System Center

Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 is a proactive and unified management solution that enables IT professionals in midsize organizations to more efficiently secure, update, monitor and troubleshoot their IT environments.

The evaluation edition is valid for 90 days after installation. The Evaluation Edition can be activated to a full product without requiring a full re-installation. See the System Center Essentials FAQ for more information.

This patch is a rollup of important post-release fixes for System Center Essentials 2007.

KB 936339 - Fixes a problem in which Windows-based computers are not displayed in the Network Topology diagram view in System Center Essentials 2007. The WSUS component parts of Essentials 2007 also fail on the Essentials 2007 agents.

KB 937831 - Fixes a problem that occurs if the computer's NetBIOS domain name does not match the domain or if the computer's domain suffix does not match the domain.

A very good blog post that points out potential pitfalls and a little bit of 'best practice' advice for deployments. Very handy to keep bookmarked for anyone just learning how to use BDD or for the seasoned veteran that is looking for some helpful tips.

You can read his post here.

Note: "Builds" are going away in the next version of BDD (Business Desktop Deployment), but that is not a bad thing.

As you can see from this post here, the infamous 'setup download issue' which can prevent installation from completing correctly.

If you are wondering what I am talking about, I talked about the issue at length here.

A pre-made VHD for use with Virtual PC or Virtual Server has been updated to the RTM code of SCVMM. You can grab the VHD here.

It is a great way to get a feel for the product before installing it on 'real iron' for use.

Not much more to add to this than the subject line, but I found this blog posting interesting as a sign of things to come. The landscape in virtualization has really changed in the past few months, with Citrix buying Xen, and Microsoft diving into the hypervisor realm.

I'll be curious to see how everything pans out in the next year or so. It is going to be a wild ride.

Fun fact of the day: Virtualization isn't a new concept - it has been around since the DEC PDP-8/E!

Despite what some LiveJournal people might think, the PDP-8/S was the original "Serial Adder".

One piece of the upcoming/new Windows Virtualization part of System Center is out the door.

To quote some marketing speak:
“Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, part of the Microsoft System Center family of system management products, provides a simple and cost-effective solution for unified management of physical and virtual machines, consolidation of underutilized physical servers, and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by leveraging the expertise and investments in Microsoft server technology”

Why I like it:
More like VMWare, less like Virtual PC.

The best part:
You can use it today.
You don't have to wait for Viridian / Hypervisor / Windows Server 2008.

You can read the announcement here.

One unexpected aspect: Planned support for Xen and VMWare! I think that is great!

8 new/changed Windows Live categories available to WSUS servers soon
Windows Live
Messenger Installation and Upgrades
Photo Gallery Installation and Upgrades
Mail Installation and Upgrades
Writer Installation and Upgrades
OneCare Family Safety Installation
Sign-in Assistant Installation and Upgrades
Toolbar Installation and Upgrades

Read more about it here for more details.

Doug Miller pointed out an issue that he had installing SCCM this weekend and more people are running into the problem as time goes on.

There seems to be an issue with the RTM build of SCCM 2007 that sometimes, depending on your proxy settings in IE, will fail during setup on the download of the updates. Currently this is around 87 files overall. The files will download correctly, but the setup program will be convinced that the download failed.

The workaround is to set Automatically detect a proxy server for Internet Explorer even if you are not using a proxy. I am curious if this is due to interaction with winhttp and how the setup program attempts to download files. It is actually a bit surprising something like this was not caught before RTM.

Originally spotted here, here and here.

Update
The binaries available from Microsoft have been updated to fix this issue. You can read more about that announcement here.