What is SC Orchestrator 2012? It's the new name for Opalis. What's Opalis you ask? It's a Microsoft acquisition made about 1.5 years ago to automate IT processes. Opalis brings integration, orchestration and automation to your IT silos (network, server, storage, security, service desk, etc.). It works with a huge variety of...
This session was also very good, but a higher level session that didn't discuss any particular technical solutions. In fact the speaker said he's solution agnostic, as any given company has many scenarios and there's no one size fits all solution. The speaker is a Microsoft strategist, who talks to...
Batting 100% today for killer sessions. This session was on SCCM 2012, which like VMM 2012, has undergone radical changes for the better. The speaker went over several demos and there was a ton of content, so I didn't catch everything. Plus, honestly, I've never been a big SCCM guy...
Wow! This was a really killer session on System Center VMM 2012. Frankly, since the shop I work in is 100% VMware for virtualization, I haven't seriously looked at VMM before. Yes I knew it could interface with VMware, but eh, I just didn't see much value in yet another product...
If you are a SCOM user, you will have noticed that MS has been pretty mum about SCOM 2012. Last year at TechEd 2010 MS had sessions on configuration manager v.Next, but not a single one on SCOM v.Next. Well this year they finally have some SCOM 2012 sessions. First...
You know, sometimes Microsoft drops the ball on some TechEd sessions. WCL324 is one that the ball got dropped on. While the presented content was useful, it in no way reflected the course title or description and to make it worse, only took 25 of the 75 minutes. So disregarding...
This was a great session covering Systems Center Configuration Manager 2012 and ForeFront EndPoint Protection (FEP) 2012, which are both in the beta phases. Both products have undergone major changes from their previous releases. The major highlights of this session are: The products now integrate management, security, and compliance into...
So this week I'm at once again making the trek to Microsoft TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, so I'll be posting lots of session summaries and information that I want to pass along. First up is an all day pre-conference session by Jeremy Moskowitz on Group Policy. Here are some of...
In XenDesktop 5.0 you can configure HDX policies to block or allow certain types of USB devices. For example, you could block flash drives but allow USB printers or webcams. Unfortunately, Citrix doesn't give you an easy to to discover class IDs, vendor IDs, or other identifiers that can be...
Lately I've been working on a XenDesktop 5.0 Proof of Concept with Windows 7, and I wanted to make sure Windows 7 and Office 2010 were activated immediately when a VDI VM booted up. Normally after some period of time Windows 7 and Office 2010 will activate themselves, but this...
A few months ago I posted the parts list for sub-$1000 ESX server. At that time Intel had not released their Sandy Bridge CPUs or chipset. Now that manufacturers are shipping chipsets without the SATA bugs, I thought I'd post an updated list of components for a screaming home ESX...
Protecting privileged passwords is always extremely important, and you may think just because you use a very long password that is highly complex that it may take a hacker days, weeks, or even years to break into your system. Or you may also think that giving regular users local admin rights...