New Microsoft System Center solutions for management of multivendor
virtualization, operating systems and applications available for customer
evaluation.
LAS VEGAS, April 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Today, before an audience
of more than 4,000 IT professionals and partners at the Microsoft
Management Summit (MMS) 2008, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the
Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp., outlined the next phase in
the company's strategy to enable dynamic IT organizations. As part of this
strategy, Muglia announced technology innovations that are designed to
expand Microsoft's virtualization capabilities and introduced its use of
open source technologies and industry standards to broaden its ability to
deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.
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"At Microsoft we are helping redefine what it means to do IT management
in the enterprise with the new capabilities we are announcing today,"
Muglia said. "By taking our knowledge of the Windows environment and
expanding it to address heterogeneous management needs across platforms,
applications, hardware and virtualization, we are opening up a new level of
opportunity for companies to drive greater efficiency, responsiveness and
value for their business."
As IT environments grow more diverse and complex across desktops,
datacenters, physical and virtual deployments, and heterogeneous
infrastructures spanning Windows and non-Windows environments, Microsoft
has worked closely with customers to deliver a comprehensive enterprise
strategy for an integrated management solution. The announcements today
build on the strong, existing Microsoft System Center presence in the
datacenter with key additions in the areas of cross-platform, expanded
interoperability and multivendor virtualization management solutions, which
are further extended by the contributions of a strong and growing partner
ecosystem.
Extending Cross-Platform Management for the Datacenter
Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System
Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on
the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are
designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System
Center investments. Providing customers with a comprehensive management
solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates
industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web
Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the
capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows
operating systems and applications. Microsoft delivers the core
foundational cross-platform support out of the box for HP-UX, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating
systems so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in
the form of management packs. Companies such as Novell Inc., Quest Software
Inc. and Xandros Inc. have demonstrated their support by working to deliver
monitoring abilities for applications made by organizations such as The
Apache Software Foundation, MySQL AB and Oracle.
Further demonstrating support for its commitment to OpenPegasus,
Microsoft also announced today that it will be joining the OpenPegasus
Steering Committee and contribute code back to the open source community
under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative
(OSI)-approved license.
"The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions
have already delivered exciting results for Xandros," said Andreas
Typaldos, CEO of Xandros. "They enabled us to cut our expected development
time in half as we created our management packs for Apache and MySQL
running on Linux and Solaris, resulting in quicker time to market and
delivery of betas to our customers today. This new foundation from
Microsoft enabled us to focus on the development of high-level management
functions for applications, with the knowledge that the Cross Platform
Extensions were providing the necessary underlying interfaces to System
Center Operations Manager, enabling heterogeneous management from a single
location across customer environments."
Microsoft also delivered a beta of the updated System Center Operations
Manager 2007 Connectors, based on many of the same extensible open source
technology and industry standards as the Cross Platform Extensions, which
provide an integrated administrative experience and the ability to
interoperate and exchange System Center monitoring data with third-party
management offerings such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.
Single Pane of Glass for Managing Virtualized and Physical IT Assets
Also delivered today was the public beta of System Center Virtual
Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named "Virtual Machine Manager vNext"),
which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to
centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX
Server.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with
Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and
Resource Optimization (PRO). Using deep knowledge of the IT environment
including operating systems, applications and hardware, Operations Manager
identifies opportunities for more efficient physical and virtual resource
allocation and generates "PRO tips" within the Virtual Machine Manager
console. Administrators can implement these PRO tips and dynamically
optimize their datacenter based upon pre-defined policies and the
real-time, changing demands of users. When used in conjunction with the
broad System Center management suite, System Center Virtual Machine Manager
2008 enables customers effectively to manage both their virtualized and
physical servers and applications across their desktops and datacenters
with a single set of consistent, compatible tools.
"Deploying, monitoring and managing applications across a heterogeneous
IT infrastructure can present many challenges and complexities, all of
which are compounded when consolidating servers, optimizing desktops and
applications, or creating business continuity solutions using multiple
virtualization solutions," said Jerry Phillips, senior director of Systems
Operations at Clear Channel Communications Inc. "Our experience with System
Center solutions has demonstrated that Microsoft not only recognizes our
need to manage our Windows datacenter infrastructure, but also non-Windows
and virtual servers from other vendors. Being able to do so through a
single administrative console will provide improvements in productivity and
reductions in our cost of IT operations, enabling us to improve overall
organizational contributions."
A number of partners, including Brocade, Dell, EMC Corp., Emulex Corp.,
HP, NetQOS, QLogic Corp. and Quest, announced they will deliver management
packs enabled for PRO. These management packs enable partners and customers
to integrate their domain-specific knowledge directly into Virtual Machine
Manager and further integrate physical and virtual management.
"Dell's focus is to simplify IT for our customers and drive complexity
out of the datacenter, and virtualization is a key technology driving this
effort," said Laurie Tolson, vice president of systems management at Dell
Product Group. "By working with industry leaders like Microsoft on advances
in systems management between Dell OpenManage and Microsoft Hyper-V, System
Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Windows Server 2008, we're able to
bridge the gap between the physical and virtual management spaces,
providing an optimized solution that helps our customers get the most out
of their hardware and virtualization investments."
"New ways to lower energy costs, reduce server sprawl and optimize
datacenters are provided by the collaboration between HP and Microsoft as
virtualization goes mainstream," said Scott Farrand, vice president of
Industry Standard Server Software at HP. "Microsoft System Center Virtual
Machine Manager used alongside HP Insight software on HP ProLiant servers,
and HP Server Automation software, allow customers to seamlessly manage
physical and virtual environments. The combined solutions also allow
customers to maximize availability, performance and flexibility of physical
host servers, virtualized guest operating systems and workloads."
Beta software of System Center Operation Manager 2007 Cross Platform
Extensions, Connectors and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 were made available
to attendees at the conference and can be downloaded at
http://connect.microsoft.com. Customers interested in finding more
information on the System Center offerings or in evaluating them through
trial offerings can visit http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter and the
System Center blog at http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in
software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize
their full potential.
SOURCE Microsoft Corp.
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