During the second keynote on MMS on the 29th of April, Brad Anderson announced a new product in the System Center product suite called. System Center Online Desktop Manager (SCODM).Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center (ICE-SC) is the first extensive solution that provides seamless integration of the unique ProLiant and BladeSystem manageability features into the Microsoft System Center consoles. Backed by HP service and support, ICE-SC delivers the best hardware management experience for customers who have standardized on a Microsoft System Center management platform.
The Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing Management Pack monitors the health of the Windows Server 2008 NLB clusters and improves the availability, performance, and security of your Windows Server 2008 NLB deployment.
Download: Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing for System Center Operations Manager 2007
The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) team is extending the MOF 4.0 core content with the release of additional MOF companion guides. We’re pleased to announce the beta of the latest guide, Planning for ISO/IEC 20000. Visit the Connect site to download the beta now.In Microsoft Visio 2007® diagrams, appropriate data can be attached to the shapes depending on the nature and domain of the diagrams. Visio Add-In for System Center allows IT professionals to visualize data from the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) by generating the diagrams for each machine configured for it. The Add-In allows filtering of data, automatic generation of diagrams and an automatic refresh of the associated data. Download: Visio 2007 add-in for System Center Ops Mgr 2007 & Config Mgr 2007 version 1.5
In the session System Center Configuration Manager “State of the Union” Bill Anderson and Josh Pointer revealed the first looks of next version of Configuration Manager. It's called System Center Configuration Manager.next
| 29 Apr '09 - 01:50 | kenneth van surksum | 
five comments | news source ~ Aad Noman & Kenneth van Surksum 
Today at the Microsoft Management Summit 2009 we attended a session with Bill Anderson and Josh Pointer called System Center Configuration Manager “State of the Union”. 
This year is the 10th anniversary of the Microsoft Management Summit. On Tuesday the 28th of April Microsoft Delivered the keynote for MMS 2009.
Opslogix is a new player in the System Center area. They launched at the Microsoft Management Summit and are providing (intelligent) management packs. From their press release:We truly value the System Center community! In this spirit – as of today – we provide our Ping Management Pack for FREE. Beside optimized monitors, counters and reporting, we included an UI configuration page for quick and easy configuration. Please browse to www.opslogix.com to download your copy. That’s not all! We will be launching more free Intelligent Management Packs to the community in the next few months, so stay tuned …
Download: Ping Management Pack (FREE)
System Center community members; Pete Zerger, Rory McCaw and Maarten Goet have founded System Center Central. SystemCenterCentral.com is a community initiative that will combine a number of existing Internet properties under a single community site and strive to become the leading community landing page for all System Center technologies.
Visit System Center Central
With the upcoming release of OpsMgr 2007 R2 RTM, I wanted to offer some guidance on getting the best out of some of the new security enhancements in the R2 release. The ‘Run As’ functionality within OpsMgr provides the ability to carry out monitoring and execute administrative tasks using a specific account without ever presenting the account to the Operator. This allows the OpsMgr accounts to be configured with a minimum of security permissions and facilitates the configuration of specific accounts for individual applications and servers such as a dedicated account to access a SQL instance. (continue at source)
The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is a Windows service that made its debut with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This service provides the ability to create a point in time image (shadow copy) of one or more volumes. These shadow copies can then be used to perform backup operations. Shadow copies are created very quickly in general because instead of backing up an entire volume file by file, VSS only needs to track changes to existing files. By tracking disk changes at the volume level, VSS is able to present a static snapshot of changed data to a backup process and then copy a point-in-time snapshot of those files to a backup destination even while the actual files are being written to.(continue at source)
If you have ever tried to setup an App-V Remote Management Console or upgraded your existing 4.1 SoftGrid environment to App-V 4.5 just to have the Remote Management Console stop working this post is for you. Lately we have received a number support calls regarding this issue and discovered that we don’t have any App-V specific documentation on how to set this up, this post will address this issue in detail.(continue at source)
Steven Rachui: A question came up the other day about how to set the patchinstall command line switches for ITMU in SCCM. In SMS 2003 it was a simple edit to the command line for the program but in SCCM there is no such ability since we do all of the command line building based on UI settings and don’t expose the result (except in the patchinstall log when the deployment runs) for the user to edit.(continue at source)
System Center Service Manager is a new product in the System Center family. Microsoft has three main goals with the product:Did you ever wanted to build a reference image of your physical workstations onto your VMware Workstation so that people could play around ? | 20 Apr '09 - 21:09 | kenneth van surksum | no comments | news source ~ System Center User Group Belgium There are several ways to handle mass storage drivers in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, especially when we’re talking about an image solution for Windows XP/2003. If you use ConfigMgr to deploy your image, is there no need to handle the mass storage drivers within the image before deploying the image (my opinion). If you use some other deployment tool like MDT, you’ll to integrate the mass storage drivers into the image, before running sysprep.exe. In this blog will I only handle the first scenario, Windows XP deployment in ConfigMgr.
Maik Koster: What we are trying to built here is a Boot Wizard which will show a dynamic list of available OSD Task Sequences from SCCM 2007 to choose from. The chosen Task Sequence shall then be executed on the local computer. To ease our job regarding the final deployment and the management of the Boot Images, we want to have a single Boot Image to be used for WDS/PXE/CD Deployment for all known and unknown computers.Rob Marshall: Useful troubleshooting jump off point for when you need to raise a support case with Microsoft CSS. It's called the SMS / ConfigMgr Callback Information and Resources websiteEven if you are not raising a case, its worth being bookmarked for the tips and links off in to the ConfigMgr documentation library
http://blogs.technet.com/configmgrcallback/default.aspx
Ever wanted to setup IM notifications in SCOM 2007? Well here are the 6 steps you’ll need to follow to get this configured. | 15 Apr '09 - 17:08 | kenneth van surksum | no comments | news source ~ Operations Manager Product Team Blog Operations Manager team: we've released the following to our OpsMgr 2007 R2 TAP and MP Beta - Windows programs on Connect: | 15 Apr '09 - 16:57 | kenneth van surksum | no comments | news source ~ Operations Manager Product Team Blog This blog focuses on providing a very light-weight overview of how to implement SQL database mirroring and it is not intended to be a complete how-to reference. DPM administrators benefit by understanding, even at a basic level, how to install and configure the applications DPM will be protecting. This blog is intended to provide some of that knowledge as a starting point.(continue at source)
There has been some confusion lately over a little known feature in Configuration Manager 2007: the ability to automatically apply hotfixes to the client during initial install by creating a ClientPatch folder on the site server. If you want a very light-weight and simple tool to simulate SNMP messages for a wide array of devices you can download it from here: Download the Free SNMP Simulator from Jalasoft
When you reassign a Configuration Manager client from one hierarchy to another, the client already has a trusted root key from its original hierarchy. Reassigning the client to a new hierarchy means that the client will also be assigned to a new management point. When both the trusted root key and the management point changes, by default, the client will become unmanaged. In this scenario, the Advanced Client component will send the status message ID 10822 to the site, with a description that it encountered a certificate for a management point that it could not verify. Additionally, the client log file Locationservices.log will display the following error: The trusted key, mp certificate and the mp machine have changed on server. The client cannot validate the authentication information.(continue at source)
J.C. Hornbeck: Have you ever wondered how Microsoft uses Configuration Manager? Well wonder no more, there’s a detailed write up on everything from developing the business case to using some of the more advanced features as part of our IT Showcase. Here you’ll find Microsoft IT's early adopter experiences, best experiences, and lessons learned from their own deployments of System Center Configuration Manager within their global enterprise. The specific sections include:Justin Zarb: We have some great resource kit tools that can really help new App-V admins to fine tune there app-v estate. The App-V Best Practise Analyzer is a really handy tool that you can use. How do you know whether your Management\Streaming Server has settings that result in sub-optimal server performance. Enter the Microsoft Application Virtualization Best Practices Analyzer tool. The App-V BPA is a tool used to scan an App-V Management or Streaming Server for configuration settings that could result in sub-optimal server performance. The App-V BPA produces standardized reports that are generated by the Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer.(continue at source)
This QFE updates the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Agent to allow it to monitor Windows Server 2008 Internet Information Services 7.0 Servers. Download QFE: System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Internet Information Services 7.0 Monitoring support
John Gilham: In order to diagnose a failure scenario, it is normally required to reproduce the issue and collect traces at the same time.Self-Service Portal is an optional component of SCVMM 2008 that allows users or server administrators to create and manage their own virtual machines using a web interface. The portal utilizes SCVMM 2008 self-service user roles which determine or limit the scope of the users' actions. The following article provides the steps for installing and configuring the Self-Service Portal component.(continue at source)
So you’ve run into a problem with VMM. Maybe your Hosts have lost connectivity with the SCVMM Server. Or, P2V fails for a certain machine every time. If you’ve searched many TechNet blogs or forums for answers you have probably come to one conclusion: you’re going to have to run a trace to collect the required information.(continue at source)
Many customers wish to pre-configure items that are “pinned” to the Start Menu in their Windows images. Also, since items can now be pinned to the new Taskbar in Windows 7, customers will want to configure “pinned” items there as well.When the Configuration Manager 2007 operating system deployment feature is used to deploy a Vista SP1 image, a new boot configuration data (BCD) store is created using the BCD template. Configuration Manager 2007 explicitly creates the Boot Manger and Operating System objects from the BCD template, but allows the Resume object to be created implicitly by Windows Vista when it goes through mini-setup. Vista SP1 correctly generates the Resume object during mini-setup but the associated Resume settings objects are not generated. Because there are no Resume settings objects, hibernate functionality does not work.(continue at source)
| 11 Apr '09 - 19:35 | kenneth van surksum | no comments | news source ~ ConfigMgr Support Team Blog 
Active Directory has a built-in process that exists to secure users that are members of privileged groups. This process is one that has been around for quite some time, but is still not known by all Active Directory administrators. I have seen a number of Active Directory administrators get caught off guard by AdminSDHolder, in many different ways.
Learn more about the new HP Proliant G6 Servers by visiting the HP Proliant Web Jam. The Webjam provides you with the ability to watch video's on and obtain more information about the new HP Proliant G6 Servers.Check it out: HP Proliant Web Jam
Michael Niehaus: I needed some PowerShell practice this evening, so I did some experimentation to figure out how to interact with the ConfigMgr provider via PowerShell and WMI. As a result of that experimentation, I’ve put together a module that you might find useful, if nothing else as a good example of how to do similar activities yourself.(continue at source)
Steve Rachui: What exactly do you need to do to get your environment ready to use the System Center Updates Publisher (SCUP) with the WSUS Self-Signed Cert (WSSC) option? There are a few key steps. (continue at source)
This free Solution Accelerator collects and monitors operational measurements for your line of business (LOB) applications. Its graphical dashboard makes it easy to keep tabs on service availability and performance, letting you:Since releasing Beta1, we have received feedback from our customers that they are facing increasingly high cost in terms of maintaining their plumbing system. This has also been experienced by some of the SM team members. In view of this strong demand, we have decided to ship a new solution in SMv1: Plumbing Management. (continue at source)
. But for those environment where prerequisite fail your must find a way to get around it. (continue at source)
The OpsMgr team is glad to announce that the most recent update to the SQL Server MP (version 6.0.6569.0) has been released to the MP catalog! This update provides fixes to key customer problems and also includes many significant updates to the guide as well. Following is the list of changes to the MPs themselves, and everyone that uses this MP should definitely take a close look at the guide as well to see all of the new information that has been added...(continue at source)
The default management pack that ships with OpsMgr 2007 is used to store very specific information for the management group. Though it is not meant to hold any custom rules, monitors, groups, views, or overrides, this MP still often ends up full of junk. In this post, Kevin Holman discusses what should be in your default MP, what should not, and how to clean it up. (continue at source)
