Category: System Center
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Co-Management: The slow migration from local to cloud
**DISCLOSURE: While I am contracted to Microsoft Corporation, I am not an employee. The articles that I write are not meant to represent the company, nor are they meant to represent me as an employee or spokesman for the company. As has always been the case, all articles on this website represent me and nobody…
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Deploy Your Apps From Intune
**DISCLOSURE: While I am contracted to Microsoft Corporation, I am not an employee. The articles that I write are not meant to represent the company, nor are they meant to represent me as an employee or spokesman for the company. As has always been the case, all articles on this website represent me and nobody…
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Management Packs: Keep Up!
Updating your SCOM Management Packs should be done from time to time… schedule it!
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SCOM Prerequisites: A Web of Confusion
Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) has several prerequisites that must be installed for each component, and frankly, some of those can be cumbersome to get around. Of course, it is nice for the SCOM installation console to let us know that Report Viewer (a free download from Microsoft, link provided in the notifications window)…
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Help! My Servers Aren’t Being Monitored!
This isn’t right… I have System Center Operations Manager monitoring all of my servers for me, but this morning I noticed that several of my servers are in a warning state, but they are greyed out (which implies that they aren’t reporting in properly). What do I do? This is not uncommon, especially in smaller…
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New (and Free!) E-Books
Last month I posted an updated list of free ebooks that Microsoft Press offers (Free E-Books… Way beyond PDF Files!) which was extremely well received. Well today I was given information that MS Press released two new ebooks this month, both of which are extremely of interest to a lot of my readers. Microsoft System…
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Welcome to What’s Next…
There is irony in the title of this post… What’s next. I posted on Friday that it was my last day working full time at Yakidoo. I really enjoyed my time there, and am glad that my next venture will allow me to stay on there on a limited basis. This afternoon I am meeting…
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Keep Up: How to configure SCOM to monitor the running state of services and restart them when they stop
Windows runs on services. Don’t believe me? Open your Services console and count just how many are running at any given time. Of course, some of them are more important than others… especially when you are talking about servers that are critical to your organization. A new customer recently called me for a DEAR Call…
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Another tough exam…
As a subject matter expert (SME) on virtualization, I was neither excited nor intimidated when Microsoft announced their new exam, 74-409: Server Virtualization with Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center. Unlike many previous exams I did not rush out to be the first to take it, nor was I going to wait forever. I actually…
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Building an IT Camp with PowerShell
I have been telling people for a couple of years that if they want to ensure a good future in the IT field there are two things to learn: System Center and PowerShell. I unfortunately am quite good with one, but have been referring to myself as a scripting luddite for quite some time. It…
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Counting Down the Classics with the US IT Evangelists
“On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me…” “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall…” “Thirty-five articles on Virtualization…” All of these are great sing-along songs, whether for holidays, camping, bus-rides, or comparing virtualization technology. Each one is a classic. Wait… you’ve never heard the last one? That’s okay, we…
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vSphere vs. Hyper-V: The Head to Head Battle!
On Thursday August 8th I participated in a webinar debate. Shawn MacArthur (CEO of VMTraining) and I had a friendly debate over which hypervisor and virtualization ecosystem was better. This was the third part in the series – The first had Shawn discussing vSphere, the second had me discussing Hyper-V and System Center. Who won? …
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It’s On! VMware Versus Microsoft!
It is going down this week! August 8th (Thursday) at 2:00pm Eastern Time (11:00am Pacific)! In the Blue corner we have Shawn MacArthur, and in the Red corner we have Mitch Garvis! Two champions, both undefeated, and the winner will be… YOU! VERSUS As many of you know I used to (and occasionally still do)…
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Is Hyper-V the Best Hypervisor Out There?
Of course it is! Seriously… I have been talking about it for years, and while I think ESXi is still an excellent product, I feel that the complete management solution provided by Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012, coupled with the price point which is as low as one sixth the cost of vCenter…
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Two Years Later, Gartner Makes it Clear!
It was two year ago this week that I published an article calling out Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure (Gartner agrees with me… Hyper-V is for real!). I was thrilled that Gartner (a completely independent unbiased industry observer) evaluated Microsoft’s Hyper-V 2008 R2 and determined that it was indeed an industry leader.…
The World According to Mitch 