ConfigMgr 2007 R3 and 2011 (vNext) preliminary features

So unfortunately I couldn’t make it into TechEd 2009 Berlin, so I know I missed out on a whole lot of information. Luckily the guys from the System Center User Group in the Netherlands and Belgium organized an event and had Wally Mead (Microsoft) come in to talk about the current and future versions of Configuration Manager.

I visited the Belgian event last night and had some nice conversations with fellow MVPs Kim Oppalfens and Alexandre Verkinderen.

Luckily the information that Wally shared with us is not under NDA restrictions as it was presented on TechEd last week as well. I probably did not catch all the stuff, but it gives you a pretty good picture of where the product is moving towards.

ConfigMgr 2007 R3

As I posted in one of my earlier posts, ConfigMgr 2007 R3 is all going to be about Power. Power Management to be precise.

Power Management will be applied to Windows Operating Systems (no other obviously) through Collection Membership. Just like you can set Maintenance Windows on Collections in today's product, you will be able to configure power settings there as well.

Configuration Manager can detect which machines in your environment are capable of doing some form of Power Management (S3/S4 etc.) which will give you a pretty good estimate on how many machines will benefit from the applied policy.

Better yet, R3 will hold reporting that will tell you how much energy (= money) you are going to save if you apply Power Management in your current environment and it will do this based on the fact that it knows which machines can apply this policy. After you’ve applied the policy it will show you (in a report also) how much machines actually got powered down (=savings) and compare it to the old situation. Pretty nice stuff.

R3 will help you establish proper Power Management rules by measuring user activity throughout the day. Based on that information you can start shutting down machines as soon as most of your workers have left. Users can override this particular window (so move the 9-5 window to 11-7 or something) but they cannot disable the Power Management rules.

All this functionality is based on Windows Wake Up and Sleep. So the power management is being effected by Windows. No Wake-on-LAN technology is being used. Windows can for example be set to startup every night, check for new ConfigMgr policies, apply them if necessary and go back to sleep again.

Scale and Performance is another asset that will be addressed in R3 in the form of faster discovery of objects.

Active Directory discovery for example  will do a full discovery just like the product does nowadays. But in addition it will also do a Delta AD Discovery every 5 minutes by default! In a Delta AD Discovery the system will ask AD which records where altered in the last 5 minutes, and it will add only those objects to the database. This applies to User and User Group Discovery as well as System and System Group Discovery. Security Group Discovery is still subject of debate.

In addition there will be something added called Fast Collection Evaluation. Just like with AD discovery Full Collection Membership evaluation will continue to occur the same way, but in addition Fast Collection Evaluation will query the database every 5 mins for any new objects. As a result it will put the new objects in the corresponding Collection.

Note: this only applies new objects! Alterations to present objects will not be effected.

This feature is particularly useful for new machine deployment. In the current version of ConfigMgr you would have to use staging Collections or OUs which would hold a faster refresh cycle in stead of the default 24 hours. In the end you could effectively wait up to 48 hours before machines where serviced by ConfigMgr. This has been shortened to 10 minutes maximum! Nice.

In the department of OS Deployment there will some added functionality as well. R3 will be able to create and support OEM media. This basically means that when you’ve created your Boot and WIM images, task sequences and drivers you can create what’s called the OEM WIM file and supply to your OEM vendor. They can go ahead an apply that image to all the machines you are buying and when the machines boots in your environment it will be picked up and managed by ConfigMgr.

R3 is planned to released in january 2010.

ConfigMgr 2011 (f.n.a. vNext)

Last week I posted that Configuration Manager vNext officially got renamed to Configuration Manager 2011. Yesterday I got to see a little bit more features of the upcoming product.

ConfigMgr 2011 is going to be about “User Centric Computing” which basically means that applications should be travelling with the user no matter where they are sitting. Packages will be replaced by Applications and there will be something called Detection Rules to determine what application (or better yet delivery method of that application) should be used. ConfigMgr knows this because we supply it with information of which user has which machine as it’s primary machine.

Example:

John sits down at his primary machine and starts his application. Based on certain conditions (Operating System, Work network etc.) the application will be presented to him as a Virtual Application and will stream on demand to his machine.

Now John sits down in an internet café and start the same application. Although his Operating System hasn’t changed he is now no longer in his work environment. Based on this condition he is now presented with a Remote Desktop Service application that is running in the datacenter.

The same condition can apply to whether an application should be physically installed or streamed etc.

From an architectural perspective ConfigMgr 2011 will have a flatter hierarchy than ConfigMgr 2007. To this means that there will be a Client Administrative Server (or CAS, known as our current Central Site) and only one layer below.

Sites will be identical and sites are only added for scalability, not for administrative purposes. Replication between Site serves will be based on SQL replication in stead of File Replication. This does not included the content (sources) of applications of course. But Distribution Points will now have Senders as well so we will be able to throttle them even better. Content Distribution will be automated, meaning that DP’s will be state based. When a new DP is added to a DP group that already has software pushed out to them, the new DP will get the same content. Secondary sites will hold a database (SQL), a Management Point and a Distribution Point by default.

Desired Configuration Management (or Reporting, which was basically what it is) will do Auto Remediation in the next version. So when a machine is drifting from a configuration perspective you auto remediate that machine. Auto Remediation intelligence (like when this setting is not ok, do this) still has to be manually added. We will have the power of Registry, WMI or Script to do so.

The next version of ConfigMgr will be fully based of SQL Reporting Services in stead of the Web reports that are currently in the product. So if you are unfamiliar with this: get acquainted.

The Administrative Console will no longer be an MMC (thank God for that). In stead it will have the “Outlook look and feel” just like so many of the other System Center products already have. The Admin Console will have Role Based Access Control, meaning that you will only see the assets where you have permissions. I guess Newbie admins will no longer be scared to death when they first open the console :-)

ConfigMgr 2011 will be x64 server only except for the SMB file shares. Therefore a migration towards ConfigMgr 2011 will probably be a Side-by-Side migration where you can selects a client machine to be migrated and it automatically migrates all the dependencies of that machine (like applications etc.) to the new environment as well. It’s not sure if a ConfigMgr 2011 export / import tool will be available outside migration perspective. They know the request for this, but we’ll see.

ConfigMgr 2011 is planned to released somewhere in 2011.

So that pretty much sums up what I’ve heard last night. I don’t think this is a complete list of all the features, but definitely the highlights. Features are only part of the product when I see it working installed on my box. In the mean time, who knows what might change.