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

Operations Manager (SCOM) 2012 Upgrade Planning

Since many organisations with SCOM 2007 will already be thinking about the upgrade to 2012 when it's released, now is a good enough time as any to start planning the migration.

To help with the migration, Microsoft have recently released some process flow diagrams to help with the migration.

These can be found here and do a really good job with laying out the processes that need to be thought about and should hopefully help with a smooth migration as they're very comprehensive.

Orchestrator Runbook Design, Planning and Validation

Anders Bengtsson has done it again and written another stunning blog post about validating your runbook designs.

This ties in nicely with a discussion that I was having with a customer yesterday where I was stealing a comment made at the Best of MMS 2011 UK event where Adam Hall (I'm sure it was Adam, if not I apologise to whoever it was) coined a phrase about a day of design roughly equates to an hour in the runbook designer.

The point I was trying to get across to the customer is that while setting up SCORCH (or to some extent Opalis) is relatively simple and you can dive into the console and knock up runbooks very quickly too, it's very important to take that step back, map out your process first fully, exploring all angles, then create the runbook from this plan, and then like Anders says, build it out with resilience, checking and logging.

Back to the initial point...

Anders now has a trilogy of posts that I would really recommend reading, even if you feel really confident creating runbooks, I'd bet you don't use half the methods fully like Anders recommends.

Post 1: Fault Tolerance in Runbooks
Post 2: Building a log for Runbooks
Post 3: Validate your Runbook Design (He also includes a runbook which automates some checking!)

Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) Guide for Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010

I posted about this when it was in Beta a while ago:
http://systemscentre.blogspot.com/2010/10/ipd-guide-microsoft-system-center.html

I forgot to repost when it was released!

As I said last post on this I've personally used a few of the IPD guides now and have found them extremely useful, if for nothing else they give a great start to any documentation that you might need to support a business case to implement a technology in a smart and presentable fashion that senior management will be impressed by.

SCSM IPD Site can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff946088.aspx

Download link here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=197499

From the IPD site:
The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) Guide for Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010 takes the IT architect through an easy-to-follow process for successfully designing the servers and components for a System Center Service Manager 2010 implementation, resulting in a design that is sized, configured, and appropriately placed to deliver the stated business benefits, while also considering the performance, capacity, and fault tolerance of the system.
The guide covers these key steps in the System Center Service Manager 2010 infrastructure design process:

• Defining the project scope by identifying the necessary System Center Service Manager 2010 features, the requirements of the process management packs, and the targeted population of the organization.
• Mapping the selected features and scope to determine the required server roles.
• Designing the fault tolerance, configuration, and placement of the management servers, portals, and supporting SQL Server databases.

The IPD Guide for Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010 can help you reduce planning time and costs, and ensure a successful rollout of System Center Service Manager 2010—helping your organization to more quickly benefit from this platform for automating and adapting IT Service Management best practices such as those found in Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

IPD Guide - Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010 (SCSM)

I'm back from sunny Florida and thought I'd reopen the blog with this post:

A new Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide has just been released as an open Beta for Microsoft System Center Service Manager 2010.
https://connect.microsoft.com/content/content.aspx?ContentID=6556&SiteID=14

I've personally used a few of the IPD guides now and have found them extremely useful, if for nothing else they give a great start to any documentation that you might need to support a business case to implement a technology in a smart and presentable fashion that senior management will be impressed by.
 
Blurb taken from the connect site:

 

This IPD guide takes the IT architect through an easy-to-follow process for successfully designing the servers and components for a System Center Service Manager implementation, resulting in a design that is sized, configured, and appropriately placed to deliver the stated business benefits, while also considering the performance, capacity, and fault tolerance of the system.
The guide covers these key steps in the System Center Service Manager infrastructure design process:

• Defining the project scope by identifying the necessary System Center Service Manager features, the requirements of the process management packs, and the targeted population of the organization.
• Mapping the selected features and scope to determine the required server roles.
• Designing the fault tolerance, configuration, and placement of the management servers, portals, and supporting SQL Server databases.

The IPD Guide for System Center Service Manager 2010 can help you reduce planning time and costs, and ensure a successful rollout of System Center Service Manager—helping your organization to more quickly benefit from this platform for automating and adapting IT Service Management best practices such as those found in Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).