From the Anderson's Web blog: Ok, I wanted my first blog to be about something fun. And, since I have to do a blog on licensing SMS (bluck!) I wanted to do this one first.
IT Forum this year was an INCREDIBLE event. It has really become MMS Europe for the past two years. Last year we launched SMS 2003 there (took a bus decorated in SMS logo's and put it in front of the Tivoli Garden sign!), and this year we launched MOM 2005 and Virtual Server (took a bus deco'd in MOM log's and put it in front of the Tivoli Garden sign!). If you'd like to see the whole keynote, take a look at www.microsoft.com/management (http://www.microsoft.com/management) -- and you can watch Bill^2 (me and Mr. Gates!) for 70 mins. But, what I wanted to talk about was what you COULDN'T see on the webcast -- the actual demo's we did, and the technologies.
First demo was a MOM 2005 demo with some Virtual Server as well. After parading through the MOM UI to show the new views (and the killer Dell blade they gave us - Assembly line #000001!) we showed how to use the task panel in MOM to kickoff a series of ADS and VS scripts to do a physical to virtual migration. Yes - the same demo we did at MMS this year! So, if you remember my demo from there, you now know what you missed. It is NOT the VSMT work that we just released - just some scripts from MOM to ADS. Would be good for us to do the full VSMT set of 6-7 scriptable actions for a complete story.
Demo 2 was all about OS Deployment. We did an end-user self-provisioning demo that was really a combination of SMS OSD FP along with the Biz Desktop Deployment (BDD) Sol'ns Accelerator, and the Zero Touch Provisioning work. Wow - lots of acronyms! What that REALLY meant was that we use MS technologies like Exchange, SharePoint, BizTalk, MOM, and SMS together - to really unify the provisioning experience. So I go to a sharepoint site where I have a list of services to draw from - including software to install, a plug-in to a help desk, a new desktop OS, etc. These are all Web parts to plug business logic into. So, with ZTP and BDD, you can be as simple or complex as you want to - from me just installing my desktop, to a detailed workflow with dept'al approvals, and near real-time alerting if a few of your thousand PCs have failed their install so you can solve before users come in the next day. For us, it was simple - just e-mail as a notification engine, and an auto approval from BizTalk on the backend.
How did we get it to fit in a demo time window? User targeted so eval'd more quickly, and were scripting to ping client REPEATEDLY so it kept checking over and over for new policy. From the time of submission until the SMS agent indicated there was software was about 45 seconds. NOTE - not recommended for production deployment!
But, the HIT of the demo agenda was the "Wall of Fire." A hundred PCs all in a scaffolding, a combo of 2k/XP SP1 with some state/data, that we used osdeploy.exe to backup state, flatten, and reimage as XP SP2. It was pretty cool (and yes - it worked!!) Took us about seven minutes from remote execution to completion. Yes - OS deployment times are FAR more gated on networking and binary space than they are on an execution tool, so these were pretty stripped down images with very little state/data to migrate to get the process to fit into a time window, but the rest was all about OS Deployment. Gates introduced me by saying this was the "neatest" demo he had ever seen in the mgmt space. It was pretty cool, and YES - it worked!! :-) How did we get it to all kick-off at once? Osdeploy.exe was executing, waiting for a custom action. We created a simple script to create "the action."
We wrapped up with some sample reports we hope to deliver in System Center Reporting Server such as some integrated change tracking and perf reports, as well as showed some more things we'll be doing in capacity planning around our Indy project. The ability to not only take a proposed capacity workload and model it, but to model the changes ongoing (new hardware, new workload, etc) is a VERY powerful tool.
But, was pretty cool to see Bill Gates spend that amount of time on mgmt, and even COOLER for me to still be employed afterwards!! :-)
Bill Anderson
Group Product Manager
Windows and Enterprise Mgmt Division