Building the TESG Private Cloud Customer Experience Centre - Part 1

Every year my employer holds an event for customers (and potential new customers) to show case what we do and give customers a chance to meet our partner vendors.

This year, nicely coinciding with just after the System Center 2012 release, I landed the brilliant job of setting up something to demonstrate our System Center and Desktop expertise.

And so the concept of the Private Cloud and Optimised Desktop Customer Experience Centre was born.

The goal?

1. To showcase the full System Center 2012 suite
2. To showcase the interactions of each component and how they drive efficiencies
3. To showcase an elastic and easily scalable datacentre that can flex into the Public Cloud
4. To showcase the dynamic desktop with OS, Data, User and Application layers abstracted
5. To showcase BYOD and specifically desktop/application access on tablet devices

Over a couple of blog posts I'll aim to share some of the planning, thoughts and tips & tricks that went into building it.
What I'll not be doing is guides on how to install the different components as there are plenty of them out there, but I will post links to some relevant good guides.

My original test lab was made up of a couple of HP Proliant DL380 G7's with some shared space pinched off the corporate SAN, but as this was going to need to host a lot more and it would need to be "slightly" portable for attending events like the T360 it was time to purchase some upgrades.

1. More memory.  Upgrade from 64Gb per host to 128Gb
2. Dedicated Storage.  iSCSI SAN that would also allow me to show some of the VMM storage management features (N.B. More details on this later, plus some pitfalls to watch out for!)
3. Dedicated Switches.  To show SCOM network management & keep the environment self contained.
4. More NIC's.  The original environment only had 4 onboard NICs, not good enough.
5. Flight case to rack it all in to make it portable (kind of!)

Now that might sound slightly overkill for a test/demo environment.  However, I have a laptop which is quite capable of showing 2-3 of the System Center products at the same time, but this Customer Experience Center had to host the following:

• Active Directory
• Virtual Machine Manager
• Operations Manager
• Service Manager
• Configuration Manager
• Data Protection Manager
• Orchestrator
• App Controller
• SQL 2008 R2 Server
• SharePoint Enterprise Server
• Exchange
• Lync
• ForeFront UAG
• ForeFront TMG
• File Servers
• XenDesktop Mgt Server
• XenDesktop VDI Desktops
• XenApp Mgt Server
• XenApp App Servers
• Remote Desktop Session Hosts
• Remote Desktop Broker/Gateway/Licensing
• RDS/Hyper-V VDI Desktops
• Dedicated Win 7 Admin Workstations
• Citrix NetScaler VM Appliance
• App-V Sequencer Workstations

When you consider that all of this needs to be up and running at the same time, my laptop just wasn't going to cope!

So far this has spread out across 34 VM's and there's still more to come...

This is a quick example diagram that I drew up to show the Hyper-V layout

Once all the hardware components were installed and racked then Hyper-V was the first thing to tackle and all I can say is thank god for Aidan Finn and his blog: http://www.aidanfinn.com/

Lots of useful posts, for example: http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=10311

I'm going to leave the rest for the next post, but I just want to mention something that came to light when I installed the first System Center component, Virtual Machine Manager.

This is a logical first place to start if you've got the chance to build a private cloud from scratch like I have as you can implement Service Templates for deploying your VM's to help structure the environment and provide servicing and scale out options.

However, I hit a problem almost straight away, I struggled to get it to see my storage provider.

Originally I was ordering a Dell Equalogic iSCSI SAN for the environment, but due to certain disks not being available and increased costs for alternatives I was suggested to look at a DotHill AssuredSAN 2332.

The first thing I did was ask/check it supported SMI-S protocol, which it did as this is what VMM requires for the new features.
However when trying to set it up in VMM, it soon came to light that it only supported SMI-S 1.3 whereas VMM requires version 1.5.

So lesson learnt, make sure that when checking specifications, especially SAN's that you check in detail, right down to the version number!

There is a useful table (I found this afterwards!) that details the supported arrays:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610600.aspx

Part 1 - Building the TESG Private Cloud Customer Experience Centre

Part 2 - Service Accounts & Permissions

Part 3 - Installation Guide Links
Part 4 - Partner Solutions & Extensions

MMS 2012 - Wrap up

Well I'm back from this years Microsoft Management Summit and just about recovered.

I thought I'd write a quick post to cover some of the useful information that I've seen filtering through since MMS 2012 and also to post some useful links that I didn't get chance to while balancing my tablet on my knee during sessions.

Johan Arwidmark has released a brilliant "Hydration Kit" to help deploy a complete ConfigMgr 2012 infrastructure, fully automated, for a lab/test environment.
http://www.deploymentresearch.com/Blog/tabid/62/EntryId/57/The-Hydration-Kit-for-ConfigMgr-2012-RTM-is-available-for-download.aspx

The sessions from MMS 2012 can be watched on-demand from the http://www.mms-2012.com/digitalmms site.  The individual slide decks are also available from here.

If you don't want to trawl through so many sessions grabbing the slide decks, you can download the entire stack from the myITforum site.

Similarly, with the video sessions, you can find a nifty little PowerShell script here on the scomfaq site that will allow you to download all the sessions for offline viewing, or supply your own text list of session ID's if you don't want them all.  Just be careful, there's around 26Gb of videos available to download!

Various System Center solution accelerators, add-ins and resource tools have been released:
Service Manager 2012 Exchange Connector 3.0
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2012
Security Compliance Manager 2.5
Many other Addons that I previously listed

Keynote Day 1 saw the "official" announcement that System Center 2012 was RTM and GA (General Availability) which was no huge surprise (For those customers that took my bet that April 17th was the release date I'll collect my winnings later!)
Another non-surprise was the announcement that Windows Server "8" was officially renamed to Windows Server 2012 (shortly followed with the Windows client team announcing that Windows "8" will be officially called Windows 8).

Keynote Day 2 was more client focused, but the main announcement was that Intune will be receiving a big feature update in the next release with the ability to manage iOS and Android devices, not just through Exchange ActiveSync policies, but by being able to allow applications to be installed from a centrally controllable "approved" list.  Details are still sketchy and the demo showed a web page being used on iOS, but fingers crossed this will change to being an app.

Microsoft's Eric Main posted more information on the changes. Here's an excerpt with some additional details:
"The next release of Windows Intune will integrate with Windows Server Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange Server, allowing IT to manage the many devices brought into the workplace, even if they’re not owned by the organization. IT will also be able to use Windows Intune to set security policies for mobile devices and enforce password protection, encryption and even kick off a remote wipe if a device is compromised. Windows Intune’s mobile device management will support any device with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync capabilities, including Windows Phone, iOS and Android."


I took both the new Private Cloud exams while I was out there;
70-246 - Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud
70-247 - Configuring and Deploying a Private Cloud

For those of you thinking about taking these exams and don't work daily with ALL of the System Center 2012 products, I'd recommend you look at attending the classroom based courses:

Learning Plans and Classroom Training
10750AB: Beta: Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 (5 Days)
10751A: Configuring and Deploying a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 (5 Days)

Unfortunately I have to wait until June time to find out my results, fingers crossed that I passed!


Much to the disappointment of my wife who was hoping to come to Las Vegas with me next year and a colleague who also had his sights set on Vegas, the announcement was made that MMS 2013 will be held in New Orleans in June next year.  Rumours are already circulating that this may well mean a combining of both MMS & TechEd since MMS is usually held in April/May and TechEd in May/June time.  Since both events usually have the same set of Microsoft staff attending a fair portion of the sessions it would certainly make sense.


Finally, while I did the usual sweep of the vendor stalls looking for swag, I personally thought it was rather light on goodies.  I did however find swag gold from BDNA.  For those people that don't know me, I tend to drink a lot of Relentless, so being a geek these were the highlight of the swag gathering!

System Center 2012 Licensing Changes - Knowledge Cast

After the recent announcement last week by Microsoft on the changes being made to the license models for System Center ready for the launch of the 2012 wave, I'd like to share an invitation to a knowledge cast that I will be presenting on these changes.

http://www.trustmarquesolutions.com/news/system-center-2012-licensing-changes-webinar/

These significant changes include:

• Streamlining the complexity of licensing System Center
• The discontinuation of the Enterprise workload licenses
• The removal of Management Server Licenses
• License grants & transition paths available for existing Software Assurance customers

The Knowledge Cast will cover:

• Review of the licensing changes
• What these changes will mean to your business
• The key timelines for pricing & product changes
• The increased benefits of the System Center 2012 models

*Update- due to demand, we've added an additional session on Thursday morning*
There are four sessions that I'll be presenting on, across two days:
Tuesday January 24th 2012
11:00 – 12:00
14:00 – 15:00
Thursday January 26th
11:00 – 12:00
14:00 – 15:00

I know it's short notice, but these changes were only announced last week and some of the changes have important impact if not acted on quickly.

Places are limited, and aimed at UK based organisations, so booking soon is recommended:
http://www.trustmarquesolutions.com/news/system-center-2012-licensing-changes-webinar/


*Usual disclaimer: While I work for Trustmarque Solutions, and this knowledge cast is presented for them by myself, this blog is my personal blog and the writings and opinions contained within this blog are my personal opinions and are not reflective of the thoughts or intentions of my employer*

Microsoft Private Cloud, System Center 2012 and License Changes

http://www.microsoft.com/business/events/en-us/PrivateCloudExec

Today Microsoft announced a change in the licensing for System Center.
The multiple SKUs and versions have been greatly simplified down to just 2 (yes that's just TWO!!) offerings.

That's a big change from currently the four different licensing schemes, Datacenter, Enterprise, Single Enterprise, and Single Standard.

The new license types are:
System Center Standard - Manage a physical server, or very lightly virtualised (2 VM's)
System Center Datacenter - Manage unlimited VM's on a physical host

Both the System Center license types contains the following products:

• Configuration Manager
• Service Manager
• Virtual Machine Manager
• Operations Manager
• Data Protection Manager
• Orchestrator
• App Controller
• Endpoint Protection 

So no more individual license for each product, it's a suite license only.

Another couple of major changes....
Licences are now only needed for endpoints being managed, no management servers or SQL licensing. (Yep, you heard it right, SQL licenses for the SC Management Servers is now included in the new licenses)

Both types (Std & DataCenter) are both processor based Licenses, but covers up to two processors per license.

There is also a transition model from the old licensing model to the new.

If you have Software Assurance coverage on your current System Center licenses at the time of System Center 2012 General Availability, you will receive the following System Center 2012 Server ML grants at the ratios listed below:

That covers off licensing Server Operating Systems, however for the Configuration Manager and Service Manager parts of System Center for example, you still require Client Management Licenses for non-server OSE's

Microsoft also have a useful interactive site online that can provide some common scenario questions about System Center 2012 licensing:
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/SystemCenter2012.aspx

Just to pre-empt the most likely couple of questions likely to get asked around this:

Q) Are there separate offerings without SQL Server Technology?
A) No. All System Center 2012 products include the right to run a runtime version of SQL Server Technology to support System Center so there are no longer separate offerings.

Q) Do I need to purchase separate Management Server Licenses to run Management Server software?
A) No. With System Center 2012, the right to run Management Server software is included with the Server MLs and Client MLs.

Further information:
System Center 2012 Licensing Datasheet

System Center 2012 Licensing FAQ

System Center 2012 Wave

I thought I'd post a quick one on how the System Center 2012 stack is starting to line up and some bits to note for testing and in preparation for implementations.

At present we have the following table that shows the parts of the System Center stack available and their current release stage:

Configuration Manager	Release Candidate 1
Operations Manager	Release Candidate 1
Service Manager	Beta 1
Virtual Machine Manager	Release Candidate 1
Data Protection Manager	Beta 1
Orchestrator	Release Candidate 1
App Controller	Beta 1

All of the System Center solutions are undergoing a branding change.
If you haven't noticed, the branding has now changed to:
"System Center 2012 Product Name"

So this makes it:

• System Center 2012 Configuration Manager
• System Center 2012 Operations Manager
• System Center 2012 Service Manager
• etc etc etc....

A small change I'm sure you'll agree, but important in the long run as we start to see really tight integration between all the solutions, and the development and release schedules of all the parts of the System Center align up.
(Hopefully we'll also see the Start Menu program groups be consolidated together unlike the random scatterings it is at present)

SQL Collations between the solutions are also drawing together with the need for the following collations per solution:

Configuration Manager	SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
Operations Manager	SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
Service Manager	See: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh495583.aspx
Virtual Machine Manager	SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
Data Protection Manager	Unsure - Doesn't seem to specify
Orchestrator	SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
App Controller	SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

Anyone else see the running theme here?
SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS seems now to be the de-facto SQL Collation for the System Center 2012 wave.

You can also expect SQL 2008 R2 to be the prefered SQL version, 2008 may be supported for some of them, but 2005 is definitely a no go.

Private Cloud, make sure you choose right!

This is brilliant Microsoft advertising.
It's good to see that Microsoft have got a sense of humour, but the points it mentions are valid.

One thing in particular did catch my attention when the IT guy asks Tad if his solution would allow him to see deep inside his apps (1:30 min though).

Rather than Tads blank expression reply...

This is where System Center comes into its own and the upcoming 2012 wave will just blow the competition out of the water.

Imagine having your data centre built as a private cloud infrastructure using System Center as the pivotal part of the solution. When the IT guy then asks if the solution would allow him to find out performance problems, bottle necks and root causes the reply would be a resounding YES!

Virtual Machine Manager handles the virtualisation management piece of the solution, providing management of the "cloud" and dynamically assigning resources where and when required to ensure optimum performance. However, with Operations Manager sat within the environment gathering events and metrics constantly it would alert IT staff to potential problems, automatically raising Incidents directly within Service Manager. The necessary and relevant information is immediately at hand for the engineer to work on resolving the incident, coupled with Operation Managers ability to deeply dive into .Net applications to such a level as to even show which line of code is at fault
Once the root cause is identified using the information surfaced through Operation Manager (Events & Performance) and Service Manager (Configuration & Changes), then, if for example an update was required, the necessary Change Control would be raised in Service Manager to apply the update and once approved Orchestrator could pick up the change. Orchestrator could proceed to automate the remediation by talking across the infrastructure management products to take a backup of the system using Data Protection Manager, put the system into maintenance mode to suppress alerts in Operation Manager then create the necessary tasks with Configuration Manager to deploy the update to the system and finally check the success and report this information back into Service Manager for later review and analysis. 

Once service is restored and operating normally, it may be deemed that either during a known busy period or to support an advertising campaign for example, that the corporate web site will need extra resources to cope with demand.  A Change Request is raised within Service Manager and once approved Orchestrator can take on the responsibility of setting the wheels in motion for adding those resources for example by instructing Virtual Machine Manager to provision a new Virtual Server, Configuration Manager to deploy a new Operating System and any required software along with updates, settings and configuration.  Orchestrator would enable the bringing online of a new web server and adding it into a web farm as extra resources with little to no interaction of highly skilled technical resources.

This is all so easily possible due to the tight integration that is now present within the System Center product suite and is only going to continue to grow stronger with this next 2012 wave and beyond.
The tight integration allows for data about the infrastructure to flow across products, negating the need for duplication of effort or manual input.
The end net result is a very dynamic, private cloud infrastructure and much more efficient service delivery model.

This has several other benefits such as:

• End users of the service gain improvements around time taken to respond to requests
• Total Cost of Ownership is lower to support and maintain the environment
• IT staff have more time to be proactive rather than constantly being reactive
• High control of the environment can be achieved, helping with compliance (PCI, CoCo, Sarbanes Oxley)
• Conversion of processes to automation helps with both workload reduction and better auditing of changes to the environment
• Paves the way for Platform as a Service (PaaS)

One key thing to note, while I’ve mentioned various Microsoft products such as Data Protection Manager as the backup tool and Hyper-V as the virtual hypervisor, this doesn’t have to be the case

Microsoft have done a real good job of “growing up” these last couple of years and have finally embraced the fact that data centres are heterogeneous environments. So while I’ve mentioned the best products (sorry, couldn’t resist) you can still use the System Center tools like Virtual Machine manager to manage your VMWare or Citrix hypervisors and Operations Manager to monitor your Solaris and Unix servers while Orchestrator can use integration packs to work with other vendor systems such as BMC Remedey and HP Openview etc

Why is this worth mentioning? Because it means that to implement a private cloud and reap the benefits doesn’t require a complete rip and replace of your current infrastructure and the costs associated. You can introduce the tools, methodologies and principals behind the cloud now as you plan towards full implementation (Based on Hyper-V et al of course!)

Finally, as we start to move towards the release of the System Center 2012 wave of products, the dedication Microsoft has towards enabling businesses to implement private clouds and also link them with public clouds is very evident with new product features such as Virtual Machine Manager 2012's ability to provision storage and networking elements, Operation Manager 2012's increased Networking & Application Monitoring along with more Azure integration, Configuration Manager 2012's more user centric approach and it's support of "IT Consumerisation" and Service Manager 2012's expansion of ITIL/MOF process support with Service Requests and the further integration with Orchestrator to help with automation of processes all show Microsoft is serious about making this all a reality, and achievable for all, not just the biggest companies around with the most cash as these solutions scale both up and down.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/private-cloud/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/default.aspx

Footnote:
This is only scratching the surface of what the System Center products can do, areas like reporting, SLA management, patching, baselines, tuning etc etc would make this post just too long to read.