mountainss SystemCenter Blog

Step into the #Microsoft System Center Virtual Labs for Free #SC2012 #SCVMM2012

James van den Berg — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:57:46 +0000

Link to Technet Virtual Labs for System Center

#Microsoft Virtual Academy: Protecting your Private #Cloud with #DPM2012

James van den Berg — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:54:19 +0000

About This Video (double Click on the picture)

This video is part of the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA). The MVA is a free program delivering structured learning paths for IT Professionals on various Microsoft products and solutions.

This video will outline how you can use System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager to protect your private cloud. You’ll learn how to use new capabilities to recover your infrastructure due to failures in the datacenter. We will demonstrate how DPM can be used to back-up and recover several common Microsoft server products, and subsequently how using DPM can provide increased service levels in your environment. Additionally, we will show how DPM works with other System Center products including Orchestrator, Operations Manager, and Virtual Machine Manager to ensure high availability of your cloud environment.

#Microsoft Patching Your Fabric with #SCVMM2012 #WSUS

James van den Berg — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:33:35 +0000

One superb feature in SCVMM is that you are now able to patch the resources in the Fabric, which also includes your Hyper-V Clusters.

How are you usually patching your Hyper-V Cluster? You have to initiate the Maintenance mode, patch the node, stop Maintenance mode, and so the story continues with the next node.

SCVMM 2012 will do this automatically for you, so that you can spend your valuable time with more important tasks, like focusing on pro-active management and best practices.

Let`s take a walkthrough on Microsoft Technet WiKi

UPDATE : #Microsoft Integration Packs for System Center 2012 – #Orchestrator #SC2012 #SCVMM2012

James van den Berg — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 10:49:11 +0000

System Center 2012 – Orchestrator includes over 41 built-in workflow standard activities that perform a wide variety of functions. You can expand Orchestrator’s functionality and ability to integrate with other Microsoft and third-party platforms and products by installing integration packs. Integration packs for Orchestrator contain additional activities that extend the functionality of Orchestrator.
You can download integration packs from the Microsoft Download Center. Each integration pack has a guide that provides installation instructions, describes any known issues, and includes reference information for all of the activities supported by the integration pack.
Microsoft provides integration packs for all of the System Center products, as well as other Microsoft and third party products and technologies.

UPDATE : System Center 2012 – Orchestrator 2012 Component Add-ons and Extensions DOWNLOAD HERE

The following integration packs are available:

Active Directory Integration Pack for System Center 2012 – Orchestrator

HP iLO and OA Integration Pack for System Center 2012 – Orchestrator

HP Operations Manager Integration Pack for System Center 2012 – Orchestrator

HP Service Manager Integration Pack for System Center 2012 – Orchestrator

IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus Integration Pack for System Center 2012 – Orchestrator

VMware vSphere Integration Pack for System Center 2012 – Orchestrator

Integration Pack for System Center Configuration Manager

Integration Pack for System Center Data Protection Manager

Integration Pack for System Center Operations Manager

Integration Pack for System Center Service Manager

Integration Pack for System Center Virtual Machine Manager

#Microsoft #Lync2010 Bandwidth Calculator available

James van den Berg — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:39:10 +0000

Overview

With the Lync Server 2010 Bandwidth Calculator, you can enter information about your users and the Lync Server features that you want to deploy, and the calculator will determine bandwidth requirements for the WAN that connects sites in your deployment.

You can download the Lync Server 2010 Bandwidth Calculator here

#Microsoft #SCDPM2010 Interoperability #Hotfix for Centralized Management, with #SCDPM2012

James van den Berg — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:20:40 +0000

Overview

SCDPM 2012 RC now provides the capability for customers to manage multiple SCDPM servers using a single console. After applying this hotfix, SCDPM 2010 cutsomers can also monitor and manage their SCDPM 2010 servers using the same centralized management console with which they are managing their SCDPM 2012 servers. Using the Central Console, you can monitor the health of the various SCDPM resources such as SCDPM servers, protected computers, tape libraries, disk space availability and more. The Central Console also tracks the various tasks in SCDPM servers, such as whether recovery points are being taken at the scheduled times, whether a server is still on the network, and so on. To understand Centralized Management feature in detail please refer to (Link to start page of SCDPM 2012 Centralized Management Value prop) This hotfix does not contain any other fixes other than enabling Centralized Management feature. Important Information

Note – This hotfix does not update the version of the SCDPM Protection Agents and hence will not require a upgrade of the agents installed on protected servers and clients. We recommend to install KB2465832 before installing this hotfix. Because once you install this hotfix, you cannot get previously serviced Agent side fixes along with KB2465832.
Note- If you have created customized filters from Monitoring UI, they would not be retained after installing this hotfix. So user needs to copy the file JobFilters.xml from DPMINstallLocation>\DPM\bin to the folder %SystemDrive%\Users\User name\appdata\Microsoft\Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager.
Note – This hotfix rollup package applies to all language versions of System Center Data Protection Manager 2010.
Note- This hotfix does not replace a previously released hotfix.

Download here the Hotfix for Centralized Management

UPDATE : #Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager for System Center 2012 RC Documentation #SCVMM2012 #Powershell

James van den Berg — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:50:20 +0000

Overview

This download provides technical documentation for the release candidate of VMM for System Center 2012.

VMM for System Center 2012 Release Candidate documentation — last updated September 8, 2011
System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager Cmdlet Reference — last updated January 27, 2012
VMM for System Center 2012 General Troubleshooting Guide — last updated September 8, 2011

You can download the Microsoft SCVMM2012 RC documentation here

Using the Cmdlet Reference guide of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC :

#Microsoft System Center 2012 – Service Manager Component Add-ons and Extensions #SC2012 #SCVMM2012

James van den Berg — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:45:17 +0000

Overview

Download the System Center 2012 Release Candidate in one convenient package as part of the Microsoft private cloud evaluation.

The following System Center 2012 – Service Manager add-ons and extensions are available for download:

System Center Service Manager Authoring Tool
The System Center Service Manager Authoring Tool is a tool for customization and extension of the built-in functionality in System Center Service Manager. This release supports modifying existing Process Management Packs and creating new Management Packs that define extensions to the Service Manager database for tracking additional information, customizations of forms or new forms, and new workflows. This release is available in 10 languages.

This release is compatible with the System Center 2012 release candidate. It contains the necessary changes to ensure the Authoring Tool is compatible with System Center 2012 – Service Manager but does not contain a new feature set from prior releases.

System Center Cloud Services Process Pack
This process pack will offer a self-service experience to facilitate private cloud capacity requests from your business unit IT application owners and end users, including the flexibility to request additional capacity as business demands increase.

IT Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) Process Management Pack
Microsoft System Center solutions assist medium and large organizations in managing and automating their IT GRC responsibilities; improving IT GRC program management efficiency while reducing costs; simplifying and consolidating IT GRC workloads; and increasing executive, audit, and management visibility into their GRC programs. The IT GRC Process Management Pack —combined with the IT Compliance Management Series—helps customers understand and bind complex business objectives to their Microsoft infrastructure in an operationally efficient manner.

Download Microsoft System Center 2012 – Service Manager Component Add-ons and Extensions here

Leveraging #Microsoft #Office365 for Project Collaboration Success

James van den Berg — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:41:42 +0000

Overview

Are you tired of relying on email to facilitate project collaboration? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a more efficient project collaboration solution out there? Office 365 can take your project collaboration practices to the next level. In this white paper, learn and see how you can easily facilitate better project collaboration with your colleagues utilizing existing tools that we you already use like Windows, Microsoft Office, your mobile devices and even non-Microsoft platforms. The intended audience for this whitepaper includes project teams that rely on email, Microsoft Office tools like Excel, Word, Project and who have yet to implement an enterprise project management platform such as Microsoft Project Server, but need the ability to collaborate with project resources via current Microsoft Office tools or through Office 365. Through this whitepaper, you will learn how to:

Utilize Office 365 to create a Project Management Information System (PMIS)
Integrate Microsoft Project information with SharePoint
Empower a project team to collaboratively share relevant information with MS Office
Build a project management dashboard in SharePoint Online
Utilize mobile devices to interact with project artifacts and communications

The intent of this whitepaper is to show how an organization can utilize Microsoft tools the average business user is already familiar with to create an excellent collaboration solution. This is not intended to be a project management ‘best practices’ guide. Rather, it is a look at typical project collaboration scenarios that can be enhanced by use of familiar Microsoft products to get quick wins for both management and project stakeholders. Far too often solutions are implemented without consideration for the effect it will have on the work patterns of the people who will use it. In order to keep the organization change impact to a minimum, the overriding theme for this whitepaper is ‘solve a particular problem scenario while keeping the technology part of the solution as simple as possible for the end user’. This download page contains: a Word white paper and an overview video. Please check out the Leveraging Office 365 for Project Collaboration Success site for additional information. Learn more about Microsoft Project and Office 365

Download Leveraging Office 365 for Project Collaboration Whitepaper here

#Microsoft System Center 2012 Unified Installer #SC2012

James van den Berg — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:40:52 +0000

System Center 2012 Unified Installer is a utility designed to perform new, clean installations of System Center 2012 for testing and evaluation purposes only. If you want to upgrade from an existing System Center installation or choose set up options such as high availability or multi-server component installs, please refer instead to the System Center 2012 component installation guides located on the Microsoft Private Cloud Evaluation Resource Page.
User’s Guide >>

Before you begin with the Unified installer, you have to extract the installation files of the products. In this example I did that for Orchestrator 2012.

Download Microsoft Private Cloud Evaluation Software here

That was easy to use, Cheers!