MMS 2012 Day 1 Wrap Up!

Wow, it’s been a massive day at MMS with Brad Anderson opening the conference with an absolutely stellar keynote all around the Private Cloud.   I had intended to produce an overwhelming amount of tweets and posts to our APAC Facebook Wall (check it out, it’s absolutely awesome ) but made the noob mistake of only having my phone with me and the associated difficulties with the wireless network in the keynote hall pretty much put paid to those ideas.   Won’t be making that mistake again, as I’ll take the lappy with me as I report back to you tomorrow!

We really showed that System Center 2012 is ready today to run the heaviest of your Private Cloud resources, and this was brilliantly highlighted by some awesome demos.   The first showed how System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager could provide capacity forecasting to show when fabric resources needed to be added to the Private Cloud, then showed how we could provision a bare metal server into our Private Cloud, automating the deployment and addition of resources to the fabric in a completely automated fashion.   Not only this, but we saw how VMM could manage all major Hypervisors:   Hyper-V, VMWare and XenServer all from a single console.

After this we saw how System Center 2012 allowed an application owner to self service provision a multi tier web application into our Private Cloud based on constraints provided by the Datacenter Administrator.   System Center 2012 was then able to scale up additional instances of the web tier to handle increases in load during peak times by understanding the internals of the application, rather than treating the VM as a black box, then ramp back when this was no longer needed.   This gives us true efficiency in the utilization of our fabric resources and is unique to the System Center 2012 product.

Next saw the app being broken, and System Center 2012 bridging the gap between the application developer and operations personnel by understanding the issue affecting the application and tracing the problem back to the code itself that was causing the issue.   We also saw how System Center 2012 could integrate with Visual Studio to take this information and present it right within the development environment, an area the developer was familiar with.

So at this stage, we were all pretty pumped, and then Brad hit us with an announcement that the next version of Windows Server would be henceforth known as Windows Server 2012, then we got some truly awesome demos from Jeff Woolsey around the fantastic new features of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 such as the huge scalability, shared nothing live migration and storage spaces.   Truly exciting stuff!

The rest of the day saw me in a few breakout sessions, which we will all be able to enjoy as the week goes on even if you are not at the conference and then on booth duty at the Public Cloud Management stand.   If you are at the conference, swing past the booth after 12pm tomorrow and I will see you there!   Overall an amazing day, can’t wait till tomorrow!