKOUT – ODYSSEY SOFTWARE: ATTACK THE COSTS AND COMPLEXITY OF MANAGING MOBILE DEVICES IN YOUR ENTERPRISE WITH ATHENA TM DEVICE MANAGEMENT EXTENSIONS FOR SYSTEM CENTER CONFIGURATION MANAGER 2007
In this session we will demonstrate how to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of managing deployments of Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Windows CE, BlackBerry, iPhone/iPad, Android and Symbian devices through comprehensive, centralized management of these devices utilizing Odyssey Software’s AthenaTM device management extensions for System Center Configuration Manager 2007.
ROOM 2: 12:20 – 12:50 BREAKOUT – BRIDGEWAYS SOFTWARE: HETEREOGENEOUS MANAGEMENT WITH OPERATIONS MANAGER 2007
Learn how you can extend your Operations Manager 2007 platform beyond the Windows stack with Bridgewys cross-platform extensions and connectors, allowing you to manage platforms such as VMWare and Oracle from the same familiar console as the rest of your devices allowing you to consolidate your management tools, driving down your infrastructure costs,
12:50 – 13:50 LUNCH
Join us for lunch in our partner pavillion, where you can network with other delegates and meet our ISV partners and speakers
ROOM1: 13:50 – 14:50 BREAKOUT – JEFF WETTLAUFER MICROSOFT: SYSTEM CENTER CONFIGURATION MANAGER V.NEXT HIGHLIGHTS
The next generation of the world’s leading systems management technology is now in Beta! As we enter a new era of work styles, with people working in new ways from new locations on new devices, the System Center flagship product is evolving. In this session we present a demo rich technical highlight of the next release of ConfigMgr. We will focus on our continued vision of User Centric client management, highlight new improvements to core capability, infrastructure simplification and more.
ROOM 2: 13:50 – 14:50 BREAKOUT – SEAN CHRISTENSEN MICROSOFT: SERVICE MANAGER THE BETTER TOGETHER STORY
Breakout two, takes us on a journey into the world of IT service management with one of the newest members of the System Center family, Service Manager. Learn how you can pull together your IT resources with industry standard best practices, bringing disciplines like incident and problem and change and release management to your organisation allowing you to drive more efficient working processes across your organisation.
ROOM 1: 15:10 – 16:10 BREAKOUT – JASON BUFFINGTON MICROSOFT: INTELLIGENT DATACENTER APPLICATION PROTECTION
This session will focus on leveraging Data Protection Manager’s protection and recovery capabilities in large datacenters. We will look at how Data Protection Manager protects and recovers critical application workloads such as SQL, Exchange and SharePoint – as well as virtual machines within Hyper-V. The session is full of demonstrations, including the new self-service restore capability for database administrators. We will also look at combining on-premise and off-premise protection using both Data Protection Manager’s built-in replication mechanisms as well as cloud-based Data Protection Manager-partner repositories.
One stat to take away… up to 60% of corporate data does not reside in the datacenter… Yikes!!!
therefore backing up the client machines, with policies to not backup the junk, movies, music, etc.
ROOM 2: 15:10 – 16:10 BREAKOUT – ADAM HALLGREG CHARMAN MICROSOFT: DATACENTER IT PROCESS AUTOMATION
In one of the final sessions of the day we bring you the one solution that will probably give you the biggest set of tools in fighting the War on Cost. Microsoft’s newest addition to the System Center suite is Opalis, a robust and multi functional IT orchestration toolkit that can help drive incredible efficiencies in your organisation by automating many of your time consuming, day to day IT processes. This is not a session to be missed.
16:10 – 16:30 CLOSING KEYNOTE
Proceedings end with a closing keynote from Inframon CEO Gordon McKenna.
16:30 – 17:00 TOUR OF VENUE
Finally you are invited to take a tour of this very historic venue.
