system center – UseIT | Roman Levchenko

It has recently been announced that a new semi-annual channel release for System Center is available. As you can see in the following picture, the new System Center 1807 is the last release before GA of SC 2019. So, my recommendation is to implement this release and test it before going further . In short, you have a plenty of time to evaluate the newest SC and prepare your staff for SC 2019 deployment in production.

system center roadmap

TIP: SC 1807 is an update release for SC 1801. To apply System Center, version 1807 you will first need to download SC 1801

System Center 1807 provides updates to the following products:

:: Operations Manager

:: Data Protection Manager

:: Service Manager

:: Orchestrator + SMA

:: Virtual Machine Manager

In this post, we will cover the major changes for VMM.

Storage Space Direct Management

With Virtual Machine Manager 1807, you will now be able to patch and update the nodes of a Storage Spaces Direct cluster with the orchestration of the update process performed by VMM. You can update individual S2D hosts or clusters against the baselines configured in windows server update services (WSUS)

VHD Placement

When you add a new VHD to the existing VM, you can now define CSV path (a new volume) for that disk to eliminate problems with storage space. Prior to VMM 1807, a new VHD of an existing virtual machine would be placed in the same CSV as the other VHDs, aggravating the problem if the CSV was already running high on utilized storage.

vhd placement csv vmm 1807

Convert SET switch to logical switch

VMM 1807 allows you to convert a switch embedded teaming (SET) switch to logical switch by using the VMM console. In earlier versions, this feature was supported only through PowerShell script.

Display of LLDP information for networking devices

VMM 1807 supports Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). You can now view network device properties and capabilities information of the hosts from VMM. Host operating system must be Windows 2016 or higher. DataCenterBridging and DataCenterBridging-LLDP-Tools features have been enabled on hosts to fetch LLDP properties

lldp vmm 1807

VMware host management

VMM 1807 supports VMware ESXi v6.5 servers in VMM fabric. This support facilitates the administrators with additional flexibility in managing multiple hypervisors in use.

To evaluate SC 1807, you can download SC 1801 from here , and then update to 1807 (SAC) + it also will be available @MSDN.

In addition, VMM 1807 has received SQL Server 2017 support.

TIP: VMM 1807 update package for VMM 1801 can be obtained here

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.

Tag: system center