Category Archives: Business Continuity
Snow and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services
Recently I have become amazed at the amount of organisations who do not have the fundamental infrastructure in place for supporting remote working. I wouldn’t want to quantify the cost for an organisation in lost labour as staff sit in traffic going nowhere, take time off for childcare needs as schools close or worse still end up dealing with an insurance claim because of a traffic accident in icy conditions. Wouldn’t you rather have employees being more productive and safer working from with full application and data access? Well the variety of options on offer from Microsoft are amazing, direct access being one solution I just could not live without. However what about the more traditional thin client access many organisations have deployed and upgraded over time?
Well interestingly I have seen a shift in the market place with the introduction of Microsoft Remote Desktop Services(RDS). Those organisations smart enough to stop and take stock of the next impending 3rd party renewal or thin client infrastructure refresh have seen that RDS is now very feature rich and capable of delivering what customers need from a traditional thin client solution. Matt McSpirit summarised it very well when he commented that you could not have imagined video content could be streamed with the Microsoft solution 18 months ago…. So the revolution is on now, organisations save money by deploying RDS and allocate it into more value add services which can only be a win win situation!!!! By the way unfortunately I don’t look out onto this tree from my home office, my view isn’t as nice but just as snowy….
System Center Operations Manager Overview
System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is the end-to-end service-management product that is the best choice for Windows because it works seamlessly with Microsoft software and applications, helping organisations increase efficiency while enabling greater control of the IT environment. With the release of this product the concept of “Management packs” introduced a greater level of control, reporting and standardisation.
Management packs contain an application’s health definition as defined by application product developers. When imported into Operations Manager, they enable the agent to monitor the health of an application, generate alerts when something of significance goes wrong in the application, provide product specific reporting and take actions in the application plus supporting infrastructure to further diagnose the application or restore it to a healthy state.
Without an application, operating-system, or device-specific management pack, Operations Manager 2007 is unaware of those entities and is unable to monitor them. There is a great range of management packs now in existence from Microsoft directly which can operate with Operations Manager or the SMB alternative System Center Essentials. In addition to Microsoft released packs many industry leading third party vendors have created management packs as well. Alerts can also trigger automated tasks within the other System Center product suite e.g. a hardware power supply failure on a virtualisation server could trigger a transfer of all virtual images onto another host until the fault is resolved.
System Center Data Protection Manager Overview
System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) is the new standard for Windows backup and recovery, delivering continuous data protection for Microsoft application and file servers using seamlessly integrated disk and tape media. System Center Data Protection Manager enables rapid and reliable recovery through advanced technology for organisations of all sizes. Although utilised faithfully by IT professionals it is well documented that when it’s time to go into disaster recovery mode, the tape backup system is often one of the biggest disasters. Making use of DPM for rapid recovery from disk rather than tape not only provides a more reliable experience but also improves recovery timescales dramatically.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager Overview
Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and centrally manage physical and virtual infrastructure from one console. New to this version of VMM is multi-vendor virtualisation platform support, Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) and enhanced support of “high availability” host clusters, among other new features.
System Center Overview
When the phrase “Microsoft Management” ever got mentioned often customers associated SMS and MOM as successful standalone products with little integration or the full management suite of products needed by IT professionals. So in early in 2007 Microsoft launched a new brand, “System Center”, which covers an integrated suite of new management products. This suite comprises of the following products,
- System Center Configuration Manager
- System Center Operations Manager
- System Center Data Protection Manager
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
IT professionals now have the power to more effectively and easily manage the technology components that keep their organisations running smoothly. Microsoft System Center solutions integrate the management of all aspects of infrastructures in physical and virtual environments – across data centres, desktops and devices. More importantly with the concept of “Management Packs” System Center products can use knowledge-driven management guidance to help organisations realise the value of their investments and provide a consistent level of service.
Branch IT services
Choices, choices, choices… It must be confusing for a customer knowing how best to provide IT services for a branch location. Certainly local IT staff and service providers will be keen on having all the bells and whistles locally installed in the branch location. However is that the best approach for an organisation? With a mass of marketing campaigns around cloud, optimisation and deal of the century circuit upgrades for the WAN it is no wonder that confusion exists. Ultimately the best approach is consolidation and standardisation back in the HQ without impacting the service provision at the branch. Technologies do exist which can deliver reductions in IT services costs, resolve issues more quickly, and improve the productivity of employees in branch sites by centrally managing IT infrastructure. If customers can afford WAN upgrades who would object about more bandwidth but there are also technologies which can offset future spending on upgrades and improve network application responsiveness through more effective bandwidth optimisation. Finally in the current climate advising a customer you can reduce costs on physical hardware at the branch as well via virtualisation and appliances is a powerful message.
Microsoft have been involved in the development of branch appliance solutions with both Citrix and Cisco. Riverbed also provide a solution as well for optimising the WAN and also delivering local IT services. Ultimately they all provide a hardware appliance at the branch and an appliance in the HQ. Between them they optimise the network traffic going across the link utilising a variety of well documented techniques. One of the most interesting aspects is the branch appliance can host local IT services in the same hardware. This allows the delivery of all the necessary IT services which should be served locally in the branch, examples being DHCP, DNS, AD, file and print services. I know this is a simplistic overview of the technologies involved but the amount of customers I visit with complex branch IT deployments is amazing!!!
What does a Microsoft datacentre look like?
Ever wondered how Microsoft provide services such as BPOS? Old video but still a good one. I can imagine someone in sales did a good deal well selling this amount of servers!!!
Building a datacentre
Had a great opportunity today for a discussion regarding datacentre construction. Joking aside this video shows how simple a datacentre build can be but location in my mind is the critical issue.
