Welcome to Microsoft Mechanics.
Coming up, were going to take a look at what's new with Systems Center 2016
including the latest support for Windows Server 2016.
with updates for Shielded VM's
and Nano Server.
We're also going to build Hyper Converged Storage Clusters
using new Storage Spaces Direct technology.
We're going tune alerts
and also discover Management Packs more easily with Operations Manager
And, we'll see what's coming for Hybrid Management across your data center
and the cloud
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined today by our lead Program Manager
for Systems Center
Kiran, welcome.
Good to be here.
We've done a lot in terms of System Center 2016 with some new updates
for TP5
but, what's new with this release?
So, for those not familiar with System Center
there are multiple components
that allow you to manage every aspect of your application
and infrastructure.
Whether running in a virtual environment
or a physical environment.
Ultimately, the focus of System Center
is to service the needs of the data center.
And, we're driving innovations
to simplify management of every aspect
of your life cycle.
Whether it is monitoring your applications
monitoring your data center
or whether it is managing a server of client configurations.
Or, whether it is managing your virtual infrastructure.
So you said virtual infrastructure
I know the Windows Server 2016
you've done lots of updates there
for virtual machines
mainly Shielded VM's
a new security technology, to really make sure that
people who should have access
have access to those virtual machines.
And, also Nano server
which also gives you a smaller footprint build
of Windows Server and also fewer patches.
What are we doing around those new virtualization technologies?
So with Virtual Machine Manager 2016
we made it easy to manage all of your infrastructure fabric
and your virtual machines, all in one place.
Case in point, the Shielded VM's
where we made it so that it's just part of your workflow
and easy to manage through the Virtual Machine Manager visit.
You try to make it as easy as possible
So, I'm actually going to show a demo of what this looks like.
So, here I've got System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
I've got a couple of hosts already configured here
and I'm going to go ahead and click on the properties of these hosts.
What I going to see is
the Host Guardian Service is turned on.
This is part of getting Shielded VM's to work.
The host has to have that service configured and enrolled in.
Now I'm going to go ahead and load some demo Shielded VM templates.
I'm going to create a virtual machine.
I'm going to go through the normal steps
with System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
And, here I've got my Shielded VM Template we saw earlier.
I'm going to give it a name.
DemoVM2
Hit Next, and go through the standard process.
Hit Next on the hardware configuration.
And then, we're gonna look at our shielded data.
So our shielded data file is something that permits us
as an IT Department to own
who's going to be able to access that VHD file.
Not the operator of the fabric, for example.
I'm going to go ahead and choose the destination default.
Now I can look at my host themselves.
Here I've got a host rating
to make sure that Host Guardian Service has been configured
and enrolled, and everything's working.
And, I can click Next.
Everything meets the requirements I need.
Then, I'm going to review what's going to set up.
Look at the networking.
Look at my final properties.
And there is my final summary.
Now I'm ready to create that Shielded VM.
I'm going to go ahead and hit Create, here.
And that's going to take a couple of moments
and build that VM.
So, the key point to add here is that
all of this is automated and managed through Virtual Machine Manager.
Now, once a VM is created
lets take a look at what can be done.
Right, so now I've got my Shielded VM
DemoVM2
as we saw earlier created.
I'm going to go ahead and have a look at what that is.
What I'm going to do here is try to mount that VHD file
just to show you what the shielding actually does for me.
So, I'm going into Hardware Configuration
just so I can
grab the path to where that actual vhd.exe file is stored.
So, were going to go ahead and copy that here, from our
UNC path on the host server.
Copy that.
Now cancel out of that dialogue and open up Disk Management.
I could use disparate.exe if I wanted to do it.
And that's on the host on which the VM was provisioned?
And now were going to just attach the VHD
as we normally can do to mount that VHD
And now you can see with the Shielded VM
it's BitLocker Encrypted.
So, normally a vhd.exe file
or VHD, I would be able to attached and actually see what's inside of it.
But, here I can't.
If I even go to open it
just with the open command, it will say that
E :\ is not available.
If I open a command prompt
and try to do a directory of E:\
that's not going to be able to show me that.
So, here I've got everything encrypted and Shielded.
What's happened is
even if I get access to that vhd.exe file
There's no way to look at it
and VMM did all the work
to do the shielding
and provisioned the Host Guardian Service and everything in the background for me.
We did everything for you
to create and manage those shielded VM's.
Really exciting stuff.
But, I know you've done a lot more for virtualization
so why don't you go through the rest of what you can do
in VMM.
With VMM 2016
we will be adding capabilities to provision complex environments
with multi machine deployments.
We're also adding capabilities to simplify
your networking and reduce dependency
on physical networking infrastructure
through software-defined networking.
We are allowing you to deploy and update your Windows
without any downtime through rolling cluster upgrades.
And, we've also added the capability to support
the hyper converge deployment architecture
that is being introduced in Windows Service 2016.
Now, if you aren't familiar with hyper converge clusters
what that basically does is it takes all of your disk.
Whether they are solid state drives
hard disk
and it will actually put them into one storage pool.
So, you can use them either as clustered storage
or as a file server, for example.
That's correct
Let's take a look at what happens under the covers.
So, here we have a few hosts.
each with some local disks and local SSD's in them.
Now using Spaces Direct technology
What I'll do is create a storage pool
Which is a large, giant pool that can be accessed by VM's
or, by another cluster.
And, you can have different performance characteristics from those virtual disks, right?
That's correct.
So, you can carve out virtual disks from these pools
each with different performance characteristics.
Availability characteristics.
And, reliability characteristics.
Nearing all of that, right?
Absolutely.
Then, you can make them accessible from any host in the cluster
by using cluster shared volumes
and then, either have your virtual machines access that storage directly
or exported as a file
so other clusters can access that storage.
This is really incredible work
because I've been a lot of time in the last several years
doing server and client deployment automation.
And really, you've got it down to one checkbox
to get all of this working.
Let me show you how easy it is
to create this hyper converge cluster.
So, here I've got 4 hosts
and these 4 hosts have 25 storage disks a piece.
I want to be able to converge
all of their disks together, in one hyper converged cluster.
I'm going to go ahead and click Create.
Go into the hyper-v cluster options there.
I'm going to give it a name
DemoCluster
This checkbox here is really important.
This is the thing that is going to tell it to do all the automation
to build this hybrid converge cluster out.
I'm going to click Next.
I going to browse for the account I want to run in
as admin.
I'm going to select all the hosts I want.
In this case, I'll just do a Select all.
I'll click Next.
No IP addresses to configure
and click Finish.
And, it was as easy as that
If I think back to all those years
I spent building client deployment and server deployment task sequences
literally that checkbox
did all of that work for me
and VM's doing everything under the covers.
Absolutely.
So when you hit finish
it will take a few minutes to configure that cluster
but, once it's done
you'll have a pool of storage ready to use.
Now when you go to the job status
it will show you the details of what it exactly did.
So, let's take a look.
Alright, so I'm here back a few moments later.
Everything has been built.
I can see all the different steps that it's done
in terms of preparing the nodes
looking and preparing and deduping all my storage.
All these different things done as part of that automation.
So, really really powerful stuff that you've built in through VMM
but it gets even better than that
because, now that I have some virtual machines and some hosts
I've got a larger data center.
I need to be able to monitor what's going on.
One of the worst things for me
is really dealing with the noise
and making sure that I have the right tools in place
to monitor the right things.
So, you've done some work to actually make Management Packs
the thing that we use to scope those alerts and what's coming to us.
make those more discoverable with OPS manager, right?
That's correct.
In terms of monitoring their data center
What we've done is added capabilities
to monitor things like Nano servers
to alert lifecycle management
in terms of tuning your alerts
or even discovering Management Packs.
Updating them, and in some cases even allowing you to roll them back.
So, let's take a look at how we can discover the Management Packs.
Okay.
So, what we have here is the SCOM 2016 console.
And, under the administration option
we have something known as updates and recommendations.
What this does
is it gets all of the workloads that are under management by SCOM
and tells me whether the Management Pack itself is not installed
partially installed
or has an update available.
let's take a look at one of these workloads.
Now when I look at Active Directory Federation services
I can go on more information and it tells me
the server that is running that workload.
I can click on Get MP.
and it connects to the Download Center
and gives me the Management Pack required to monitor that workload.
So, I can click on that and simply install it.
That spares you the trip to have to go into the browser
and grab the Management Pack from the Download Center
and load it yourself. Exactly.
Similarly, I can see that certain workloads have
the Management Pack installed
but have an update available.
In this situation or this scenario
I have the Office SharePoint Foundation 2010
which has a management pack installed.
But, it has an update available.
So, when I click on more information
it gives me the version of the Mangement Pack installed
as well as the newly available version.
And then, what I can do
again is go to the Get MP option
and download the Management Pack from the download center itself.
Again, you can see that
direct link to the Download Center.
Whether you have to fix a partially installed case
something that's not installed
or, in this case
you want to update to the latest and greatest management pack.
This will take you right to that spot in Download Center
without even making you go to a browser.
That's correct.
So, beyond all of that.
Now that we have the ability to kind of tune and scope the alerts
to in this case our SharePoint form maybe.
We're doing a lot in terms of alert tuning
because the worst thing is if I've got thousands
or tens of thousands
or hundred thousands of servers running.
Is this getting alerts flying from all of them?
I only really want to know what's important?
What's gonna break something?
Have you done something there to make Alert Tuning better?
Absolutely, and as you rightly point out
that's been a big question from customers.
Let's take a look at what we've done here.
Again, we're on the SCOM 2016 Console
We've added an option called Tune Management Packs.
And here, what we have is all the management packs
that are under management by SCOM.
What we can do is identify the management packs we want to tune
and filter by date and time
as well as a threshold in terms of the alerts that are generated.
What this does, is it gives me all the management packs
as well as the alert count that meet the criteria.
Now, this is a demo environment
so there are very few alerts that are generated.
I can click on Tune Alerts.
What that does, is it goes into a drill down
of all the alert that were generated by the Management Pack
based on the rules or monitors that are set up in SCOM.
Now I can select
a specific alert.
I can click on View or Override Sources
which gives me a list of all the servers
that generated those alerts.
And, I can click on that and either disable
the alert or set an override
such that either the alert is not generated or it is suppressed.
So, what that does
is it allows me to control the numbers of alerts generated.
Similarly, I can click on override
the rules themselves, by object
by group, by specific object of the class
or by objects of another class
to give me a level of granularity
by which those alerts can be disabled or overwritten.
So, based on this what users will get
is the ability to manage the number of alerts that are generated
thereby helping them focus only on the most important alerts.
Really good stuff.
So, beyond all this
a lot of people are moving some of
maybe some are moving faster than others
to cloud workloads.
How do I manage what's in my local data center
Through OPS Manager.
Maybe when I'm using Operations Management Suite for my Cloud services
in one place.
Are we doing something their?
Absolutely.
So, if you're not familiar
Operations Management Suite is a cloud based service
that allows you to run IT Operations Management
for all your workloads.
Whether its running in the cloud or whether it's running on-Prem.
What we have today is an integration between SCOM and OMS
or Operations Management Suite.
Which allows SCOM alerts to be piped up to OMS
Where you can run analytics
and gain insights on the alerts themselves.
Let's take a look.
Here we are back in the SCOM console.
where we have the Operations Management Suite option.
We can click on Add Computer Group
and Add SCOM Managed Servers
to Operations Management Suite.
Then, I can go to the browser
go to alert manager on OMS.
and see that those servers appear on the list.
I can click on the server
and get the details of all the alerts generated by the server.
As simple as that.
Really cool to see.
So, all those views that you have
all the graphics, all the elements that we have through OMS
making that a really great experience
in terms of monitoring my data center.
I can not only look at what's running maybe in Azure
but, I can also see what's running
through the things that are being managed
and monitored by OPS Manager On-Premises.
Really good work.
But, beyond all of this.
What you guys doing in terms of future direction?
So let me first emphasize that System Center
is a fundamental part of Microsoft's Management Strategy.
In addition, we are looking to extend System Center via OMS
to provide more hybrid management capabilities
in the cloud.
In addition, we continue to support updates
and add innovation in terms of supporting Windows
Linux, Virtualization, as well as applications.
This is really great stuff.
So Kiran, if I wanted to get started with System Center 2016
where do I go?
So, System Center is in Technical Preview today.
You can download the bits and take it out for a spin now.
So, this is just a scratching of the surface when you think about it
with Systems Center OPS manager
and Virtual Machine Manager
but, there are a lot of other components
within System Center 2016.
That's about all the time we have for today's show.
Of course you can stay up to date with the latest updates
from Microsoft and Microsoft Mechanics.
Watch Wednesday's or as news breaks.
Thanks for watching and goodbye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics