Build Your Private Cloud in a Month – The Complete April 2013 Series

Want to build a private cloud?  Head over to Kevin Remde’s blog for more information and video series.

Date	Title / Topic	Author
1-Apr	Series Introduction - Build Your Private Cloud in a Month	Keith Mayer – @KeithMayer
2-Apr	What is a Private Cloud?	Keith Mayer – @KeithMayer

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack

Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack Documentation

• Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack Documentation provides detailed instructions and descriptions on how to import and use the Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack
• Exchange Server 2013 Management Health Set documentation comprehensive list of health sets and details

Overview

The Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack provides comprehensive service health information for your Exchange organization.

The Exchange 2013 Management Pack is engineered for organizations that include servers running Exchange 2013.

The key feature of this management pack is user focused monitoring. The simplified dashboard focuses on the user experience and makes it easier for you quickly determine exactly what your users are experiencing.

Feature Summary

The Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack works with the Managed Availability feature in Exchange 2013. The alerts within the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) portal indicate unhealthy states as reported by the Managed Availability components in Exchange 2013.

The following are some of the new features in the Exchange 2013 Management Pack:

• Simplified dashboard The dashboard of the Exchange 2013 Management Pack has been simplified and refined into the following three categories
  • Active Alerts Provides a list of all outstanding alerts in your organization.
  • Organization Health Provides an overview of the overall service health in your organization.
  • Server Health Provides an overview of the health of individual servers in your organization.
• User focused monitoring Exchange 2013 introduces a monitoring and recovery infrastructure called Managed Availability. Managed Availability focuses on the user experience. All Exchange 2013 components have built-in monitors that detect problems and attempt to recover the service availability. Any issues that can't be recovered automatically are escalated to the Exchange 2013 Management Pack as an alert.

Download can be found here; more information can be found here.

AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center

What is the AWS Management Pack for Microsoft System Center?
The AWS Management Pack is an extension to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that enables you to view and monitor your AWS resources directly in the Operations Manager console. This way, you get a single pane of glass to view and monitor your resources, whether they are on-premises or in the AWS cloud.

Which AWS resources can I monitor using the AWS Management Pack?
You can monitor following AWS resources using the AWS Management Pack:

• Amazon EC2 instances (Microsoft Windows and Linux)
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes
• Elastic Load Balancing
• AWS CloudFormation stacks
• AWS Beanstalk applications
  

Which versions of System Center Operations Manager can I use?
The AWS Management Pack is available for “System Center 2012 – Operations Manager” and “System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2”.

More information can be found here and here;

Microsoft Management Summit 2013 Keynote.

MMS 2013 Keynote.

System Center 2012 SP1 General Availability

System Center 2012 SP1 is now available for download here;

SCCM, SCSM, SCVMM, SCOM, SCAC

System Center 2012 uniquely delivers unified infrastructure, application and cloud management capabilities in a single product offering and this blog post highlights new cloud and datacenter capabilities introduced in SP1. For information about Configuration Manager enhancements in SP1 and related Windows Intune capabilities, please read the client management blog post.

Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 Support
Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 were both groundbreaking releases and provide the infrastructure and application platform as the foundation for SP1. With the release of SP1, all System Center 2012 components are now enabled to run in a Windows Server 2012 environment and provide management capabilities for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, Windows Server 2012 Servers, guest operating systems and applications. With SP1, a single instance of Virtual Machine Manager now supports up to 8000 VMs on clusters of up to 64 hosts and customers can easily extend beyond these limits with multiple instances of VMM, enabling datacenter management at large scale. SP1 also now supports the use of SQL Server 2012 as a repository for use by System Center 2012 components.

Software Defined Networking (SDN)
Traditionally, networks have been defined by their physical topology – how the servers, switches, and routers were cabled together and configured. That meant that once you built out your network, changes were costly and complex.  SDN addresses these limitations by using software to configure end hosts and physical network elements, dynamically adjusting policies for how traffic flows through the network, and creating virtual network abstractions that support real-time VM placement and migration throughout the datacenter.
…………………

More information can be found here and here;

System Center 2012 with SP1 on MSDN Subscribers

MSDN Subscribers can now download the System Center 2012 Suite with SP1 integrated; no news of separate SP1 installer yet.

System Center Advisor

System Center Advisor is a cloud service that enables you to assess your server configurations and proactively avoid problems, while helping support staff to resolve issues faster by accessing current and historical configuration data; all with the security features that meet your needs.

Additionally, System Center Advisor helps reduce downtime by providing suggestions for improvement and notifying you of key updates specific to your configuration.

System Center Advisor provides support for System Center 2012, SQL Server, Windows Server, SharePoint Server, and Exchange Server.

More information can be found here and here;

UPDATE(15/03/2013): Advisor is now FREE