Innovative Technology Weblog

I am enjoying Longhorn beta 3 at the Longhorn TAP event in Seattle.

I have got a little stampede going on. On my Vista box, a Dell 810 with 2 GB of ram, I’m able to run 4 Virtual Longhorn Beta instances.

Two core installs and two regular installs, one of the regulars is a Domain Controller.

I think I could another one or maybe two instances when I close a couple of other open programs, but because I’m running all from my local disk I have some limitations because of the amount of free diskspace

 

Rob

 

 

Today I attended another “Service Desk� session, this time with plenty of XML and InfoPath. The purpose of the sessions was to show how to extend Service Manager. Maybe because of pre beta 1 code, or because it just didn’t work as expected, some of the demos failed but it did not kill my enthusiasm.

Probably the highlight of today’s session was when Marielle, a colleague, asked a quite interesting question. She is rather small so could not reach the phone and behaved as one of those rock stars from the eighties. Her question, “What is your definition from a CMDB?�

The question was related to what content is stored in the Service manager CMDB. The presenters were talking about storing incident and change management data in the CMDB. After some confusion we managed to have a one on one with the CMDB program manager which actually brought the session to a much higher level. Anyway the CMDB stores CI information but Service manager can query more, it could even do SQL joins…

I think we talked about 15 minutes about the Service manager “Federated CMDB� and this talk gave some inside in what Service Manager is doing at the moment, pull down information from different resources into the CMDB and future plans to leave the information where it is and look at the CMDB as a distributed database and use information from other databases in Service manager or somewhere else based on connectors.

I tried to get some information about future plans regarding a connector to Carmine, Virtual Machine Manager because I really think that Virtualization on demand can help the Microsoft Dynamic System Initiative. Sadly enough not a clear answer on that one.

What became clear is that there are plans to really dig into deployment based on DCM information. For example if an application has a DCM policy that defines that the application can only be installed on a clustered server, Service Manager could use this information to find a clustered server and install the application if it find a suitable candidate.

One other nice example mentioned in the talk regarding the possibilities in  Service Manager; suppose you want to order a laptop with specifics specs, you could ask Service Manager “Which laptop has these hardware specs and has the least amount of hardware calls and no battery replacements?�

I am even more excited but have to go to the party, it looks like MS bought part of the town for a partyJ

For some reason I get excited when I see a solution or framework that consist of multiple products and technologies. The last two years I spend a lot of time on Business Desktop Deployment which is a solution build around a huge list of products.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the revitalization of the CMDB and I got some comments back that were really interesting, MS is trying to patent CMDB. Today I attended a great overview sessions about Microsoft System Center Service Manager, previous coded as Service Desk at MMS 2007 in San Diego (CA).

Service Manager can be seen as the delivery system of the Microsoft‘s Dynamic System Initiative and false in the last phase of Infrastructure Optimization, the dynamic phase.

So why so exited? Let us look at an example scenario and demo from today:

A user goes to a SharePoint portal and requests an application. The application list is not a static database table but is actually provided by a SCCM 2007(SMS v4) connector which will be shipped as part of Service manager. Besides the list of applications there could be also some logic to find the user’s desktop name by querying SCCM 2007 and the primary user for the machine. The user submits the request and Service manager will initiate a Change Request and queries the Active Directory (Service Manager will ship with a Active Directory connector) for the users manager. Active Directory is queried for the users manager email address and an email with the request is send to the user’s manager. The user’s manager receives the email and approves the request. Service manager receives the approval and send a software distribution task to SCCM 2007 over the SCCM 2007 connector. In  the mean time the user requesting the software can see the approval in his Service Manager gadget on his / her desktop (see the previous blog from Stephan). After a while the software gets installed. This is not the end of the story because there is no one to close the call, or is there? Service After a while SCCM 2007 hard and software inventory runs on the machine and finds the installed software and reports this to Service manager. Service Manager get informed and closes the call.

Some similar automated scenarios are possible by defining DCM (Desired Configuration Management) policies, like checking for Antivirus Software. If DCM does not find a correct installation it fires a configuration mismatch, Service Manager logs an incident and send a repair job to SCCM 2007. The next DCM cycle the installation is checked and the incident is closed. Or using the CMDB as a deployment database, add assets to the CMDB, send them to SCCM 2007 and deploy with a baremetal scenario and check with hard and software inventory and DCM if they  really are deployed and check with DCM if they are deployed wsith the correct configuration.

When Service Manager ships, it will also have a SCOM 2007 (MOM v3) connector. And hopefully after a while also a Virtual Machine Manager connector servers can bee added when needed.

Am I too excited?

I’am thinking about what happended last year at MMS 2006. During the keynote Microsoft started to talk about Application Virtualization and this was the next step in the Virtualization world. A bit strange because they did not have a Application Virtualization product. I believe the next day SoftTricity appeards on the stage and demoed their Application Virtualization Product. Weird…. Someone else on the stage during a keynote at your conference demoing something you see as a the next step and you are not even close….. We all know what happened three weeks later

And then today, thinking about last year, looking at the previous blog “Bob Muglia kicks off MMS 2007 with the launch of new System Center products and announces Key industry partners in his keynote address delivering the Building Blocks for Dynamic Systems Management” and looking at a SCCM 2007 demo. I see a couple of Operating System packages, some Microsoft packages, a Etrust AV package and……. a SAP package, actually two.  mmmm I wonder why they have that package in SCCM 2007. 1 1/2 hour later the sessiojn finished and now I relly wonder why they had that package in SCCM 2007, they didn’t even use it, so why spend a  license on it?

 Anyway, the SCCM 2007 session was quite interesting. Three weeks ago there was no need for a  BDD version and SCCM 2007 Operating System Deployment was Enterprise ready. This time SCCM 2007 Operating System Deployment was Enterprise ready but there will be a BDD version for SCCM 2007. When I look at the way they handle those deployment variables like Timezone, Keyboard layout, Input Language I am absolutely sure that SCCM 2007 cannot live without BDD when deploying operating systems it in an Enterprise…

Still wondering why that SAP package was there…

Rob

About a few years ago Microsoft started to change the name of its suite of management products to System Center. It looked like SMS and MOM becoming a single product but that didn’t happen. The only result is the introduction of a new product SCE (System Center Essentials) which is basically targeting the low end market.

Just after the System Center name saw the light of day Microsoft also started with some smoke and mirrors stuff called DSI (Dynamic System Initiative) and IOI (Infrastructure Optimization Initiative) but lately these two started to become quite clear.

About one year ago DCM (Desired Configuration Management) for SMS was introduced and just after that MOM and SMS and a bunch of other products changed their names to System Center Configuration Manager and System Center Operation Manager.

I just flew back from Seattle where I was at the SCCM 2007 TAP airlift and am now at the Microsoft Architecture forum in Copenhagen with a terrible jetlag running thru the agenda for today. I can remember one of the talks I had with a Microsoft Architect in Seattle about SDM (System Definition Model) and SLM (Service Modeling Language). The Architect actually managed to bring our talk to System Center Service Desk via DCM.

And again I look at the agenda of the Architect Forum in Copenhagen and I see a track about Service Desk “Take a first look at the tool that will be the “brain” of our Self Managing Dynamic Datacenter. See how we are planning to automate ITIL based processes and let the other members of System Center family execute them. The new possibilities for Self Service, and see our implementation of CMDBâ€?.

I do some queries on the MS site and I find the following quite interesting document http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/3/8/b38239c7-2766-4632-9b13-33cf08fad522/sdmwp.doc

But the odd thing I remember about the Seattle talk is that I did not only talk about management of products with the MS Architect I also talked about deployment and he is actually a member of a deployment solution team.

Wouldn’t it be fun if CMDB becomes a Deployment Database besides a Configuration Database? System Center Configuration Manager has a Operating System Deployment component so it is capable of doing deployments and it would solve the problem that the CMDB info is never up to date.

Rob