 Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer, I'll be your instructor for this course that covers the exam of Microsoft's 7414. Now, I have been working with Microsoft Network Operating Systems since Windows NT 4.0, which goes back to 1996. Prior to that, I had been working with their competition, the Novell Network Systems. So they hopefully give me kind of a lot of experience in looking at the world of the network operating systems, and I'm excited to be able to follow all the technology changes that occurred as we continue to move forward. That is, when we introduced Windows 2000, I remember working with it as a beta. Going into 2003, going on again to 2008, here we are, 2012. We're going to focus a lot on the cloud infrastructure and all of the components that make up system center. And it's exciting because I've worked with a lot of virtualization environments, not just in labs from training, but also in the real world. I've even helped create labs for different companies that are in a virtualized environment so they can do training with their products that are dealing with firewalls or routers or some other types of things. I've also had a lot of experience in the realm of security, and so you're going to hear me interject that as well as we talk about some issues to be careful of as you're designing the clouds. Well, in this module, we're going to talk about how to create that infrastructure for the virtualized environment. So what we'll do is, well, first of all, talk about the Microsoft system center 2012 and all of its components. One of the things you'll learn is that unlike previous versions where you could buy maybe just operations manager or configuration manager, that when you get system center 2012, you have all of those components and you pick and choose which ones you want to use. Now, primarily, we're going to focus on virtualization. So we'll talk about how system center helps with that, which we'll start off with the virtual machine manager, kind of the middle part of this entire section that's going to work with all of the hosts and all the virtualized servers that we use. We'll then, of course, have to talk about how to create that virtualization host so we can have a place for the virtual servers or the virtual machines. We also need a lot of storage potentially for virtualization. So we'll talk about those storage options. And then, of course, the communications outside of the host through the infrastructure, the network infrastructure, as well as talking about the internal infrastructure about the virtual servers will work and talk to each other within a host environment. We're going to take a look at the network infrastructure through the virtual environment, making it, again, able to either isolate some virtual machines, talk with other virtual machines, being able to get out to the rest of the network or even to the Internet. There's also an infrastructure for storage. Storage is usually not on the actual host, but at some separate location, usually as a storage area network or a SAN. So we'll talk about the way in which we set up the network to be able to communicate from the host to that storage. We'll also take a look at how to configure that storage that we set up, not just the network communication from host to storage, but also for the virtualization and the virtualized servers that are going to be there. And so all of that should come together as we just give you the entire infrastructure, as I mentioned, both the internal, the virtualization and the network. So we're going to begin by talking about the System Center 2012 components. And what we'll do is we'll talk about each of the components. Make sure you understand what the virtual machine manager is. We'll take a look at what Operations Manager does. And remember, these are overviews, not the in-depth on each of these components, at least not yet. We'll talk about Orchestrator, the app controller, what the Service Manager does for us, the data protection manager, the configuration manager, and then we'll look at some of the other miscellaneous tools and services that come with System Center. So as an overview of what the virtual machine manager is, it is basically a component that is going to manage the host environments for our virtualization. So if you imagine that I have a server running the virtual machine manager and that I am going to create a host, one or more hosts, see if my 3D picture doesn't make it look like I just dropped the server out of the box here, these host machines are the ones that are going to be divided into these other virtual servers that we want to be able to run. And so one of the things that is important for us as managing a host is to know when to take a virtual machine out or to put a new one in. But as I said, with the virtual machine manager, we're going to actually have many hosts, hopefully many hosts, that are going to run the virtualized environment. And one of the things a virtual machine manager can do is make the decisions about where to put a new virtual machine. So in this little example, if I have these two hosts, one of which I hope looks like it's filled with virtual machines, and another host that has room, when you decide suddenly that you need another web server to be able to handle the traffic that's coming into your network, virtual machine manager can say, okay, let's go over to this host because it has room, and let's put in that new virtual machine. And then of course, after time, if that virtual machine is not needed, we can take it offline to be able to preserve the resources that are running on that host. So that's what virtual machine manager does, is it helps us in being able to deploy the virtual machines. But what if suddenly I need more hosts? Well, the virtual machine manager should be able to go out there, find another place where it can do a new host deployment for us, and as a part of that host be able to then again put out more virtual machines. Now in order for a virtual machine manager to run more efficiently, we often try to group these hosts together. That's kind of what we would call the host groups. And that way the virtual machine manager can say, all right, I have different sets of hosts that I'm grouping together, maybe some for web servers, maybe some for an email server, some for other database servers, depending on the management objectives. And the other thing that's great about virtual machine managerics is it can manage those hosts as a group. And like I said, when it's making that question about where to put or deploy a new machine, if it knows that it needs to deploy to a host, it can then look at just the, or a new group I should say, it can look at the hosts that are in there. Now another thing that we have to look at is that hosts also fail. And so sometimes we could put these hosts into a high availability situation where they are just copies of each other so that if one goes down, the other one is still available for use. Now that's one of many methods that we have high availability. The other, of course, is that if a virtual server goes down, then we can just simply move it to another host machine if there's room there for it, and to be able to make that continue to run and do that within minutes. Now behind all of this, each of these servers is going to require to have its own hard drive. And that's what we use the storage area network for. So in the storage area network, if I draw it like a cylinder, like most of our hard drives are, we're actually going to talk about how we'd break these up into these logical unit numbers, things we call LUNS, where each virtual machine can connect to one of these, thinking that that is a directly connected hard drive. Now the problem is how easily can I retrieve the data from that as a server? I mean, if the hard drive was local to the machine, then we would follow the regular system board bus to get there. But that's where we have to have some sort of a networking infrastructure that has high speed communications. But we also have to remember that these are hard drives, and so that we have to be able to send IO commands, input output commands. So as we build that storage and network infrastructure, we have a couple of choices about how we're going to actually set that up. One of them might be through a communication protocol known as Fiber Channel, which is a way of encapsulating your input output commands and sending it over the network. Or maybe as a more popular option, what we call the iSCSI, which is a way of, again, SCSI was the bus system for input outputs, that we can encapsulate those commands over our Ethernet network so that we can still act as though the hard drive is directly connected. So again, more things that we'll get in more detail. Now I think I've already mentioned a bit about trying to optimize the VMMs and hosts. The optimization is to try to make sure no one host is overloaded with more virtual machines than it may have resources for. And that's a part of what the VMM will gather information about and help make an intelligent placement. We also can use cross-platform management. One of these hosts, if it ended up being something other than Microsoft Hyper-V, like VMware's ESX server, we can still manage that as well. So we have the ability to be able to use different platforms. Like I said, the ability to take these machines offline when not needed can help in the resource and power optimization. We're also going to take a look at our ability to look at the performance and reliability objects of how well these host machines are running. And at some point we're also going to talk about, and this is a great option, having an actual physical server here and taking that physical server and moving it over to a host as a virtual machine, something we call physical to virtual, which is a great way of being able to... Well, let's think about it. What does that do for me? It takes this server offline, something that I have to pay for as an actual hardware device, maybe reutilize it for something else. It's less power because now it's not having to consume electricity as it's being taken offline and moved as a virtualized machine or an existing host that's already got power to it. It also can help reduce rack space by taking that physical server out of the rack because it's no longer needed. So there's a lot of really cool benefits. I'll just call them bennies with some of the things that we can do with a virtual machine manager. So now operations manager is another key part of the components of System Center 2012. What it can do for us is, number one, provide you with close to real time. Close to real time because it has to pull a machine to be able to pull the information back to tell you about the counters, the different parts of your system, CPU, memory, network utilization, those types of things, and be able to report to you how a server is responding. But it does more than that. Besides that, it continues to monitor different systems at your request. And if something fails, if a service or some of the process were to die or somebody's CPU is way over capacity, it can create alerts. The alerts allow you to have a way of looking at the results and being able to determine if there's a probable performance problem within the network. But we can also add some sort of automation. And with that means that if we have certain types of alerts that go off, that we can start a process either with service manager or orchestrator to try to fix that problem without having to have somebody manually intervene, trying to work to keep your network at a high level of performance. That's some of the really cool things. Of course, we have to be able to know what we are managing as far as the inventory or applications. Another sweet thing about this is that if you could imagine that you have maybe a web server, that you have the general public wanting to connect to, and you want to keep that alive. But that web server depends on other servers to run different types of applications or maybe to connect to a database in the back end. Well, it's just one thing to say, okay, my web server is up, but what about the connections? What if I lose my connection to the application part of this as far as logic or lose my connection to the SQL server? One of the things we can set up is we can have the operations manager actually act, actually act as though it is the user. And it can impersonate a user and test all aspects of that. So a lot of things that we'll talk about. Dashboard for the quick view of what's happening here. And as you can see, there's a number of different really cool things we can do with operations manager. But like I said, this is to give you the overview and to not try to talk about what it does in specific. So we're going to take a look at exactly what operations manager does, but hopefully it gave you kind of a good idea as to the capabilities. And like I said, with the automation, operations manager can connect to other components like the service manager or to the orchestrator to be able to run different types of automated tasks at the tasks that you create. So you know that they're running the way that you expect them to be. And all of these, of course, are integrated. And don't forget, operations manager is also able to look at your virtual machine manager and see how it's running in a variety of different servers. So it's kind of a central component to be able to keep this network that you have, the infrastructure, your cloud running at its peak levels. Now orchestrator is another component of system center 2012 that helps you with the automation. Now what you'll do is you'll actually create steps of actions that orchestrator will run as it was you, the administrator, taking those steps on your own. Basically it's going to follow whatever logic that you have. If as an example that you wanted to have some sort of action that would help a service that might have stopped on a server, what would you have done? You would have probably gone to the start button administrative tools, opened up services, searched for the name of the service, checked its action. If it was started, maybe you might try to restart it. If it was stopped, you probably try to start it. The simple little things like that that are easy steps that would have taken you time plus would have increased the downtime because you would have had to go out to the server and make those connections and do all that work. Orchestrator can do that for you and run the same type of logic that you set up. Those series of steps that you create, those workflows are stored in what they call runbooks. And so again, when we get into the specifics of Orchestrator, we'll talk about exactly how we create those and what they do for us. Now the other cool thing about Orchestrator, as with all of the components, is they integrate together. That means if Orchestrator needs something that service manager is capable of doing, then it can go to the service manager and make those requests or if it has to work with virtual machine manager, they all are integrated together and they can work as a team of different components based on the logic that you as the administrator set up. The better part of this, like I said, is that it just takes the downtime that you would have had waiting for somebody to respond and adds the automation to that process. And the implementation, of course, is done with something we call integration packs. Like I said, when we get into the more specifics about Orchestrator, hopefully you'll understand exactly what you can do with that component. App Controller is what we use now to replace the self-service portal. So if you think about the original parts of the components that we had in System Center, back when we were calling them individual pieces, the self-service portal was a way for a non-administrative person to be able to log in and make certain requests, such as with the data protection manager. You could give a person the ability to log into the data protection manager and ask that a certain file be restored back to a certain date and time from a backup, or at least to make a request that would have started off a trouble ticket that you could have responded to or, again, added the automation to. Now, what we use App Controller for is to have the delegated access to the different types of functions in either your private or public clouds. That means if you want self-service to the virtual machines or the virtual machine manager to create a new virtual machine, obviously to the services or to work with templates or existing images that they need to, it's about giving other people the ability to take actions with what we call the least privileged rule, giving them only the actions they need to be able to do their job. And it takes away the need for the administrator to have to get involved, allowing us to do other parts of our job. It also allows us to help migrate between virtual machine manager and Windows Azure and as far as the service provider data centers. It allows us, like I said, with the self-service to let other people take control and work with their components of the clouds, whether private or public, as needed, or virtual machine manager if they're going to add to their cloud. It just gives us the option to do delegation, which is always important inside of our networks because, again, we need to be able to make sure that we are doing other parts of our job rather than taking care of other people's requests if they could do it themselves. Another component inside of System Center is called Service Manager. Now, Service Manager allows you, if you want to, to add some automation, not quite to the extent of Orchestrator. Remember, Orchestrator can work with multiple components at the same time. It has a logical workflow that you create as a runbook. This can add some automation, though, that can help you. Even if it's just simply automation to let you know of a certain problem, either through email or some other alert functionality, or to have some types of options to be able to restart services. Again, it allows you to add automation. It's designed to help you with the change control process. Now, if you think about it, ITIL is a study of the function of the management of our networks for IT. And change control is a very big part of this because we just don't want somebody to make haphazard changes trying to put out fires that could potentially have a ripple effect that cause other problems within our network. And so what it can do is, as it's gathering information, let's say Operations Manager reports a particular problem on a system, we can count that in Service Manager as an incident. And if we have too many incidences, we can call that a problem. And we can initiate problem management automatically with Service Manager, notifying the right people about the problem, maybe even giving some suggestions based on white papers that you might have had to go out and gather from the Internet that can tell you that, hey, this problem has this solution. And it allows that process to be created, allows for the approval of that process. And with some instances, the automation to be able to start working on fixing those things once it's approved. So it's really a great tool to manage changes to help, again, lower the potential of changes that are harmful somewhere else, that ripple effect. And again, it helps you with the entire lifecycle maintenance or management of any change process that you might go through in your network. The Data Protection Manager is really a high-level backup system that is a part of the components of System Center. It's a secure method, basically, of backing up your data, whether it's on your Windows servers, on your virtual machines, on your SQL server, your Exchange server, SharePoint, Hyper-V, all of those things, or even desktop clients. And what it does is it helps you in gathering the data that you need, whether it's just to support the recreation of system state or to be able to copy an entire server that you might need to do a restore on a bare metal. Bare metal means, by the way, a server that has no operating system. It's just out of the box, ready to boot up, ready for an operating system. It allows you to archive your backups. You can archive them to remote locations to tape. You can, again, have control over who has access. It has that self-service portability so that a user can have the permissions to restore certain files that they need to. And the other part of this is, again, it integrates with the rest of the components, integrates with Operations Manager. And I realize, as you're probably thinking about this, you're saying, well, this sounds like any backups server that I have. Well, let's think about a host that is running 10, 15, 20 virtual machines. That host's backup would be able to see the virtual hard drives if they're local, not on a storage area network, and be able to back up that entire thing. The Data Protection Manager can actually connect into the virtual machine and see all the individual files that would have been in a virtual hard drive. And so it gives you item level backup within those virtual machines, something you wouldn't get from a normal backup utility unless you went to every virtual machine, opened up or connected to every one of them, and ran a specific backup. And again, that's a lot of management overhead to do. Configuration Manager is really a cool part of the components. It allows for the automation of changes to your systems, whether it's a workstation, whether it's somebody's laptop, whether it's a server, whether it's an upgrade to an application, whether or not you're doing update management. It allows for that to be scheduled and automated to run whenever you want. In fact, if you have some servers or computers that have the ability to support Wake on LAN, that means that I can, with Configuration Manager, send a signal to the network card, the computer can boot up. I can send it to all the changes to its configurations and when it's done it can boot back down. And the next day when somebody comes in, all the updates are done and taken care of without any impedance to their work. It allows, like I said, the updates to software. It allows access to the systems to remote control. In fact, some of you might remember what we called Configuration Manager in the old days, which was the SMS server, the system management server. This is its replacement. It has been the Configuration Manager since it was version 2007. Now, of course, we're talking about 2012. It offers endpoint protection. It helps you in making sure that you gain compliance to whatever policies that you have. It can also help you with managing the assets that you have, managing your inventory. And as I said, overall, it can just push out updates to systems anywhere in your network as you desire it to do. Now, there are other tools that we'll get to talk about as we continue on through our course. Just to give you some of the kind of the ideas of some of the other tools that we'll talk about that are a part of System Center, things like the System Center Advisor, Windows Intune. We'll talk about the virtual machine servicing tools, some of the plug-ins for the virtual machine connectors, also as well as being able to have tools to work with other virtualization solutions like the VMware vSphere, be able to talk about the baseline configuration analyzer, and also some of the configuration analyzers that we use through the virtual machine manager. So, again, we'll get into some more detail as we continue through, but hopefully you get an idea of what we're going to be seeing and looking at as we continue through this course.