Use Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit version 6.5 for #Cloud #SCVMM #HYPERV

Overview

The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop and server migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within their current environment. MAP also provides private and public cloud planning assessments, and server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments, including ROI analysis for server consolidation with Hyper-V. Other significant new features in MAP 6.5 include the discovery of active Windows devices, Software Usage Tracking for Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP), and the discovery of Oracle instances on Itanium-based servers with HP-UX to assist in the planning of migration to SQL Server. Learn more.

MAP is one of the tools provided by the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Security Compliance Manager provide tested guidance and automated tools to help organizations plan, securely deploy, and manage new Microsoft technologies—easier, faster, and at less cost. All are freely available, and fully-supported by Microsoft. Learn more.

You can download the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit version 6.5 here

 

 

 

Why is Microsoft System Center integration important ?

This Topic explains why Microsoft System Center products becomes more important then ever before.

The layers are further defined as follows:

• Service Delivery Layer: Represents those Service Management activities that require input and interaction with the business and service owner. The components are not only responsible for that interaction, but also the translation of business requirement into technology and operational capabilities. This layer represents the business perspective on the basis of IT.
• Software Layer: Provides the applications and software that support a business activity (for example, CRM). The Software Layer consumes Virtual Machines (VM) services from the Infrastructure Layer and may consume application services from the Platform Layer.
• Platform Layer: Provides a set of platform-level (above operating system(OS) level) building blocks which can be consumed by the Software Layer. It consumes hypervisor services from the Infrastructure Layer and is managed by the Management Layer.
• InfrastructureLayer: Provides resilient hypervisor services to the Platform Layer and is managed by the Management Layer. The Infrastructure, Platform, and Software Layers represent the enabling technology perspective within IT.
• Operations Layer: Represents Service Management and operational processes carried out by IT operations and support staff.
• Management Layer: Provides management services to the Infrastructure, Platform, and Software Layers. It is comprised of the suite of management tools necessary to support IT Service and Operations Layer and implements the operational processes. The Management Layer provides a baseline set of capabilities to the Infrastructure Layer and an incremental set to the Platform Layer and the Software Layer. The Operations and Management Layers represent the operational perspective within IT.

A key tenet of the Reference Architecture is that it helps IT strategists and solution architects to make good design decisions. The guidance will only cater to the difference between the best practices of traditional IT and dynamic IT. For example, guidance on designing the directory services or change management processes already exists, so we will not duplicate that but will instead highlight what is different or new for a Private Cloud.

Examples of the principles are as follows:

• Use virtualization to abstract applications from hardware.
• Focus on Mean-Time-to-Restore-Service instead of avoiding hardware failure.
• Have a meaningful understanding of infrastructure’s health state.
• Automate “detect and respond” processes.
• Homogenize your hardware infrastructure to reduce complexity.
• Encourage desired consumer behavior.

When you keep this model in mind, you can see what this means for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for example :

 

With Microsoft Product code “Concero” you get a hybrid Cloud Managementtool wich brings privat and public Cloud togehter in one Console.
More Microsoft System Center products becomes integraded.
For example, in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 you can deploy your virtual application as a Service wich is sequenced by Microsoft APP-V 4.6

With this System Center 2012 Cycle you are ready for the future with Cloud technology.

All Microsoft Virtualization video from Data Center to Desktop

Here is a link to the Microsoft site where you can see all the virtualization solution videos of Microsoft.

Watch these free videos to learn more about Microsoft Virtualization whenever and from wherever you want—just click, listen, and learn. Start by clicking the picture above to learn more about the videos. You can then stream it or download to view offline.

The Future of Technology — Windows 7 + Windows Live

Just a great video !

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/cloud/

Microsoft System Center Suite for dynamic datacenters

This topic is about getting a dynamic datacenter with the Microsoft System Center suite centrally managed and automated with workflows.

Core Datacenter Management Solutions

The System Center datacenter solutions described below are designed to help you build on top of your existing investments while transitioning to cloud computing.

• Optimize Service Delivery for Datacenter Infrastructure and Business-critical Services

  Using System Center and Windows Server Hyper-V, you can optimize your datacenter—including heterogeneous environments—to deliver highly available and performing services.

• Automate Datacenter Management Processes and Support Change and Compliance

  System Center enables IT organizations to improve their operational efficiency and compliance by delivering deep datacenter automation capabilities and solutions

• Deliver On-premises Private Cloud Computing Foundation

  The Microsoft Server platform, comprised of Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center, when combined with the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0, helps IT organizations extend their existing investments to deliver on-premises private cloud computing.

See also Datacenter virtualization & Management Whitepaper

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager evolution

This topic is about the evolution of Virtual Machine Manager.

First we used the Microsoft Hyper-V release 1 manager in our datacenter with each virtualmachine his own LUN’s (fiberdisk)
This is a service roll in Windows 2008 Enterprise Server.

The first Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager 2008 wich was separated from the Operating System looks like this :

New Hyper-V architecture was released with Windows 2008 R2 Server which supports shared volume between nodes. It called as Clustered shared volume. This volume can be used by all nodes at the same time. All virtual machines located in this LUN can be started on any of the host. If one node dies virtual machine will get started in any other available nodes. And can be live migrated (like vMotion) to other available nodes. It also saved a lot of diskspace.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Service Pack1 made the difference with Dynamic Memory and Remote FX.

When you look to the history of Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager the topology looks like this today :

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 can manage a mixed virtual environment like:

VMWare ESX Servers and Cluster Support.

Citrix Xen Servers and Cluster support.

Microsoft is making a big jump this year with great features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 with Cloud technology.
Microsoft Virtualization developer team has worked really hard and have listened to IT professionals and Customers.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager must be High Available to manage the virtual environment on-premises and Cloud with Windows Azure, and with this we have a hybrid virtual managed environment.

This Virtual environment has been divided in areas in virtual Machine Manager 2012 :

1. Infrastructure enhancements
Highly Available VMM server. As SCVMM 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
SCVMM 2012 can now manage even more hypervisors: Hyper-V, VMWare and XEN. 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 SCVMM 2012 you can provision Hyper-V even on bare metal computers withoudt much manual work. Cluster creation with storage provisioning is also one of the interesting new features. Regarding the network management enhancements, SCVMM 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.

And now for the two most expected features of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012:

3. Cloud Managementor Simple Cloud Creation.

SCVMM 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 SCVMM you can now define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, os images and application packages. For example you can create service template for three tier application which consist of frontend, middletier and backend. During service deployment operating images and applications can be composed. And of course if you need your virtual machines in a service to scale out, no problem, SCVMM 2012 makes this possible. And final and maybe most important feature in service management is ability to leverage great and powerfull technologies like Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V). Server App-V behaves in same manner as client App-V, so they are dynamic, “decoupled from OS” and easy to manage.

There are of course much, much more enhancements in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Check them out on technet and start your yourney to the cloud.

And at last Microsoft System Center Codename “Concero” preview is more then great easy to manage Virtual Machine Manager in the Cloud.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager evolution is better then ever before, and almost every choice of the customer is possible with Microsoft virtualization technology on-premises and/or in the Cloud with Windows Azure and of course with Office 365.

My compliments to the System Center team !

Microsoft Multiple (resource) forest with the Cloud topology

This Topic is about Microsoft Multiple Forest sharing a resource forest in a Shared Service DataCenter wich is going to federate and colabrate with Microsoft Cloud services like Windows Azure and Microsoft Office 365.

Here is the high level design picture of this Microsoft technology topology :

We will use the following Microsoft products in this design :

• Microsoft Windows 2008R2 SP1 OS and domains.
• Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Clustering with Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV)
• Microsoft DPM 2010 for Disaster recovery
• Microsoft System Center for deploying
• Microsoft SCOM for monitoring
• Microsoft Fore Front Identity Managent 2010 for provisioning.
• Microsoft TMG and UAG 2010
• Microsoft Exchange 2010
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with collabration mysite at Office 365
• Microsoft ForeFront protection
• And more ……….

Microsoft System Center suite 2012 ( SCVVM2012, SCCM2012, SCOM2012,DPM2012 etc ) will become RTM available at the
end of 2011 according to the Microsoft Roadmap at Hyper-V.nu  :

http://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/hvredevoort/2011/03/system-center-roadmap-2011/

Datacenter automation with Microsoft System Center Opalis in the future Orchestrator will become important to manage all processes in the system center suite.
Microsoft ForeFront Identity Management 2010 will provision the accounts from the resource forest to Multiple forest on-premises and in the cloud to Office 365 via federation (ADFS 2.0 ). A user account will have a unique account on this Microsoft topology design with single sign on and can work from Sharepoint 2010 portal ( On-premises / Office365 )

Internet Service Bus and Windows Azure AppFabric

This topic is about Windows Azure.

David C. Chou is a Architect at Microsoft who explains the Internet Service Bus and Windows Azure AppFabric at :

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2011/03/24/internet-service-bus-and-windows-azure-appfabric.aspx

Microsoft Windows Azure is growing fast and is becoming more mature with his products in which integration increasingly comes including System Center to become realy dynamic with datacenters on-premises and Windows Azure.