v.Next = 2012

♦ November 8, 2010 ♦ 1 Comment

I attended the event “War on Cost” run by Inframon on Friday 5th. There was a whole bunch of Microsofties from Redmond there on their way to TechEd. It was great hearing some of the stuff that will be coming out. As soon as they said that the new products are going to be called 2012 (SCOM, SCCM and SCVMM) I knew that there was going to be a delay. Microsoft name the products based on their financial year which is July to June and not the calendar year. That means anything that has 2012 in the title will not be released until at least July 2011.

OpsMgr will have a public beta in Q2 2011, RC in Q3 and RTM in Q4 (probably about Oct/Nov) – this is calendar year and not Microsoft financial year. Key points are that OpsMgr now has the networking technology from EMC Smarts that they announced a few years ago at a previous MMS, that you can do an in place upgrade from 2007 and at the moment the console looks very similar to 2007. With it being a year away from RTM a lot can change.

They were also very keen to keep a cadence going with the Cumulative Updates being released every quarter and they mentioned that new features could be added as part of the CU. I asked about certificates and DMZ scenarios in 2012 but it seems there will be little change in that area. Which is doubly annoying. Not only is it one of the trickiest areas for organisations to get right but as DMZ agents are often manually installed a quarterly CU means a lot of work to keep them up to date.

ConfigMgr 2012 takes on the System Center style console which is supposed to improve console performance. Flattening the hierarchy and better performance seem to be key areas. Having not looked at it for a while 2012 looks good.

Later this month Opalis 6.3 gets released with connectors for all the System Center products and a new improved one for OpsMgr. Microsoft is working their way through this product to make it more of a Microsoft product. The demos looked pretty good and it looks like another great buy for Microsoft and provides a glue that can link all the System Center products and provide Run Book style automation or even link into other systems. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

I have seen the AViCode stuff before but it was nice to see it demoed now that Microsoft have purchased it. A great tool for monitoring and analysing code and performance problems with web sites – especially .Net.

I am sure these will all be covered at TechEd in more depth so expect more announcements. The main thing that I took away from the day is that I will not be going to the MMS in March as it is too soon to get up to speed on the new version of OpsMgr. A shame as I have gone every second year to coincide with the major releases of the product.