Windows Intune; Online Services for PC Management

Technorati Tags: Intune,DaaS,Cloud Desktops

Intune builds on a strategy to take Microsoft products and cloud enable them.  Intune is for customers who have not deployed Systems Center onsite and is only licensed for desktop management at this time.  Intune allows you to avoid costs and complexity by NOT implementing on-premise management.  The target audience for Microsoft Intune is the mid market customer. 

Intune is available through the Microsoft Business Online Services.  If you subscribe to the service you will be able to deploy the latest version of Microsoft's desktop operating system to help standardize the user environment.  Subscribers also will get access to MDOP and all its tools (i.e. diagnostic and recovery tool kit for image and password recovery).   It is recommended that you configure the following as part of the initial enrollment.

• Product Update Classifications
• Setup Auto approval for patching
• Setup the Agent policy
• Setup Alerts and notifications

Communication is secured through certificates; one for the initial setup and then one per desktop for ongoing management.  Intune has been tested on Windows 7, Vista and XP running the latest service pack.  For alerting the SCOM management agents are used.  These management packs have been tweaked to be less chatty across the WAN. 

The console has been intentionally simplified to provide a fairly straight forward operational console.  The team that developed Intune worked internally on the Windows Systems Update Server (WSUS) so similar capabilities, concepts and simplicity in setup is apparent when browsing the interface.  The console was designed with “surfability”  in mind. 

Intune will track license compliance and alert on license issues.  You can import licensing agreement information to cross reference license compliance.  The team expects to have asset tracking in the final release so that hardware and software inventory is available. 

In the initial release there is no concept of delegation; all users are essentially administrators.  Desktop policies are available and can be configured and deployed to the desktops.  The policies are limited in the first release but focus has been put on the most critical settings.  The application of policies has been intentionally simplified through the use of templates and wizards.  You have the flexibility of enforcing local or domain policies depending on whether the desktops participate in AD.

One of the interesting features is the ability to remote control the machines through the integration of Microsoft Easy Assist.  This is end-user driven in the initial service offering meaning the user initiates the request.  Due to the integration of system center monitoring you can configure notification rules to send an alert or message for things like an Easy Assist request.

Although Microsoft was intentionally vague about the road map for Intune it is clear that the service is being actively developed to bring new features to market quickly.  Demand for the initial Beta preview was so strong that Microsoft closed signup on the day the service was announced.

Citrix Essentials with Site Recovery

Technorati Tags: Citrix Essentials,Site Recovery

Citrix has continued to develop the feature set of Citrix Essentials to enhance the Hyper-V platform.  What is interesting is they have announced a Citrix Essentials Express that is restricted to two host servers.  Included with Citrix Essentials Express is Site Recovery.  This provides some interesting DR alternatives for businesses in the SMB space.  As Citrix Essentials uses its StorageLink feature to provide visibility into the SAN layer to enable Site Recovery the limitation is the number of SAN vendors providing Citrix StorageLink support.  Citrix has set a strategy of continuing to focus on reasonable alternatives for DR automation for the SMB market so expect the capabilities and vendor support to continue to evolve over time.

Microsoft’s Management Summit 2010

This year Microsoft Invited me to attend the 2010 Microsoft Management Summit.  As we have noticed a stronger interest in Microsoft technology this year amongst our customers with the release of Windows 7 late last year, I was delighted with the opportunity to go and review Microsoft’s virtualization and management strategies. 

The key note by Bob Muglia (President, Server & Tools Business) started with a restating of the core principles of Dynamic IT which were laid out by Microsoft in 2003.

• Service-enabled
• Process-led, Model-driven
• Unified and Virtualized
• User-focused

Bob noted that many of the products in the System Center Suite have matured so that the reality of Dynamic IT can now be delivered.  Bob also drew a strong comparison between the principles of Dynamic IT and the requirements for Cloud Computing. 

The point was made that software development is largely based on software models that originated from the developers within an  organization.  With increased scale, the maturity of virtualization, and the need to properly stage code into production Microsoft discovered that the IT organization had a stronger influence over the software model than developers.  This background was used to introduce several recent or new integration points between System Center and Service Map, Visual Studio and the Lab Management feature, and Hyper-V.  Through this integration the demo focused on deploying a new software model consisting of several tiers (web, database etc.) visually represented in Service Map onto a staging environment consisting of Hyper-V virtual machines.  Lab Management from Visual Studio 2010 was used to develop and validate test plans.  When an error occurred you had the option of taking a screen shot or capturing the state of the VMs making up the software model and emailing them to the development team.  Once the code was “corrected” the final configuration was deployed using Opalis Orchestration which reminded me of VMware’s Stage Manager but seems to provide the flexibility of LifeCycle Manager of Citrix’s Workflow Studio. 

The keynote then laid out Microsoft’s message around Cloud computing and lessons learned with the deployment of Azure and Bing.  These lessons are being used to fine tune the next generation of software to be ‘cloud ready’.  Some references were made to software made up of multiple virtual containers that could scale up and down on demand.  This sounds much like the BEA Liquid VM development that was being done before the Oracle acquired the company.

It was at this point we got a sneak peak of the next release of SCVMM.  One thing I picked up was that XenServer was integrated into the management console.  Templates have been extended to include multiple virtual machines as a single application architecture.  SCVMM now integrates with WSUS server for patching.  The library in SCVMM has been expanded to include App-V application packages which allow templates to include VMs and virtual applications.  This also simplifies scaling of additional VMs to meet demand as applications are streamed into new application servers vs. natively installed or scripted into the images.

One interesting thing that was also demonstrated was the ability of SC to monitor VMs in the Cloud or off-premise monitoring.  This was provided through a management Pack for Windows Azure; it would seem that if its a Microsoft Cloud it will have a management pack.

This makes Microsoft’s foray into Virtual Lab Automation interesting as it is tightly integrated into Visual Studio and the hosted development platform Azure.