Like 2008, at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
Unlike 2008, rooms were not quite as cold (or maybe I just dressed warmer). And the announcements weren’t quite as momentous – but after all – how do you compete with last year’s flying pigs? (although the cross-plat folks did bring along a supply for giveaways)
Seriously … This year instead of being at MMS on a press pass, I was a presenter. As such, since I presented on Wednesday, Monday and Tuesday were pretty much spent with last minute details in preparation for that.
During the general sessions, a lot of focus on virtualization and cloud computing management (see http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/050109-microsoft-cloud-management.html?hpg1=bn). Some of the aspects of ConfigMgr V10 were introduced – such as replacing the MMC-based console with one using the “Outlook” feel – already incorporated into several other System Center products including OpsMgr. Next year, expect to hear a lot more about the V10 products – both ConfigMgr and OpsMgr – as planning and design for both gets underway later this year.
In regards to the OpsMgr breakout sessions, which is where I concentrated this year – there was some pretty awesome sessions. My longtime friend and coauthor Cameron Fuller gave a great session on avoiding OpsMgr mistakes (and it was hard not to chuckle when he put RMS up on the screen). Pete Zerger gave an in-depth session on AD integration. Maarten Goet dove into ACS. Rory McCaw talked about staying on top of alerts. Gordon McKenna and David Allen gave sessions on data center management with System Center and maintaining System Center on Hyper-V. Steve Rachui, technical reviewer for System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Unleashed, showed how well versed he is in OpsMgr as well as ConfigMgr by giving two talks on OpsMgr – one explaining targeting better than anyone else can, and the other discussing the different types of monitors. Andy Dominey and I co-presented on business continuity and high availability (the title was “Don’t Flirt with Disaster”).
This list doesn’t even include presentations made by the folks in Redmond which included cross-platform of course, and a team presentation by Justin Incarnato and the OpsMgr MVPs which introduced some of the new functionality in R2. A lot of coverage throughout the week specific to R2, announced as being planned for RTM sometime in June, along with good in-depth information about OpsMgr 2007.
A bit about the session Andy and I gave. Our presentation was Wednesday morning; Tuesday we got access to our demo machine and started loading the VMs carefully built earlier in the month that included two clustered nodes – after all, we were discussing high availability. When we brought up the virtual machines, we ran into our own data center disaster, and our demos were toast. However, we invoked our business continuity plan and connected over the Internet to the system Andy had running in his home lab. Just goes to show you never know when you might have to deal with a potential disaster – we came prepared to discuss business continuity and availability, and we had to invoke it ourselves to do our demos! (Glad we avoided flirting with disaster ourselves.)
Also, a new user community was launched – SystemCenterCentral.com, billed as the site to visit for “Everything System Center.” A number of the articles previously published on the ops-mgr blog (ops-mgr.spaces.live.com) were pulled over to SystemCentralCentral, along with information from systemcenterforum.org, techlog.org, and many others. Check it out!
