New platform support in SCCM 2012 SP1

Microsoft announced this week that Service Pack 1 for SCCM 2012 would be released in Q3. In addition to the expected support for Windows 8, they've added support for Mac OS X and Linux. Yes, really.

The announcement was at TechEd America 2012, but I found out about it at the Best of MMS event in Edinburgh being run by Charteris. The Microsoft guy I spoke to confirmed that Endpoint Protection is part of this support. Yes, that's a Microsoft antimalware solution for your Mac and Linux machines!

Configuration Manager 2012 released

Microsoft quietly RTM'd SCCM 2012 over the weekend. At the moment it only looks like it's available for Volume Licensing customers. Presumably the official release date will be April 17th 2012, the morning Brad Anderson does the Keynote at MMS 2012.

If you're having trouble finding it in the download center, that's probably because it is not listed under Configuration Manager. Searching for Configuration manager will only find SCCM 2007. SCCM 2012 can be found listed under the System Center 2012 Standard and System Center 2012 Datacenter suites.

Thankfully the suites are logically split into collections of ISO files. The Standard Configuration Manager and Endpoint protection ISO is 1.67GB in size.

If you've installed Configuration Manager before you'll recognise the installer. Let the migration begin!

SCCM 2012 RC2 released

Microsoft have released the open beta of Configuration Manager 2012 Release Candidate 2. It can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/configuration-manager-2012.aspx.

Downloading and installing the SCCM 2012 prerequisites

There are a number of prerequisites to install on your server before running the SCCM 2012 installer. Even once the SCCM installer is running, it wants to download some more prerequisites. If you are installing onto a non-network connected machine for testing purposes, you'll need to grab these files by running the installer on some other network connected machine beforehand. I ran this on my Windows 7 x64 workstation, but any modern 64-bit Microsoft OS should do.

From a CMD prompt-

1. Create a folder for the downloaded files (eg mkdir c:\sccm2012prereq)
2. Navigate to smssetup\bin\x64 in the SCCM 2012 source directory
3. Run setupDL.exe c:\sccm2012prereq

You will also need .net Framework version 4.0. This is downloaded as part of the prerequisite step so you can install it on your server from the sccm2012prereq folder. There are two installs, you need to use the dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe, not the client version as noted in the release notes. Surprisingly the SCCM 2012 installer doesn't automatically install this.

Before you can install SCCM 2012, you'll also need to install SQL Server (I'll cover this in a later post), and some roles and features for Server 2008. The roles and features can be easily installed with the following commands-

servermanagercmd -install web-server
servermanagercmd -install web-mgmt-compat
servermanagercmd -install rdc
servermanagercmd -install bits

MMS 2011 Day 3

The dodgy wifi at the Mandalay Bay finally conspired against me and I didn't get a chance to post this entry until today - a full week later. I'll probably type up the other notes as separate blog postings.

Keynote 2 - You! Empowered to Embrace Consumerization

This keynote is available to watch here.

As suspected, SCCM 2012 will be able to do lightweight management of iPad, iPhone, Android and Symbian devices through ActiveSync.

A new feature of SCCM 2012 is Intelligent Application Delivery. This can autodetermine if you're on a corporate machine, an untrusted machine, your primary work machine and so on. It can determine rules based on hardware or software features and then deploy the same Application in different ways based on these rules.

Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 is now part of the core CAL not just the Enterprise CAL. SCCM 2012 integration now reports on the top users that get viruses, not just the top workstations.

As reported elsewhere client settings can now be set at the collection level, so you don't need a new site just to have different Software Update settings for different machines. You can, however, set default client settings for the entire site and let other admins override them at the collection level. Editing of the sms_def.mof file shouldn't be necessary as you'll be able to enable custom hardware inventory through the client settings.

Windows Intune, a cloud based management service, was launched at the keynote. This looks like a potentially revolutionary way to manage desktop PCs in small to medium businesses.

MMS 2011 Day 2

Day 2 - the first real day of the conference, and the day of the myitforum party!

Keynote 1 - You. Empowered by the Cloud

Surprisingly early start to day 2 with a Keynote at 8.30am. There were two keynotes at MMS 2011, the first focusing on cloud computing, the second on the consumerisation of IT.

First up was the announcement that Opalis has been renamed as System Center Orchestrator. Another new addition to the System Center family is System Center Advisor. This product, formerly codenamed Atlanta, allows you to track config changes on your systems, and compare them with best practices.  The beta is available today.

A key theme in the keynote was separating the apps, data, and OS on servers to provide increased manageability and reliability. Server app-v is a key component here, which can also help reduce the number of OS images you have for your servers. To help with building and managing these private clouds, Microsoft released the beta of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 this morning.

We were given a quick demo of Avicode for client experience monitoring. The most impressive part of the demo was drilling down into exactly what part of a stored procedure is causing slowdowns. 

Tomorrows keynote- the consumerisation of IT. On the slide deck they had a picture of an iPhone- does this mean we'll be managing idevices through sccm soon?

You can watch the first keynote here.

BA01 Configuration Manager State of the Union

After the keynote, comes the 'real' keynote for SCCM. The biggest announcement came at the end!

As usual, lots of top ten lists. Interestingly the User state migration hotfix is the 2nd most applied behind the r3 power management hotfix. I'll be blogging about this particular patch at a later date, it's a pain to apply and affects OSD builds even when you're not using USMT.

As mentioned in the keynote Opalis is now Orchestrator. Out fall 2011 with built in support for sccm 2012. Built in actions like add computer to collection are supported. 

Adobe Reader X has had support for ConfigMgr since November 2010 for updates through SCUP. 

Sccm 2012 beta 2 will be RTW any day now. There's new exclude/include rules for collections!

They provided a great demo of role based administration. Thankfully you can now scope users to collection, and hide features and collections a user doesn't have access to. And at last you can run two instances of the console at once with different credentials. 

2012 has integrated global search across the entire product. They gave the example of searching for Flash. This search returned applications, deployments and software updates. You can drill down and see the context (eg properties of package) direct in the search dialog.

Supercedence is another new feature in SCCM 2012. This allows you to set rules based on versions of a product so that if you install version 9.2 of a product it will first detect and uninstall version 9.1. This also provides a graphical view of the supercedence of your apps. 

SCCM 2012 also provides a graphical view of your site hierarchy. You can enter geographical locations and view a bing map with the location of all your sites. 

An important point for those thinking of evaluating SCCM 2012 that are deploying/have deployed FEP - you'll need to wait for a compatible version of FEP. 

They announced PCM (Package Conversion Manager) to ease the transition to the new application model. This tool analyzes and checks whether classic software packages can be converted to the new app model, and if so, can convert them for you. It has a cool dashboard which gives pie and bar charts for readiness and conversion status.

One potential point of confusion with the new application model that they cleared up - legacy software distribution is still there. You can continue to use the classic way of deploying apps if you want to.

The SCCM 2012 SDK has been updated with powershell cmdlets such as new-collection, get-package. 

Server Configuration Packs look interesting. These are packs of DCM settings built and converted from the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzers. DCM is becoming much more important in SCCM, and has been rebranded as Settings Management for the 2012 release of the product. This now includes settings enforcement to remediate configuration drift. 

They quickly mentioned the P2V Migration Toolkit, which will assist with virtualizing SCCM site systems. Yesterday's BA17 Virtualizing Configuration Manager went into much more depth about this tool.

The last announcement was the headline grabber. SCCM 2012 will support Linux/unix servers. They are planning to offer support for various versions of Red Hat, SuSE, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX. These appear to be the same supported platforms as OpsMgr. The client will offer a subset of current Windows ConfigMgr functionality, and will be available some months after SCCM 2012 RTMs. They revealed a previously hidden talk on Wednesday - BA16 Configuration Manager 2012: Cross Platform Management.

Finally, they will be uploading howto videos for SCCM 2012 on Connect.

BA03 Configuration Manager 2012: Technical Overview

The main change in SCCM 2012 seems to be the Application model. In SCCM 2012 you will be managing applications, not scripts. By managing the Application you get a host of nice new features - automatic revision management and supercedence. As mentioned above, supercedence can enforce the uninstall of a previous version before installing the new version. The Application model also allows a choice of deployment options based on the device the user is sitting at - so, for example, a full install on their primary PC, but a streamed app on any other PC.

The PXE Service Point role has been bundled into the Distribution Point role.

Client health has been greatly improved in SCCM 2012 - a new program ccmeval.exe runs on the client itself and can check and remediate problems with the client.

There's lightweight device management based on Exchange ActiveSync - this will provide limited inventory and tasks that can be run on mobile devices that connect to your Exchange server via ActiveSync.

They've improved the Settings Management (DCM) interface, and you can now browse for Registry keys to check/remediate!