Hello from the MMS 2012 in Las Vegas!

Clusters now support up to:

• 32 nodes
• 4000 VMs
• Multi-tenancy
• 160 processors per host
• 2TB memory per host
• 32 virtual processors per virtual machine
• 1TB RAM per virtual machine

• Hyper-V Replica can be used for site-to-site replication of virtual machines; it is disaster recovery solution and not a high availability solution
• Hyper-V supports out-of-the-box NIC teaming (LBFO); NICs can be vendor independent
• Live Migrate 60-70 machines at same time utilizing 20Gbps connection Sharing SMB storage for VMs (performance is similar to iSCSI)
• Live snapshot merging; no longer a need to shut down virtual machine for snapshot files to merge
• Data de-duplication support for virtual machines
• No longer a need to export a virtual machine; you can now import a virtual machine without an export configuration file (about time)
• Consistent device naming allows to have hardware vendor tag the NIC so that physical port lines up with the port reported by the OS (cool)

Introduction of Hyper-V vSwitch can be read here.

Thanks for your time and we hope to catch up with you in the future regarding the great things that System Center can provide for you and your business.

Follow our updates on twitter: @ThomasDuryea

Regards,

Jarrod Vassallo, Solution Architect and;

Sam Lewis, Senior Consulting Engineer

Hello from the MMS 2012 in Las Vegas!

There were more exciting announcements from Microsoft at the second MMS keynote presented by Brad Anderson who is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Management and Security division. The second keynote can be viewed on demand here.

Some interesting notes we took from the second keynote are:

Brad Anderson said Microsoft will be providing “deep integration” with iOS and Android and he even had his Apple iPhone on stage (wow) to demonstrate the deployment of an application via the next version of Windows InTune.

There was a big push on the control and governance of mobile devices. After the keynote we felt that the solutions we provide at TD – Citrix’s Bring-Your-Own Device and Good Technology Enterprise Device Management - are more detailed and comprehensive solutions AND they are available now.

Windows InTune Pre-Release announced. Note that InTune is not a part of the System Center suite.

An updated version of ConfigMgr 2012 released around the timeframe of Windows Server 8 release will include “DeepLink” functionality that hooks into the Windows Store and allows deployment of these applications to Windows 8 devices.

We also attended a very interesting System Center Operations Manager(OpsMgr) conference . OpsMgr 2012 (also known as SCOM) offers comprehensive monitoring of the datacenter for all types of workloads. Here are some key points we took away from Operations Manager gathering at MMS 2012:

Say a fond farewell to the Root Management Server (RMS) in 2012 – Eliminating single point of failure.

High Availability straight out of the box - A great way to easily scale out and perform 24/7 monitoring. (OpsMgr 2007 R2 took eight tedious steps to recover in a DR situation. In OpsMgr 2012 it’s just one: install a new Management Server!)

Monitoring dashboards with new visualisation features using Microsoft SharePoint & Visio.

There are also some big changes in out-of-the-box network monitoring capabilities:

3rd party products to perform network monitoring are no longer required (cool!).

First class out of the box experience to discover your network environment, monitoring and reporting of network devices.

Introduction of the network vicinity dashboard & network node dashboard.

Monitors and reports on switch memory utilisation, traffic volume, port error analysis & port pack analysis.

Application Performance Monitoring – You’ve always been able to monitor the underlying operating system and various Microsoft workloads running on the server, but now you can monitor your .NET and J2E applications running on IIS 2007 (and up) as well. This provides a deeper view of your environment and coupled with Network Monitoring affords true end-to-end service level monitoring across your infrastructure.

More Information:

Talk to your BDM, and our Solution Architect Amit Singh, to see where OpsMgr 2012 can fit in your environment.

Understand the new System Center Licensing model (More Information can be found here).

Come in to our office and take a look at OpsMgr 2012 in our environment based using Cisco UCS & EMC hardware.

Follow our updates on twitter: @ThomasDuryea

Regards,

Jarrod Vassallo, Solution Architect and;

Sam Lewis, Senior Consulting Engineer

Apple’s iPad 3 was released in March to much fanfare.

While some commentators suggested that users wouldn’t upgrade and that the device was unlikely to shift in great numbers, in fact 3 million units were purchased on its opening weekend – a staggering number of devices ending up in the hands of both consumers and corporates alike.

One of the most telling numbers from Tim Cook’s keynote was this: Apple sold 15.4 million iPads in the same period that HP (currently the worlds number one PC vendor) shipped 15.1 million laptops. The Post PC world is now truly upon us.

One of the most important features of any mobile platform is its application store and the ability it offers to search through millions of applications, find one relevant to the task at hand, and have it up and running in seconds.

This is a very different experience to that of most corporate users who need to make a request to IT, wait for someone to be assigned, re-confirm their request and the reason why they need an application and then hope that IT install it and it just works – an experience that’s the complete opposite of what they see on their consumer device.

Right now, application stores are one of the missing pieces in BYO and Mobility generally. Corporations are buying devices and building management platforms to give these devices to users, but when it comes to apps they are leaving them out in the cold.

To transform a basic BYO policy into something that can really support their business, CIOs must focus on Apps. These are what will help your users gain real business value. Whether it’s expediting sales, approving forms and workflows anytime anywhere or assisting in presentations by using live data from corporate systems, the opportunities are only limited by the imagination.

Beyond the millions of applications available commercially in the App Store, your can also build your own internal applications, from basic sales catalogues through to Mobile Document Management systems.

With the exponential growth of web apps and other OS platforms inside the enterprise the concept of an enterprise app store for all apps, not just mobile ones, is increasingly powerful – especially if it allows for apps to follow users across devices with built-in location awareness.

As a user, I want my enterprise app store to follow me between devices and to understand the capabilities of the device I’m using to deliver the best experience. It should also know where I’m coming from (physically) and secure my session appropriately.

Expect the future to hold great things for the development of the enterprise app stores as enterprises look to offer their staff a more flexible workplace and work style.

Find out more about BYOD and what Thomas Duryea can do for you here.

Rhys Evans is Thomas Duryea’s National Practice Manager, Enterprise Information Systems.

Hello from the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2012 in Las Vegas!

It’s only half way through the second day of the conference and already there have been some exciting announcements!

The opening Keynote of MMS 2012 was held this morning (Wednesday 18^th April) and was presented by Brad Anderson who is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Management and Security division. During his presentation he announced the general availability of System Center 2012.

Some key takeaways of his presentation were:

• Cloud Computing is the methodology of delivering services to end users via a pool of infrastructure which scales via automation and self-service.
• Microsoft have worked with many large TAP customers (100,000+ seats) to help develop and validate System Center 2012.
• Windows Server ‘8’ has been renamed Windows Server 2012 and commits to launch this year.
• More powerful cloud solution platform when combined with System Center 2012.

In the annual ‘State of Union’ session, some interesting and exciting facts about the development of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager were discussed, we found these quite interesting and some of them are:

• ConfigMgr 2012 has been in development for 4 years and is the largest engineering release by the ConfigMgr team, ever.
• 25 customers from 11 countries in 15 different industries involved in the TAP with over 450,000 end points managed by ConfigMgr 2012 RC2.
• TAP customers included large companies such as Dell, Boeing, Nokia and Sprint.
• Over 190 scenarios validated, 2,500 applications managed and 650 ConfigMgr 2007 to ConfigMgr 2012 migration jobs run.
• Product team drank 32,832 cans of coke & 90,896 starbucks coffees during development and engineering of ConfigMgr 2012

These are just some of the figures that were presented showing that Microsoft have put a lot of time and effort in the development and testing of not only ConfigMgr 2012, but the entire System Center 2012 suite and their key message is that it’s ready for production now.

The opening keynote can be viewed on demand here.

Additional Information:

• Talk to your Thomas Duryea account manager in order to arrange a meeting with myself to see how the system center suite can benefit you.
• Understand the new System Center Licensing model (More Information can be found here).
• Come in for a demo at Thomas Duryea and see our System Center Solution on top of our Cisco UCS and EMC storage platform.

Follow our updates on twitter: @ThomasDuryea

Regards,

Jarrod Vassallo, Solution Architect and;

Sam Lewis, Senior Consulting Engineer

Hi, I am writing this update from the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas. Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2012 has begun and we are so excited to be here!

The primary reason we are here is for the release of Microsoft System Center 2012. We all know the immense value of operating system deployment and ongoing management. But we are here to understand the true value of the whole system center suite and how it can benefit our clients back home in Australia.

What we will see at the first MMS Keynote:

• The public announcement and official launch of System Center 2012, which reached the RTM milestone last week.
• The need for mass standardisation across current data centres (private cloud) to get the true value out of System Center 2012.
• Live demonstrations of system center including public & private clouds.

Overall we expect to see a massive investment in System Center 2012. This is a suite of products that have already been well tested throughout the world over the past two years during the development stages.

Additional Information:

• Talk to your Thomas Duryea account manager to arrange a meeting with myself (Jarrod Vassallo) to see how the system center suite can benefit you.
• Understand the new System Center Licensing model (Datasheet can be found here)
• Come in for a demo at Thomas Duryea and see our System Center Solution running on our Cisco UCS and EMC storage platform.

It’s great for both of us to be here. Representing not only Thomas Duryea but Australia! We are looking forward to taking the best of MMS and delivering it to you, our clients.

Follow our updates on twitter: @ThomasDuryea

Regards,

Jarrod Vassallo, Solution Architect and;

Sam Lewis, Senior Consulting Engineer

Everyone knows how to keep their environment up and running. Most know how to quickly resolve incidents as they arise. Many know intimate details about how their systems are built and configured.

However, an accurate snapshot the health and performance of the whole environment is often a difficult ask, let alone a historical report on various metrics for the past 12 months.

Don’t worry; you’re not alone. And it’s not your fault.

For every thousand configuration-, automation-, virtualisation-, consolidation-, [insert miscellaneous buzz words here] technology, there is only one monitoring tool . And let’s face it; it can be kind of boring by comparison and it often falls by the wayside to more ‘high-priority’ projects.

What’s more is that as datacentres become more complex with the introduction of virtualisation and distributed applications it is becoming increasingly common for organisations to deploy multiple management tools that include proprietary and limited scope products, tools developed in house, and more.

Needless to say, this directly results in inefficiencies and higher TCO from, well, management of management tools.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 (OpsMgr) tackles these challenges head on by providing a single, familiar and easy to use interface that provides a holistic view of the entire datacentre – from hypervisors to network devices to storage devices to applications and to Windows servers.

Better yet, OpsMgr is not just for aesthetics. It looks at your datacentre through ‘computer eyes’, rather than the human eyes you’ve been blessed with.  This means that it sees your environment as a plethora of objects that are related and come together to ultimately provide a service.

To put this in to real terms, think about how much infrastructure it takes to keep a business-critical service like email running. Microsoft Exchange, for example, can be distributed across many servers, with its database on one server, mailboxes on another, plus edge servers, ActiveSync, OWA, network devices and so on. Each server then has CPUs, RAM, storage, a UPS, and so on.

This notion of service level monitoring promotes the ability to proactively address issues before they become incidents. It allows for service levels to be tracked so that SLA’s can be realistically defined and met. It allows for forecasting and capacity planning with accurate and reliable trend analysis.

It saves time and money.

As IT Pro’s, we should be excited by that. This sort of capability is the epitome of knowledge-driven IT. And knowledge is power.

This blog merely scratches the surface of the capabilities, features and benefits of System Center Operations Manager 2012, which is slated for release in the coming months.

Do you want to learn more about the key differences between OpsMgr 2007 R2 and 2012?

Do you want to learn more about the exciting new integration with the System Center 2012 suite?

Do you want to understand how OpsMgr fits into your environment and how it can help you?

We have all the answers!

Now is the time to start transitioning to a knowledge-driven IT model with OpsMgr!

Ask us how we can help you today.

Additional roles and enhancements for 2012 include:
• Vastly improved user experience by providing the option to self-provision applications securely from an easy-to-use web catalog.
• An improved administration console enables you to organise administrative tasks by business role, ensuring that only relevant features are visible to any given role.
• Manages a wide range of mobile devices with a single administrative console for policies, asset management, and compliance reporting.
• Provides continuous settings enforcement to automatically identify and remediate noncompliant machines

It may be tempting to leap from XP to Windows 8, but the devil’s in the detail.

Windows XP is 10 years old, yet a substantial number of businesses are still using it.

They’re not really at fault. Upgrading to Windows Vista was considered too much work for too little payoff, and for many businesses upgrading to Windows 7 has for a long time seemed unnecessary.

That’s changing, however. With the rise of Ultrabooks and tablets, businesses using XP have found that it falls short. Decreasing support from manufacturers and software vendors means that XP can no longer drive the technologies they want to use.

Many in this position tell me that their plan is to wait for Windows 8. It shouldn’t be. Not only will migrating from XP to Windows 8 be a more difficult and complex task than moving right now to Windows 7, but Windows 8 remains a long way off.

Time to upgrade, but to what?

Support for Windows XP will end in two years. Microsoft has already renewed its lease on life twice, and it won’t do so again.

At the moment, you simply can’t buy a new PC with XP, and downgrade licenses can be hard to obtain.

Businesses using XP know they need to upgrade. Rather than develop plans and policies around Windows 7, however, some are understandably attracted to Windows 8.

For one thing, Microsoft is spruiking Windows 8 as a fix for integrating PCs, phones and tablets across the enterprise — something that IT leaders know is a must.

For another, they believe that if they have to go through what could prove to be a difficult upgrade process, it might as well be to the latest and greatest thing.

But I think waiting for Windows 8 is a risk for a number of reasons:

We don’t know exactly what it is

The Windows 8 beta has not yet been released, and therefore we can’t assess its utility for the enterprise. So far, Microsoft has been promoting consumer-oriented features of the OS, such as its tile interface. We simply can’t be certain yet what these features will mean for the enterprise desktop. It could be that businesses will find Windows 8 to be too consumer focused.

We don’t know when it will be out

With the beta due for release shortly, we can assume on previous experience that Windows 8 will see a general release sometime between October and December this year.

That said, many businesses will prefer to engage in the traditional wait for Service Pack 1, so it may be July next year before they’re ready to upgrade. At that point, XP’s lifecycle will have only six months left to run.

It’s going to be a bigger leap

When you move from XP to Windows 7, most users find the change relatively easy. It’s a much more intuitive switch than that between Office 2003 and the ribbon-based Office 2010, for example.

Exactly what the tile interface and the emphasis on tablets and touch will mean for desktop familiarity in Windows 8 is yet to been discovered, but it’s bound to be a bigger change and there will be a learning curve.

Indeed, when you look at demonstrations of Windows 8, the interface has more in common with an Xbox than a PC. The OS is very deliberately aimed at smartphones, tablets and other ARM-powered devices. This may turn out to be a big ask for enterprises.

It’s easier to upgrade to Windows 7

IT vendors now have a wealth of experience migrating their customers from XP to Windows 7, something that businesses going straight to Windows 8 won’t benefit from.

In addition, Windows 7 is well supported by manufacturers and suppliers today, and there doesn’t seem to be a great deal that Windows 8 will do in future that Windows 7 can’t right now.

Businesses running XP need to understand that Windows 8 won’t be the silver bullet that offers them an easy upgrade.

Their best bet is to develop a plan to move to Windows 7 as soon as they can — a system that’s a ready, proven and available quantity.

Rhys Evans is national practice manager of enterprise information systems with Thomas Duryea.

View our Windows 7 Solutions page here.

The Macmillian Dictionary defines the term “fit for purpose”, as something being “good enough to do the job it was designed to do”. With the lack of Disaster Recovery (DR) standards, how can we measure if an IT DR programme is good enough to do the job it was designed to do? How can we draw some conclusions from business continuity standards? The below diagram sets out how two business continuity management standards (the British Standards Institution’s BS 25999 and the Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines) can apply to DR methodology, through five phases.

1. Understanding the organisation’s business compiles policy and framework documents, and invokes a Business Impact Analysis (BIA), and a Threat and Vulnerability Assessment.
2. Organisation’s disaster recovery strategies review technical options addressing the gap between business expectation and current state.
3. Developing and implementing the organisation’s DR solution and plan, implements the preferred option, and compiles the DR plan (DRP).
4. Exercising, maintaining, and reviewing organisations DR programme, exercises the plan and incorporates DR checklists/ processes into change and project management.
5. Annual reviews to embed a DR culture into the organisation. As we will see through some of Thomas Duryea’s clients, disaster recovery that is “fit for purpose” depends upon particular requirements, and may consist of implementing all, or some of the five phases.
The examples below will demonstrate that even with differing business and budgetary requirements, organisations can implement an incremental and scalable DR methodology to ensure their unique goals are met (i.e. fit for purpose).

Golden Plains Shire Council
Golden Plains Shire Council (GPSC) is a municipality of approximately 20,000 residents situated between Geelong, Ballarat, and Melbourne. It offers access to city services, and a mix of country lifestyle. GPSC has a tradition of wool and grain growing, and animal farming. Wine production is an emerging industry. GPSC’s business did not fully appreciate DR requirements and as a result of financial constraints, GPSC provided DR capability via five replication technologies. Issues with this included sustainability, complexity, service restoration, and business ownership. A BIA was conducted highlighting the recovery requirements of the business could not be met with the existing solutions; financial investment was required; and business continuity workarounds needed reviewing. The business also began to understand that DR was not solely “IT’s problem”. GPSC investigated technical solutions and is currently working to increase their DR capability. Independently to the BIA process, GPSC compiled a DR policy and framework, and as their DR capability increases, amendments to their DRP are being done. By undertaking all phases of the DR methodology (although not in strict order) GPCS have progressed from having some disjointed and complicated technical replication, and providing unknown DR capability, to having a defined DR stake in the ground – with support and understanding of the business to move forward and deliver a DR solution that’s fit for purpose.

Service Stream
Service Stream provide solutions in the telecommunications and utilities sectors in areas of construction and design, asset management services, contact centre activities, logistics, and technology solutions. The Communications division (SSC) is dedicated to the support of telecommunication networks, providing communication services matched specifically to their clients’ needs. SSC needed to establish a DR capability, however the DR policy and framework were not immediately required, as these would be adopted by the whole organisation at a later date. An abridged BIA was undertaken, which provided recovery requirements, restart order, and assisted in the determination of the technical solution. SSC established their DR capability utilising VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which provided the required rapid return to service. The DRP was written and validated via an exercise, involving starting and validating all applications and data within the Vmware DR “bubble” environment. SSC have scheduled quarterly exercises, and by undertaking selected phases of the methodology, they have ensured their DR capability is fit for their purpose.

Royal District Nursing Service
Royal District Nursing Service (RDNS) has a staff of approximately 1,400, providing 24×7 home nursing and healthcare, with over 1.7 million client visits, and more than 550,000 hours of care per annum. This enables people to remain in their own homes, providing them with more independence, choice, and control in relation to their healthcare. RDNS operate two data centres with core IT capabilities replicated between them providing DR capability. Implementation of new IT infrastructure provided the opportunity to review DR processes which were incorporated into existing BC documentation. RDNS implemented a new DR programme, where the initial focus was documentation and a DR policy and framework were created. A DRP (including existing recovery procedures), was created for both data centres, allowing them to be amended as technical DR capability increased. An abridged BIA was undertaken using process recovery requirements captured in the (business continuity) BIA. Where these were unavailable, IT local knowledge was substituted to determine business
requirements. This resulted in minor amendments, to the deployed solution to closer align it to business requirements. By following all phases of the methodology in strict order, RDNS, have delivered a DR capability that is fit for purpose.

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