New System Center 2012 Virtual Labs posted to Technet site!

Good Day Folks!

I just learned that we have some brand new virtual labs on the Microsoft Technet site. With most of the System Center 2012 products in Beta or RC status now, it is a great opportunity to start working with products that should be feature complete. The Technet Virtual Labs let you get your hands dirty in a safe, structured online lab.

Here are links to all of the System Center 2012 Virtual Labs --

Introduction to System Center Configuration Manager 2012

After completing this lab, you will be better able to understand the Configuration Manager 2012 Console terminology, navigate around the Configuration Manager 2012 Console, use the search and filter capabilities of the Configuration Manager 2012 Console, and use the Configuration Manager 2012 features in the beta 2 release.

System Center Operations Manager 2012: Infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring

Deploying the infrastructure for a private cloud is just the first step. Once it’s in place, IT administrators have to monitor those resources to ensure that the infrastructure SLAs are met, quickly find the causes for any problems, and plan for future growth.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012: Building Your Cloud Infrastructure

In preparing for private cloud deployments, you have to think about the best ways to use your existing infrastructure fabric resources. For example, do you have needs that will require resources like bare-metal operating system deployments and servers running Microsoft Hyper-V? Do you have different types of storage? Will you be able to properly discover, classify, and allocate the right resources to different virtualized environments? Can you simplify the complexity of your complex networking environment to pull all these elements together, create clusters, and streamline the deployment of private clouds? Virtual Machine Manager for Microsoft System Center 2012 helps this process by streamlining how network and storage resources are allocated for virtual machines, and by making it easier to create new Hyper-V hosts and host clusters.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012: Building a Service Template

Today’s IT environments are typically a complex mix of hardware, applications, and even different platforms. Introducing cloud technology into the mix makes everyday IT jobs even tougher. The Microsoft approach to Infrastructure as a Service is to streamline cloud deployments for IT pros. Microsoft does this by taking disparate resources and logically abstracting them to the cloud, using the same methods to deploy different hypervisors, and delegating cloud access and control. Microsoft also provides cloud-based delegation of resources, and quota controls over resource usage. The result is that the underlying infrastructure fabric of networking, storage, and computers—including different hypervisors—can be configured as resources in private clouds. These clouds can be delegated to individual users with distinct quotas. The goal of this demo is to show IT pros how to delegate private cloud access to users and administrators. After creating the roles needed, users will create a new private cloud, a virtual machine, and service templates before deploying a service to the cloud.

Cheers!