Beta versions of System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE) and System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (DPM)are available now.

Personally I found the following things as very exciting

• SCE now supports management of virtual machines. The virtual machine management part of SCE2010 is based on SCVMM 2008 R2. So SCE 2010 is a true unified management solution for both physical and virtual servers in a small/medium organization.
• Ability to protect client computers and Hyper-V R2 with Live Migration (with CSV) are things I found to be exciting about DPM 2010

Please click on the links above if you want to know more about these products

The desired configuration management (DCM) feature in SCCM is a great tool for ensuring software compliance management across your server and desktop systems. This is typically done with the help of various configuration items (CI). Now there is a new CI for managing the power consumption levels of PCs in your network. Click the link below know more about it.

http://www.microsoft.com/environment/campaign_energy_star.aspx

HP has recently updated it’s server update catalogue for managing Proliant series of servers using SCCM. Follow this link for more details

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration/catalog.html

When you try to install the reporting component of System Center Operations Manager 2007 on Windows Server 2008 the following error might occur.

This error is actually due to a problem with the SQL Server 2005 reporting services (SSRS) running on top of Windows Server 2008 (WS2008). First thing you need to do is to make sure that you have installed SSRS correctly on top of WS2008. This article from Microsoft would help you do that.

Even after strictly following the above article you might still run into the same issue. In that case follow these steps completely get rid of this issue.

• Start IIS 7 Manager
• Go to the "ReportServer" application and select it. This could be under Default Web Site"
• Select "Handler Mappings" on the central pane and double click it
• In the Actions pane on the right hand side click "Edit Feature Permissions" and make sure that the settings are like this
• 
• Click OK and restart SSRS (not really required). You are all set to go
  Technorati Tags: SCOM 2007 reporting services,SQL Server 2005 reporting services

This video is worth watching. It's a super cool demo on how System Center Operations Manager 2007 can be used to monitor a heterogeneous environment consisting of Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems.

 http://edge.technet.com/Media/Operations-Manager-with-Barry-Shilmover/

Using System Center Essentials 2007 (SCE 2007) one can discover Windows computers in a domain. But the discovery tool may fail to detect XP/Vista based computers. One of the reasons could be the firewall being turned on. In that case few exceptions should be allowed through Windows firewall for SCE 2007 to successfully discover the computer and install the agent. The next question would be how to enable those exceptions in the firewall? Obviously not by visiting each computer and doing it one by one. The SCE 2007 management console has many wizards built into it. One of them called "Configure product features" which can be found under "Actions" in the details pane on right hand side would help one configure firewall exceptions in all XP/Vista machines. Basically this is done by creating necessary group policies at the domain level. Therefore to get immediate results out of your discovery process you may need to either force refresh the client side group policies or restart them after this policy creation J

The following are the major limitations of SCE 2007

• All components of SCE 2007 including the managed computers should be part of the same Active Directory forest (multiple domains within the same forest is supported)
• SCE 2007 does not support computers with IA64 processors
• No cluster support for any of the SCE 2007 components
• No support for SQL Server 2005 database mirroring
• No more than 10 computers can run SEC 2007 management console at any point of time
• Maximum number of managed devices are restricted to 30 Windows based servers, 500 Windows client computers and 50 network devices

By the way all the SCE 2007 server components can be installed on a domain controller.

The following are the system requirements for a computer running both server and management components. The figures in brackets are the recommended values

Hardware: 1.8 (2.8) GHz processor, 1(2) GB RAM, 12 (20) GB hard drive space of which 1GB is in the system partition

Software: Windows Server Standard or Enterprise edition with SP1 or later (both x86 and x64 editions are supported), Small Business Server 2003 Standard or Premium edition with SP1 or later

IIS 6.0 and BITS 2.0

.Net framework 2.0 and 3.0

MSXML 6.0 Parser

SQL Server 2005 Express/Workgroup/Standard/Enterprise edition with SP1 or later

SCE 2007 server must be part of an Active Directory environment

Just the management console can be installed on a computer running Windows XP SP2/2003 SP1/Vista

Computers running Windows 2000 SP4/XP SP2/2003 SP1/Vista operating systems can be managed using SCE 2007.

Both the server and client computers can be running in a virtualized environment using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

I have listed out the basic system requirements for setting up a SCE 2007 environment. In my next blog post I will continue with more details on supported configurations and topologies

This is one of the cutest products I have seen so far. I am saying it as cutest because of the superb combination of components it has. Let me try to define what this product is. SCE 2007 is a management solution for a medium sized business organization (up to 30 servers and 500 clients). SCE 2007 can do H/W & S/W inventory management, monitor computers and applications, patch update, software installation plus reporting of all these actions.

Another way of looking at SCE 2007 is as a combination of three other distinct products in the Microsoft System Center 2007 family viz. Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007 and Service Manager. I am sure that this is going to be a real value addition for all medium sized organizations looking for a compact infrastructure management solution.

I am going to drill down in to the product in my next few blog posts