The keynote was presented by Brad Anderson and immediately started with the IT priorities of this day and age such as cloud computing, green IT, business intelligence and compliance. The key point here was that businesses need to drive down costs and expand business capabilities at the same time and that this is something you can do with Microsoft’s solutions. Everything can be turned into an advantage and it is not the first time I hear that you can take advantage of an economic downturn like this.
Then Brad talked about Dynamic IT that makes IT less of a cost center and more of an asset to the business. Microsoft focuses on four areas to make that happen:
- Unified and virtualized approach
- Model driven
- Service enabled (cloud or not)
- Focused on the user
These things are not new and were also discussed during last year’s keynote.
The focus then shifted to virtualization that you have to see as a strategy and not as a bunch of products. They demoed Hyper-V 2.0 that is a part of Windows Server 2008 R2. Of course, the demo showed the Live Migration feature but also focused on the importance of managing both your physical and virtual infrastructure with SCOM 2007. And of course, SCOM 2007 integrates nicely with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM 2008) with the PRO tips. Essentially, SCOM delivers these tips to SCVMM where they can be implemented by the administrator or where they can be automatically implemented. This is especially useful when combined with Live Migration to optimize running workloads during business hours based on application knowledge from SCOM.
Microsoft of course uses virtualization from the datacenter to the desktop and with tools such as the acquired technology from Kidaro (now called MED-V) this becomes more and more clear. Brad also talked about the fast adoption of MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) that includes App-V.
Then the presentation went on about datacenters and the fact that Microsoft are building several new and large datacenters with a big focus on green IT. Microsoft needs those datacenters to provide cloud-based services such as those announced last week (Azure) but also offerings such as Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Brad stressed that they are actually learning from these implementations to improve their management products and that they are moving closer and closer to the Dynamic Datacenter where technologies such as hardware virtualization and software virtualization are combined. In fact, they are working to extend App-V features to server applications to make it possible to assemble a solution by combining operating system images with application images.
Then the focus shifted to Operations Manager 2007 R2 where they will extend management capabilities to Linux and Solaris. They actually make use of things such as OpenPegasus and OpenWSManagement to make this work. A new feature called ProblemPath was demonstrated. ProblemPath actually highlights the path to a problem in Diagram View to clearly show where the problem is situated. The beta of R2 will be available shortly.
The next section dealt with Windows Server 2008 R2 where they focused on the four main areas of improvements:
- Virtualization: Hyper-V 2.0 with Live Migration, improved Terminal Services and VDI
- Management: PowerShell 2.0 and a bunch of cmdlets to manage Windows
- Windows 7 and R2 better together:: DirectAccess, BitLocker To Go and BranchCache
- Web improvements
They they actually demoed BranchCache where you can actually configure a file server to cache content from a location over the WAN to improve access times. It’s good too see technology like that making its way to Windows as an out of the box solution.
Next, they talked about the next version of SQL 2008 called Kilimanjaro. Interesting in that release are the self-service BI features. They will make it easier for end-users to perform analysis, create reports and share their work with their co-workers. The demo was actually quite interesting and it is something I need to take a better look at in the coming months.
Of course, no keynote these days can be complete without saying something about cloud computing and this one was no different. Microsoft wants to offer choice to the customer when it comes to using their products. A customer can run the products on-premise, partner hosted or Microsoft hosted. In any case, users use the tools they know to work with these services. They then demonstrated Exchange Online by synchronizing Active Directory with the online service, enabling users for an online mailbox and migrating the mailbox from the customer’s server to the Microsoft servers. I already talked about this in a previous post and it is pretty easy to set these things up. Note however that passwords are not synchronized and that for now, there is no free/busy synchronization available.
To summarize it was a decent keynote that mainly put extra emphasis on things we knew already. Microsoft is clearly going forward in the virtualization and management space with a set of products that integrate well and are able to manage the physical and virtual world with the same toolset.
