My first book is published! (VMM 2016 Cookbook)

My first book that I have been working day and night on for the last four months is published and globally available! The System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2016 Cookbook (English, 575 pages) includes multiple tips, tricks and techniques to help you make the perfect VMM fabric (see What this book covers  section at the bottom of this post for details)

I have done a complete makeover of the previous edition and,therefore, we have the  chapters written from the scratch, plenty of new recipes and revised old ones to meet changes in VMM 2016.  This book is essentially intended to system engineers, solution architects, administrators and anyone who want to learn and master Virtual Machine Manager 2016 (however, since we have two channels (LTSB/SAC), you will also find references to the latest VMM 1801 release in the semi-annual channel).

The book is available in paperback and ebook formats at Amazon and Packt

Please don’t forget to write your feedback/review on Amazon.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to work during this project. This book would not be possible without Packt team who found me and offered to take up the writing. I say thank you to Devika Battike, Manish Shanbhag, Heramb Bhavsar and Prateek Bharadwaj for supporting and helping me along the way.

A special thank goes to Edvaldo Alessandro Cardoso, an author of two previous editions, for an active participation and for being a technical reviewer together with Tomica Kaniski. I could not have finished this edition without your help.

In addition, I wish to mention the Microsoft team for helping to make this book as accurate as possible, in particular: Steven Ekren, Elden Christensen Sai Prasanna Vudataneni, Krupesh Dhruva and Sonal Agarwal. I am pretty sure our long discussions and your feedbacks will be appreciated by readers.

I have worked nonstop on the book for the last months and truly couldn’t survive without my family. Nobody has been more important to me than you. Thank you very much for your support, inspiration and love.

What this book covers
  • Chapter 1, VMM 2016 Architecture, provides an understanding of the VMM modular architecture, which is useful when designing VMM and troubleshooting deployment. This chapter also covers all requirements that must be satisfied to make a private cloud.
  • Chapter 2, Upgrading from Previous Versions, walks through all the necessary steps to upgrade the previous version of Virtual Machine Manager to the new VMM 2016, covering its database, highly available configurations and post-upgrade tasks.
  • Chapter 3, Installing VMM 2016, focus on deploying VMM and it’s dependencies. It gives also a plenty of tips and tricks to install and automate VMM and SQL Server deployments in both Windows Server Core and Full environments.
  • Chapter 4, Installing a High Available VMM Server, dives into more advanced VMM configuration, and provides an understanding how VMM has become a critical part of the private cloud infrastructure. You will also learn how to make a highly available library server and VMM configuration database.
  • Chapter 5, Configuring Fabric Resources, discusses building a new fabric in VMM by configuring compute, storage and networking resources. It starts by adding hosts group and ends by creating a hyper-converged cluster with Storage Spaces Direct and Hyper-V. It also covers a deployment of a Network Controller providing a good start point for network virtualization implementation.
  • Chapter 6, Configuring Guarded Fabric, walks you through the recipes to help protect confidential data by deploying new shielded VMs as a part of Guarded Fabric consisting of Guarded Hosts and Host Guardian Service. It also discusses how to convert existing VMs to shielded and manage them through VMM.
  • Chapter 7, Deploying Virtual Machines and Services, provides information to help the administrator to create,deploy and manage private clouds, virtual machines, templates, and services in VMM 2016; it provides recipes to assist you in getting the most our of deployment.
  • Chapter 8, Managing VMware ESXi Hosts, shows you how to manage and make VMware recources available to private cloud deployments. It also covers converting VMware machines to Hyper-V (V2V), deploying virtual machines and templates, all from the VMM console.
  • Chapter 9, Managing Clouds, Fabric Updates, Resources, Clusters and the New Features of 2016, covers other new features of VMM 2016 such as Cluster OS Rolling upgrade and Production Checkpoints. You will also learn how to integrate VMM 2016 with Windows Azure Pack for VM Clouds management.
  • Chapter 10, Integration with System Center Operations Manager 2016, guides you through the steps required to complete integration of SCOM 2016 with VMM in order to enable monitoring of the private cloud infrastructure.

VMM 2016 Cookbook

Code Files

 

Ignite 2016 Key Announcements

Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 are GA

Windows Server 2016 is available for evaluation and will be on the October price list. Volume licensing customers will be able to download fully licensed software at General Availability in mid-October.

Windows Server 2016 also comes with the built-in support of containers and commercial version of Docker engine without additional charge!

System Center 2016 Evaluation is here . What’s new in System Center 2016?

UPDATE (10/12): WS2016 and SC2016   became available @MSDN and @Azure + UR1 for System Center 2016 and CU for WS2016 + https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3192366

Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 Ignite Announcement+ today MS has published pre-configured VHDs to help you quickly evaluate new SC 2016 features

See my previous posts to get what’s new in Windows Server 2016 (Hyper-V, RDS, MultiPoint)  and also check the updated technet articles : WS 2016 and SC 2016

TIP: I’d not recommend to use evaluation version in production. Wait while fully licensed media becomes available.

Azure Stack Technical Preview 2

In fact, Azure Stack TP2 announcement was described earlier in this blog post (TP2 rolled out for some “vip” customers). At Ignite MS confirmed GA for Azure Stack TP2.

And now you can try this new preview here + read what’s new in Azure Stack TP2 and review Azure Stack Architecture

More info about this announcement: New ideas, new solutions, new technical preview of Azure Stack

SQL Server supports Storage Spaces Direct

SQL Server 2016 will support deploying databases on Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).To build up S2D you need from 2 to 16 servers with local-attached SATA, SAS, or NVMe drives and dedicated network between hosts (10+GbE with RDMA is recommended)

storage-spaces-direct-with-sql-server

Continue reading “Ignite 2016 Key Announcements”

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