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Microsoft System Center

SAP, Microsoft Team Up To Make App Development And Cloud Management Easier

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Expanding their long-term partnership with a joint base of thousands of customers, SAP and Microsoft today announced their plans to improve integration between SAP software and Microsoft virtualization and cloud computing technologies.

These plans include innovations to people-centric applications development for SAP software as well as virtualization and cloud computing without disruption of customer IT landscapes.

The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 15-18, 2011.

The parties plan to make business processes from SAP software more easily consumed and extended by .NET developers, simplifying the overall application development process. This level of access will help redefine the SAP/Microsoft developer landscape with shorter development cycles, lower costs and openness into core applications.

Microsoft and SAP are also planning to provide integration between upcoming landscape management software from SAP, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V technology, bringing greater agility for cloud management and deployments.

Target: We Run Applications For Our 1,755 Stores On Microsoft Virtualization Technologies

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Microsoft and Target have announced that the latter is running business-critical workloads for all its retail stores on 15,000 virtual machines using Microsoft virtualization and management technologies.

The second-largest discount retailer in the US, Target has virtualized inventory, point-of-sale, supply-chain management, asset protection, in-store digital media and more on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center.

Earlier this year, Target scaled its deployment of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to every US store in its chain.

Applications, ranging from Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1, SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 to third-party, line-of-business software, can now be deployed and managed more quickly, with 8,650 fewer physical servers to maintain, power and refresh.

The retail giant has also implemented the Microsoft System Center management platform to manage and patch more than 300,000 endpoints, ranging from servers and PCs to mobile inventory devices and point-of-sale registers.

Microsoft System Center Service Manager Beta 1 Made Available

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From the Microsoft System Center team blog comes the news that Microsoft System Center Service Manager Beta 1 is now available.

I’m pleased to announce that the new beta of System Center Service Manger is now available. This beta includes the updated infrastructure components that will both deliver the performance we are targeting for the release and support our objective of delivering an IT service desk that is tightly integrated with the rest of the System Center product family.

How to Get the Bits: You can access the beta on Microsoft Connect, where you will first need to fill out a nomination survey. Once you’ve completed the survey, you will see the Service Manager beta connections page, which provides links and instructions for downloading.

As a reminder the objectives of Service Manager are to deliver an IT service desk that provides:

  • Built in service management best practices
  • Simple customization and extensibility
  • Common platform and workflows across System Center

You can download a whitepaper outlining the vision for Service Manager here.

Key capabilities available for testing in this beta release include:

  • Administrative tasks such creating users and groups
  • Change management activities such as creating and monitoring the progress of requests
  • Creating and viewing configuration items (CIs)
  • Editing incident notification templates or workflows
  • Create incidents and editing the incident (and problem) workflow
  • Integration with System Center Configuration Manager

We’re excited to make this beta available publically and will be delivering a second beta in the middle of 2009. Until then I hope you enjoy this important step on the journey to expand the System Center family to include a strong Service Desk capability

Visit the Connect site to download and start trying out Service Manager today.

Microsoft To Release System Center VMM 2008 Soon

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Diane Prescott, Product Manager, System Center at Microsoft posted an article on the official SC blog today sharing that the launch of the next version of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) is imminent, specifically in Q4 2008. The beta was formally introduced by the company end of April 2008.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 will be available as a stand-alone product, while the current version only comes bundled with Server Management Suite Enterprise. Prescott also said something about the pricing structure:

“[SCVMM 2008] will follow the licensing model set forward by the SMSE. It will be sold as a per-device enterprise server management license (ML) and will include rights to the management server. Because we’ll be selling the VMM 2008 enterprise server ML on a per-device basis, which makes sense in the context of virtualization, we’ll be targeting a price which will be approximately 10-15% less than the SMSE at that time it’s generally available. Additionally, because of the new value and functionality being added to the various System Center offerings over the next year, including VMM, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager, we will be implementing a price increase to the SMSE of approximately 10-15% in the same time frame. We’re still working on the specifics regarding the pricing and licensing of VMM 2008 and the SMSE and we’ll have further details to share in early August.”

Next to support for Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008 will also offer management capabilities for VMware ESX environments, allbeit through VirtualCenter.

Microsoft

VDIworks Brings Desktop Virtualization Management to Hyper-V

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VDIworks, the young company recently spun out of ClearCube, announced it has tied its solution with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, which provides management of physical and virtual deployments throughout the data center, desktops and devices.

VDIworks released a new plug-in, VDIvision for System Center, allowing its customers to use MSCOM to manage a variety of VDIworks-driven features. The management plug-in includes a highly configurable and scalable connection broker, leveraging the power of desktop virtualization. VDIworks utilized APIs from Microsoft to ensure seamless functionality among both products.

On the heels of Microsoft’s release of Hyper-V, VDIworks is the first virtual desktop management vendor to integrate with Hyper-V and the System Center management offerings. The plugin is integrated with Active Directory so IT managers can control users’ access rights and permissions. It runs a SQL Server database at the back end in which enterprise IT can store all the components of the VDI environment so it can run reports against them and manage the environment.

VDIvision for System Center is platform-agnostic, so it can also run with the VMware and Xen hypervisors.

[Source: InternetNews]

VDIworks