What’s new in System Center 2016 Technical Preview 5

Overall, System Center 2016 will be a significant upgrade over System Center 2012 R2 to manage key aspects of your applications and infrastructure, including client and server configuration management, monitoring and alerting, orchestration and automation, event and incident management, data protection, and virtual machine and infrastructure fabric management.
Here’s a summary of some of the key innovations in this latest version of System Center.

 

Manage your virtualized datacenter using Virtual Machine Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2016 will provide a comprehensive solution for deploying and managing your Windows Server 2016-based software-defined datacenter. With Virtual Machine Manager, you will be able to manage your fabric as well as workloads in one place. You can try the following with Technical Preview 5:

Compute

• Deploy compute and storage clusters from bare metal machines
• Manage the lifecycle of the new, minimal-footprint Nano Server-based hosts and VMs
• Perform rolling upgrade of Windows Server 2012 R2 clusters to Windows Server 2016 clusters with no downtime for the hosted workloads
• Take application-consistent VM checkpoints (production checkpoints)
• Change memory and virtual network adapter configuration of a running VM

Networking

• Easily deploy Software Defined Networking (SDN) components like Network Controller, Gateway, and Software Load Balancer (SLB) using pre-defined and customizable service templates
• Create and configure all SDN entities, such as virtual networks and virtualized network functions (e.g., gateways, SLB) via the Network Controller
• Create and manage flexible gateway pools instead of traditional gateway clusters to achieve higher availability with fewer virtual machines
• Control network traffic coming in and out of a VM using port access control lists (port ACLs)

Storage

• Deploy and manage storage clusters with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) in disaggregated and hyper-converged topology. S2D reduces storage costs by building highly available and scalable storage systems using industry-standard servers with local storage
• Replicate storage volumes synchronously using Storage Replica (SR) instead of expensive storage-based replication
• Enforce Quality of service (QoS) for virtual machine storage to avoid the noisy neighbor problem.

Security

• Manage the lifecycle of guarded hosts that provide the infrastructure for shielded VMs; these hosts protect VM data against snooping and tampering by fabric administrators or malicious software
• Create shielded VMs using the Virtual Machine Manager console and Windows Azure Pack (WAP)
• Convert non-shielded virtual machines to shielded virtual machines using the Virtual Machine Manager console and WAP

Monitor your datacenter infrastructure and applications using Operations Manager

System Center Operations Manager 2016 will expand the surface area of monitoring, and enhance the experience of monitoring infrastructure and applications across public and private clouds. The new version of Operations Manager will also ease the discovery and maintenance of management packs, provide better support for Linux environments, and integrate with the Operations Management Suite to provide richer analytics and improved diagnostics. You can try the following with Technical Preview 5:

• Monitor a broad range of network devices without requiring Operations Manager certification
• Monitor Nano Server deployments, including DNS and IIS roles
• Realize more than 2X scale improvement in monitoring UNIX/Linux servers
• Experience a more responsive application console, including the ability to navigate across different views and pivots without having to wait for the data to load
• Seamlessly discover, install and update required management packs right from the administration console
• Tune management packs, and alter the monitors and alerting rules – either at source level or group level – to reduce alert noise
• Plan and schedule maintenance windows for workloads without generating spurious alerts in Operations Manager console
• Utilize the Preferred Partner program to discover third-party management packs, authoring tools, dashboard utilities, etc., right from the Operations Manager console

Deploy, configure, and keep your Windows and mobile devices up to date using Configuration Manager

System Center Configuration Manager provides a unified management console with an automated set of administrative tools to deploy software, protect data, monitor health, and enforce compliance across all devices in your organization. New enhancements in Configuration Manager make deploying and managing Windows easier than ever before with new improvements including the support of the latest Windows 10 features, Windows in-place upgrade, more frequent and easier updates, unified end-user portal, and more. You can try the following with Technical Preview 5:

• Deploy, upgrade, and provision Windows with modern methods such as in-place upgrade and provisioning packages and profiles
• Keep Windows up to date with new configurable deployment rings, servicing dashboard, and cluster-aware settings
• Manage Windows in a way that works the best for your business through the Configuration Manager agent, on-premises MDM, and the cloud when Configuration Manager is connected with Microsoft Intune
• Manage iOS, Android, and Windows devices via MDM with improved mobile device and application management capabilities when Configuration Manager is connected with Microsoft Intune
• Get more frequent and easier to install updates directly in the management console to support new Windows, Configuration Manager, and mobile device management capabilities
• Allow users to access all of their applications from a unified end user portal
• Run Configuration Manager in Azure Virtual Machines
• Manage Office 365 desktop client updates using the Software Update Management (SUM) workflow

Automate your datacenter tasks using Orchestrator and Service Management Automation

You can choose to use System Center Orchestrator or Service Management Automation to automate your datacenter tasks. Service Management Automation will incorporate improved experiences for authoring, testing, debugging and executing runbooks. You can try the following with Technical Preview 5:

• Create runbooks with native PowerShell scripts and execute runbooks more predictably without heavy pre-compilation steps
• Utilize an Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) plugin for authoring and testing runbooks locally
• Utilize Windows Management Framework 5.0 for authoring runbooks with PowerShell 5.0 scripts

Protect your datacenter using Data Protection Manager

Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V includes new features that improve security, stability and availability, and helps in reducing overall TCO of private cloud deployments. System Center Data Protection Manager has introduced support for protecting VMs deployed on these new Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V scenarios in Technical Preview 5. You can try the following with Technical Preview 5:

• Continue doing VM backup in the presence of Hyper-V node crash or VM storage migration using the new Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) protection technology
• Maintain Hyper-V VM backup even as Windows cluster upgrade is in progress
• Backup and recover shielded VMs
• Protect VMs deployed on Storage Spaces Direct configuration

Automate Service Delivery using Service Manager

The main focus of System Center Service Manager 2016 is improved performance and usability, which are key customer asks. You can try the following with Technical Preview 5:

• Deploy HTML5 based self-service portal with updated UX and better performance
• Experience up to 10x improvement in console performance when creating/updating work items, up to 2x gain in workflow processing, and up to 4x improvement in incident processing capacity
• Get Configuration Manager and Active Directory (AD) data through connectors up to 67% and 50% faster, respectively, with Entity Change Log (ECL) log disabling
• Complete incident workflows up to 50% faster
• Be able to schedule AD group expansion workflows and get up to 75% faster performance
• Perform ECL grooming up to three times faster
• Create rich reports and slice data based on Year, Quarter, Month, and Day using new date dimensions in Service Manager data warehouse cubes
• Use Lync 2013 and Skype for business with Service Manager

More Information on :
https://rcpmag.com/articles/2016/04/27/windows-server-system-center-tp5.aspx

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SCOM 2016

A lot of Business Owners like to see how is the core business service running and previously SCOM Admins struggled to monitor and showcase it as  a single component.
now SCOM 2016 can monitor complete business service as one component
An Example of Business Service : Internet Banking
SCOM was well known to monitor Individual components
Eg: Servers (Server1, Server2)
    Web Auth (Login > 5 Seconds)
 
Today SCOM 2016 can monitor

• End User Experience Monitoring
• Application Monitoring
• Infrastructure Monitoring

More enhanced Features on SCOM 2016:-

• Synthetic Transactions
• DevOps Integration
• .Net Monitoring with APM
• Dashboard Framework
• Management Packs
• Cloud Monitoring

So What's New,
Currently SCOM is  in Technical Preview 5
Capacity to access Management Packs

• Proactively identify new technologies or components (i.e workloads) deployed in your IT infrastructure that are not monitored
• Show when not using latest version of a Management Pack
• Feature only works with Management Packs release by Microsoft, 
• Currently  does not support third party management packs

Alert Data Management

• Get Better Visibility of the Alerts being generated in your management group which helps you reduce alerts that you don't consider actionable or relevant
• Identify the number of alert each management pack has generated
• Identify the number of alert generated by a monitor/Rule within each management pack
• Identity different sources(Component) that generated that alert

Network Monitor has been extended

• SCOM 2016 Includes a tool which will allow you to create a custom management pack to 
• monitor generic network devices (non-certified as of SCOM 2007 R2)
• Support of resource utilization matrix such as processor and memory
• Enables you to add monitoring of additional device components
• such as fan, temperature sensor, voltage sensor and power supply
• Tool generates a management pack

Nano Server monitoring

• Discover a Nano Server and push Nano-Compatible agent to the server from the console

UNIX/LINUX Monitoring Improvements

• Full Monitoring of the LAMP Stack
• Ability to run full shell script or python/perl script to identify the health of custom applications
• Credentials for UNIX/Linux machines can be stored as Run as account so that  operations staff can use these to discover servers without having to know the password
• you can now monitor up to 2x the number of Unix/Linux server per management server, against the previously supported scale
• Operations manager now uses by default the new Async
• Windows management Infrastructure (MI) APIs instead of WSMAN sync APIs
• Apache MP relies on an Apache module that is installed automatically if the 
• Linux agent discovers that apache is installed it monitors the apache server itself, virtual hosts and SSL Certificates
• you can optionally create probe rules and monitors for availability and response time  information
• of immediate value is the 21-day warning and 7-day error alerts on SSL certificate expiry
• Microsoft is also looking to provide monitoring for MongoDB, Cassandra  and Redis

Maintenance Schedule

• You can schedule maintenance mode using SCOM 2016
• View All Maintenance mode schedules from a single console
• Certified partner solution in console (Ops Logic, Squared up)

Under Management Packs View on the console, you now can see the below options

• Installed Management Packs
• Tune Management Packs
• Updates and Recommendation

you can have extended Dashboard using Visio Connection to SCOM 2016
Get Ready for the Hybrid World
SCOM + OMS
Take your investment forward.
OMS Supports lots of technologies like

• Azure, 
• Private Clouds (Azure Stack, Hyper-V, VMware, OpenStack)
• Amazon Web Services

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Whats New in System Center 2016

Whats New in System Center 2016

What  is Nano Server, 
Smaller Footprint of Windows Server


Nano Server is a remotely administered server operating system optimized for private clouds and datacenters. It is similar to Windows Server in Server Core mode, but significantly smaller, has no local logon capability, and only supports 64-bit applications, tools, and agents. It takes up far less disk space, sets up significantly faster, and requires far fewer updates and restarts than Windows Server. When it does restart, it restarts much faster. The Nano Server installation option is available for Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2016.

Shielded VM?
Something that allows someone in the IT Department to allow access the VHD File not the operator of the fabric

Once the VM is created (Shielded VM )
you  can try and mount the Shielded VM to another  VM, and it won't allow
It is bitlocked Encrypted, it will say Access is denied
This is managed by the Host guardian services

Whats new in VMM 2016?

• Muti-Machine Deployment
• Software Define Network, reduce Phyical Network Dependency
• Update windwos without Downtime on  cluster
• Hyper Converge Cluster Architecture

what is Hyper Converge Cluster?
puts All Disk(SSD,HDD)  into once storage group

Once you create the Hyper Converge Cluster you can see the Job Status to check what all it has done


Monitoring Data Center, Whats New?
Microsoft  has Added Capabilities to SCOM 2016

• Discovery Management Packs and Updating them
• Alert Optimization

on SCOM 2016 Console

Updates and recommendation Appears on the SCOM 2016 Admin Console
it will tell if the MP is not installed or partically installed

it will also show updates available for Management pack
this can be done by using Get MP option on the console


Tune Management Packs
Identify the MP that you need to tune
It give all MP and Alert that meet the criteria
you can override or disable the alert

what will the users get?
Alert Optimization, reduce the number of alerts

What is OMS?
OMS is a cloud based suite
Integration between OMS and SCOM
it allows SCOM Alerts to be piped to the cloud for Analytics

What is the future?
Microsoft is looking to  extend System Center via OMS

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