This time I’m with another close TFC associate, Tony Askew. Tony is a Windows Infrastructure Architect I’ve known for getting on 13yrs since working together on a large document management project when he was working with Lewisham Council and me with EDS.

Anyway, the training!

Tony looking bemused and confused (before the course, of course! patrick from HP with his mate, Guinness

Data Center Management Solutions
Config Management – SCCM providing automated provisioning (OSD) and updating (patching) of both physical and virtual environments
End-to-End Monitoring – SCOM Enabling of service level monitoring, not just ‘server level’ monitoring, and service levels against those too!
Server Compliance – SCOM and ACS providing centralised security auditing with controls and reporting
Data Protection and Recovery – DPM providing Business Continuity through Virtualization Management, Backup and Recovery of Physical and Virtual resources, Disaster Recovery including SRT

Systems Management Suite Enterprise (SCOM 2007 EE, SCCM 2007, SCDPM 2007 EE, SCVMM 2008) – all for about $1400 – bargain!
- Provides the rights to manage an unlimited (okay 192) number of VM’s
- would be $753+$750+$753+$1512 ($3768) for the suite if purchased seperately
- additionally this is only 20-30% of any of the comparative Enterprise Management suites from the likes of CA, BMC, etc.

“If you’re going to manage the enterprise you have to support cross-platform”

System Center Service Manager – beta available now on Connect (https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=446)

SCOM 2007
End-to-End Service Monitoring – proactive management of IT services
Best of Breed for Windows – the product teams are behind the management packs, TechNet knowledge built in, expertise for over 50 Microsoft applications, servers, and clients
Increased Efficiency and Control – reduce the complexity of managing the IT environment

Tip – Install Management Packs individually, starting with the OS, monitor the alerts, address the configuration issues using overrides where necessary, then add higher level packs, again leave the environment to accumulate good sample data before revisiting and correcting further configuration issues or tuning out as appropriate.

Management Packs – www.microsoft.com/opsmgr (vanity link! , or direct to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/cc539535.aspx

Tip – with any new deployment create an ‘Active Alerts Closed’ view to capture alerts that have changed state and would not be captured in the Active Alerts view (with specifc resolution state = closed)

Tip – best OpsMgr (SCOM) blog on the net… http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/

DPM 2007
Reporting – rocks!
Express Full Backups – effecient over the wire backup as just backing up the changes once a full replica has been created

DPM Planning and Deployment Guide – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc161369.aspx
DPM Health Model (alert list, etc.) – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dpm/dd218051.aspx

Tip – Add a SCOM Management Pack for DPM, but also add the hardware/platform vendor MP in additon to the OS MP as this will report on lower level errors for completeness
Tip – add the DPM Capaicity Planner tool
Tip – using System Recovery Tool to restore to non-similar hardware, the how to move a Windows installation to different hardware KB may come in handy… http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q249694

VMM 2008 – A centralized, heterogeneous management solution for the virtual datacenter
Unified Management – cross platform virtualization management for VS, Hyper-V, and VMware VI3
Integrated Conversion Tools – P2V, V2V,
Unlimited Virtualization with Data Center – just license the procs, unlimitedVM’s, 1/3rd cost of VMware

Tip – MS Hyper-V disks; for performance use in order of preference pass-through, then fixed, then differencing (will end up the same size anyway), dynamically expanding (huge overhead, 3 writes per write, only for use in test/dev, training, etc.)

Happy with this training course?

Overall Satisfaction
having attended scores of professional IT training since 1991, this course stands out amongst the best I’ve attended, the quality of the content & materials, the actual products themselves, but above all the outstanding quality of the instructors – hats off to Gordon & Justin from Inframon