Archives for: November 2009

 
In the first week of September the ConfigMgr product team announced ConfigMgr R3. This release is delivered to introduce some new features which are also covered in the next version of ConfigMgr which is planned for the year 2011.

In this post I will discuss ConfigMgr R3 in more detail. One of the first announced new features is Power Management.

Power Management
Global warming and CO2 emissions are hot topics nowadays. Based on Gartner research; desktops and monitors take account for at least 39% of these emissions. Green IT features like Power Management with ConfigMgr R3 can reduce those numbers extremely.

Of course we do need those desktops, but only during business hours. What you see is that most users leave their computer and monitor powered on when they leave for home.

So besides emissions, companies can also save money with Power Management. Based on the Microsoft Desktop Energy Savings Calculator a company with about 5000 PC’s can save 4.3 million kW/h, 3334 tons of CO2 emission and about $420,311 per year.

With a new client agent that ConfigMgr R3 delivers we can create and set policies based on the sleep and standby modes. This gives the administrator the ability to configure peak and non-peak schedules, the ability to remediate settings when they have changed. These policies can be configured for each collection.

The first step in working with these policies is to collect the current peak and non-peak hours. A common scenario is that you see a peak during the morning around 8:30 AM, a non-peak during lunch break 12:00PM and finally much less or no activity at all after 7:00PM. The Client Agent can collect all this data which can be presented through a couple of new reports.

With this scenario you can create a policy that, for example puts desktops for example into sleep or standby modes from 7:00PM till 8:00AM.

By default ConfigMgr R3 will also deliver reports so you can report on:

Current Power Settings for a machine or group of machines
Usage statistics like AC, DC, full power, sleep and standby modes
Power savings per kWh and costs
CO2 emission savings

Performance improvements
ConfigMgr administrators sometimes face distribution challenges in specific scenarios. Scenarios like when a user changes from Active Directory OU and does not receive software for at least one day. Or when a new employee starts it takes at least one day before the user receives the required software applications.

With a couple improvements that ConfigMgr R3 delivers these distribution challenges will be solved. The first improvement is on the collections.

With ConfigMgr R3 a collection can be marked for ‘Use fast collection evaluation’. This is a separate and much faster evaluation cycle, so resulting that newly discovered and provisioned machines will appear in a collection membership much faster. Note that the fast evaluation cycle only applies to:

Initially discovered resources
Resources provisioned through OSD
Resources that scanned for initial hardware inventory
Resources that were upgraded to a higher ConfigMgr client version

The other improvement is Delta Active Directory Discovery. This improvement will help you to deploy software based on elements in Active Directory. For example deploying software based on Active Directory groups, OU’s and so on.

Those elements are picked up by ConfigMgr with the Active Directory discovery methods. These days administrators are configuring a frequent schedule like every 2 hour to pick up changes as described above. Such schedules automatically results in a heavy load on the Active Directory Global Catalog and on your ConfigMgr site server.

When an object changes in Active Directory the USNChange attribute for that object will be updated with a higher number. The Delta Active Directory discovery will only look for those USNChange records.

This feature will be available for the User, User Group, System and System Group discovery methods. By default the Delta Active Directory discovery is not enabled. Once enabled, by default it will be set to every 5 minutes, so changes in AD are picked up every 5 minutes.

Console improvements
Besides performance improvements Microsoft also delivers a couple of console improvements.

New options for selected resource(s)
When you right-click a selected resource in ConfigMgr you will have the options Add to Collection, Remove from Collection and New Collection. ‘Add to Collection’ will add the currently selected resource(s) to an existing collection. ‘Remove from Collection’ will remove the currently selected resource(s) from the current collection.
The ‘New Collection’ option adds the currently selected resource(s) to a new collection.

New option for selected collection
When a collection is selected and you right-click that collection the administrator will have a new option named ‘Add Resources’. This option will launch a dialog box as below that enables the administrator to search for resources. Using this option will create a ‘Direct Membership Rule’ for the selected Collection.

Scalability improvements
ConfigMgr R3 will also improve the scalability of ConfigMgr. With R3, Microsoft will increase support from 200.000 clients per site to 300.000 clients when using the default settings for ConfigMgr.

Prestaged-Media
This R3 release will also improve and support pre-staged media. ConfigMgr administrators were asking for a way to integrate OEM factory imaging, mainly to reduce time with their hardware deployments.
Now with R3 you can create pre-staged media from the Task Sequence Media wizard. This wizard will create a .wim file which contains the boot media and the operating system .wim file.

Requirements
In order to install ConfigMgr R3 you need ConfigMgr 2007 with Service Pack 2. Good to know is that ConfigMgr R3 also contains all the features of ConfigMgr R2. So R2 is not a requirement and sites which are already running R2 will not be affected.

Timeframe
Currently the TAP nominations are closed. Microsoft received more than 600 nominations. So ConfigMgr R3 is already very popular!

The first beta can be expected in January 2010 and the final version (RTM) is for now scheduled for Q2 2010.

Because it is still very early in the build of this release things can always change. If that happens I will let you know!

Day 4

Yesterday was a really cool day here in Berlin. It was the first full day of TechEd with lots of sessions and activities.
In the morning I attended a session with Jeff Wettlaufer regarding ConfigMgr SP2 and R3. He was showing the new power management capabilities it delivers and also the new fast collection evaluation options. With this last features you will see that new resources will be added to a collection more quicker. Another interesting feature is Delta Active Directory discovery. You can provide an extra schedule for that so that changes on already discovered objects are much quicker detected by ConfigMgr.

R3 is very popular as we already have 604 TAP nominations at this time. I will write some additional posts regarding R3 in upcoming weeks.

In the afternoon I was ‘Ask the Expert’ (ATE) at the ConfigMgr booth. It was very busy with lots of interesting questions from attendees. I was there for 3 hours but it felt like 30 minutes because I really enjoyed discussing and sharing the same passion for ConfigMgr.

After the ATE session we went back to our apartment and eat some pizza. In the night I went with Samuel to the Community party at the Watergate Club in Berlin. I met a lot of MVPs including Torsten Meringer (ConfigMgr MVP) and we also met Daniel van Soest and Tony Krijnen. I think there were about 65 people and around 20 ‘Dutchies’! So great score for Holland there!

I finally went back around1:30PM and was really tired of this busy but really impressive day!

Day 5

I had to wake up early to attend the ConfigMgr vNext session with Bill Anderson and Jeffrey Sutherland. The session was completely full which once again shows the popularity of this product. The session discussed new features which were also discussed in the session on the MMS this year.

After that I had a lunch meeting with some other Dutch attendees and went to meet some of the ConfigMgr MVPs at the ATE booth. I will attend another session regarding ConfigMgr vNext later this day.

In the evening I have planned a ConfigMgr dinner with the guys of Microsoft Redmond and the ConfigMgr MVPs. I think we have about 11 people who will join this dinner. I’m really looking forward to it!

This morning we had the final session regarding the SvcMgr event. We had some good discussions and also discussed the roadmap of this new product with the team.

We finished up around 12PM and quickly said hello to Wally Mead because we had to go for the registration of TechEd.
So me and Maarten grabbed a taxi and went to the conference building in Berlin. Most roads were blocked because of the fall of the Berlin wall event. Today it was 20 years ago that the wall fell down.

After registration we checked out our stand and I met some other ‘Dutchies’ as well. This year there are more than 7600 attendees representing more than 104 countries. Impressive!

Also very cool, Daniel van Soest and Tony Krijnen (both Microsoft Netherlands) did a warm-up session before the keynote.

The keynote itself was held by Stephen Elop. We saw some business cases and a cool demonstration on some of the new features in Exchange 2010, Windows Server 2008 R2.

Tomorrow will be the real first day of the event with a lot of interesting sessions. I will be at the ConfigMgr booth from 3:15PM till 18:15PM....perhaps I see you there.

Day 0/1 - 2
After a very short flight I arrived yesterday with Maarten in Berlin around 10PM. We grabbed a taxi to our hotel and there we had some drinks with guys of Microsoft and other attendees. In the hotel I also met Samuel Erskine who recognized me from TechEd 2008, was nice to meet him again as well. I was pretty tired and got to bed around 2AM.

Next morning we had a great breakfast and at 9AM the Service Manager (SvcMgr) event started. Nigel Cain and Travis Wright of Microsoft were presenting and gave some cool demonstrations as well. The first day of this event was focusing on how to extend Service Manager.

SvcMgr works with Management Packs, pretty much similar as the packs we know of Operations Manager. This gives you the flexibility of modifying about everything in SvcMgr. An example is that you can create your own forms and templates as well. Unfortunately I can’t go in any detail because of the NDA.

We had a great lunch in the hotel and had some more sessions later that day. I also met Panu Saukko (other ConfigMgr MVP). With him and Travis I worked closer on the ConfigMgr integration.

We planned a dinner that night with another colleague. It was Saturday night, first time in Berlin and a pretty busy schedule coming up so this was the time to have some fun as well! With Maarten and four other attendees we went to club Felix. Very nice club, with good music so great fun.

Day 2
After only a couple of hours of sleep the second day of the SvcMgr event started. This day we discuss some more features of SvcMgr, like the integration with ConfigMgr. As of today most is still NDA so no blogging for now unfortunately, but I promise you that as soon as I’m allowed to, I will write some posts about this integration.

Rest of the day we will dive deeper in SvcMgr and tonight we have a dinner with the SvcMgr product team and the TAP members.

I’ll keep you posted…have fun!

I just finished packing my bag for my flight to Berlin (Germany). Upcoming week TechEd will be kept there this year.

Before TechEd, so this weekend there is also a Service Manager TAP event which I will attend with Maarten Goet. For our TAP I tested the integration with ConfigMgr which is pretty cool I must say.

My guess is that TechEd will be great this year. But it will be a lot colder than Barcelona, 17 degrees right now and in Berlin only 6. Altough we face an economic crisis, TechEd is completely sold out which I think says a lot about the popularity of this Microsoft event.

Besides the event there are also country and community parties and I have some dinners with partners and Microsoft.
So pretty busy schedule and I hope to find some time to post here about what is going on in Berlin.

I will attend as Ask the Expert for ConfigMgr this year. So I hope to see you all at the ConfigMgr booth and I'll keep you posted!