Innovative Technology Weblog

@ MMS 2008 there was a session about Licensing for the System Center Suite. Normally Licensing looks like University Math but they made it easier. When you are using SMS and MOM 2005 your would pay for each product and per managed client, were for MOM de clients could be Standard OML or Enterprise OML and for SMS the client and server license would vary as well. With this wide variety of possibilities the calculations for the complete license investment could take quite a while and some checking and cross check the different client and server roles.

But now with the Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) licensing model things are made easy. Normally easier is more expansive and in this case it sometimes is. When your just going to buy SCOM or SCCM licenses and your using standard OML for SCOM you still have to make a good calculation before going to the SMSE license type. 

When you want to use SCCM, SCOM and are on or building a virtual infrastructure the SMSE license will make it cheaper and you can start using Data protection Manager for only the license management server costs.

One of the shown license advantages in a Microsoft client environment was the following monitoring scenarios:

In this case the 100 virtual machines are license covered by the SMSE and your only paying for the hosts not for the virtual machines. according to the Microsoft the System Center Virtual Machine Manager will be added to the SMSE as well so a complete and easy to calculate Server Management platform license can be used.

Microsoft definition of SMSE: Comprehensive solution for end-to-end management of physical and virtual server environments that includes the Enterprise Server management licenses for Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007, and Data Protection Manager 2007; the license for Virtual Machine Manager 2007; and, rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single server.

Not mentioned in this article are the required Server 200X Standard, Enterprise and Data center licenses. But when your are running a lot of VM’s take al look at the Data center value proposition with the unlimited amount Virtual Machine options!!!

So, a small recap to see if SMSE is the licensing for your organization:

• Your running a big number of virtual machines and want SCOM for monitoring
• Your using SCOM and SCCM to manage your complete environment, running some virtual machines
• Your using SCOM and SCCM to manage your complete environment and want to use DPM or VMM
• Your using DPM and SCCM, SCOM or VMM running some virtual machines
• You want to use SCOM and VMM

For more information visit the Microsoft System Center License Site and save yourselves some money.

Regards,
Walter Eikenboom
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com

Wiebe i’ve got the beta bits!!!!!, before I left for MMS my colleague heard about the possibilities to manage virtual environments like ESX, Virtual Server and hyper-V with Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and he spammed me like crazy to get the beta bits at MMS. The search wasn’t that hard, when I attended the introduction to Vitalization VNext session they where handing the beta out and I got an extra copy for Wiebe.

For starters here is a summary of the Server 2008 Hyper-V features:

• Extendable guest support
  • Multi processor (up to 4)
  • Large Memory (64 GB)
  • 64-bit support
• Virtual Switch support with VLAN
• Quick migration with intelligent placement
• WMI interface
• Support for XEN -enabled Linux guests

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has the same look and feel as the VMM 2007 but under the hood the are some technical improvements. Microsoft made it possible to discover and connect to your VMWare ESX environment. With this connection you can, almost, completely manage your ESX environment. Vmotion to move server to an other ESX server with intelligent placement. Live migrating from Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V Host Cluster. These options are supported for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008. There is the possibilities of migrating Windows 2000 but this only can be done offline so no live migration there. The support for Windows XP and Vista makes a full VDI solution only near future.

The intelligent placement of server is based on CPU, memory, disk I/O and network availability this data is collected from the host machines to give the star rating. So why isn’t this data available in the SCOM 2007 environment? We will see what the future will bring!

The overall architecture of VMM 2008 has the most added value when integrated with Operations manager 2007 and the knowledge driven way they work together where the pro tips are a real cool feature. Microsoft is currently working hard with a lot of third party venders to extend this to feature and make hardware and (virtual)software tips really get the best out of your environment.  

Pro tips noticed by Operations Manager 2007 and integrated in VMM 2008:

In my previous article about SCSM I described the integration of the Service Manager database with the OpsMgr database, just imagine what the will happen when de Configurations Manager database will join this integration and the pro tip will advice you for desired state or and updates where the performance will be increased. It just a look in the possible future.  

Regards,
Walter Eikenboom
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com

In the hart of the System Center community at MMS in Las Vegas there are more sessions then there is time, so unfortunately I can’t attend all sessions. But the System Center thought of combining, integrating and added value of the System Center Products lure me to the System Center Service Manager breakout session. In this session the new road map for SCSM was revealed after the initial versions was paused last November. The new roadmap for SCSM and the other System Center product will be:

Service manager will be the new helpdesk application with integration of SCOM 2007 and SCCM 2007 for easy tasks en response actions to provide your end users with the best support possible. SCSM contains the ITIL and MOF based Incident, problem and change management basic workflow which a can be customized and tuned for automatic incident routing. The self service portal will provide users the options to request and install new applications, create and incident and see which services are operational en which are not. This way the support request to support personal could be reduced and more time and money can be invested in innovation. 

Service manager will use the same database as Operation Manger 2007 uses so when in 2010 SCSM will be released the data warehouse of System Center should be quite different. I guess there will be a single data warehouse at the back end for all System Center product and more integration all around. As we now see in VMM 2008 the first steps of integration start to reveal and the pro tips are a good example of that.

Regards,
Walter Eikenboom
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com

Today at MMS 2008 we attend the keynotes and watched Bob Muglia present us the road ahead for System Management and Dynamic IT. His primarily focus was the Dynamic Datacenter and how Dynamic IT would be the logical step to get in Control with the future needs of IT and IT Management. He made some announcement on VMM 2008 and new features of SCCM that are around the corner.

For SCOM 2007 he announced the Cross platform Agents and Management pack for SCOM 2007. With this announcement he made a big step into monitoring heterogeneous environment with the look and feel of the Windows Server platform. So you don’t need to be an UNIX admin to see what is going on and solve basic tasks on a Unix or SUN box. Just like running a task for a Windows server you can launch a mount drive or restart service without ever getting in the linux shell. SCOM 2007 will connect to the server over SSH with the possibility of a security based super user account that can be elevated to root if needed. The following cross platform monitoring options are announced:

• HP-UX 11i v3 PA-RISC
• HP-UX 11i v3 IA64
• Solaris 10 SPARC
• Solaris 10 x86 
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1

Beside the new monitoring features SCOM 2007 will be integrated with Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Inside VMM 2008 the movement of virtual machines across Virtual Server, ESX and Hyper-V will supported with knowledge of the Virtual environment. VMM 2008 will provide admins the best options on where to move a virtual machine and which hosts are the best options. This advise is not created from OpsMgr data but in Side VMM 2008 there is a new feature called pro-tips. Pro-tips provide configuration or environmental tip inside VMM 2008 to solve or improve your virtual environment. SCOM 2007 is getting more important everyday and the importance of SCOM 2007 beside the other management tooling is growing rapidly.

Regards,
Walter Eikenboom
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com

Converting some virtual images form our ESX 3.5 environment to a demo machine did have some impact on on my demo machine. The demo machine running the RTM bit of Server 2008 64bits with Hyper-V for some initial testing, did surprise my happily. Fast responses and 10Gb network adapters for internal communication works great and fast. Just a few things I bumped into installing Hyper-V, Hyper-V has a problem with the non-US regional settings. If your installing Hyper-V and don’t have the regional setting to English US the role will not install. Changing the regional settings back to US-English fixed the problem for me.

Installing VMWare workstation 6.0.2 on the demo machine, Server 2008,  was no problem at all. It run fine until you start a virtual machine inside VMWare:-(. The Virtual machine will boot and after 30 sec in the boot process you will get a blue screen on Server 2008, error code 0×0000124. Just uninstall the Hyper-V role, reboot, and the problem is solved.

Hyper-V is still in beta so no hard feelings there. I think Hyper-V alone is a good candidate for server consolidation, in combination with Virtual Machine Manager it could be a lot more for less, Hyper-V only costs $28 extra on top of Server 2008.

Regards,
Walter Eikenboom
http://weblogwally.spaces.live.com