Partners Guide - System Center

RCPmag.com MAY 2010 Redmond Channel Partner 1

PARTNER’S GUIDE TO MICROSOFT SYSTEM CENTER

With two new releases for midmarket companies—System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010—Microsoft is making more of a channel push than in the past. By Scott Bekker

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Redmond Channel Partner MAY 2010 RCPmag.com2

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Essentials is a branding term Microsoft tends to use for midmarket-focused products. They are designed to meet the standard requirements of 50 to 500 PC shops with limited IT staff , and the products come with slightly less functionality than related enterprise products. The Essentials moniker is common to the System Center suite of management products and the security product line. It also made a brief appearance in the Windows Server family with the short-lived Windows Essential Business Server, which was a midmarket-focused bundle of serv-ers that Microsoft discontinued recently.

On the System Center side, the product family includes four main products for enterprise customers: System Center Operations Manager, System Center Configuration Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Service Manager. System Center Essentials combines functionality from all those products and is designed for the midmarket (another SKU called System Center Essentials Plus reaches the low end of the enterprise space). System Center Data Protection Manager covers both enterprise and midmarket needs.

Both System Center Essentials 2010 and System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 went into beta in September 2009. They hit the release candidate stage in January 2010, and entered RTM in April. General availability should follow soon.

The customers Microsoft had in mind when designing System Center Essentials fit a general profi le. First, they don’t have a comprehensive and integrated IT management solution. The range of systems for the product set is generally between 25 and 400 PCs and between fi ve and 50 servers. The IT department consists of one to five employees, and these are generalists, as opposed to workload specialists. While there’s support in System Center Essentials for some other platforms, the product is designed primarily for Microsoft IT shops. Ideal customers for the suite also use the Active Directory service and Exchange for messaging. They may also use SharePoint for collaboration and SQL Server for line-of-business applications.

“For the most part, you get around 70 percent to 80 percent of the enterprise product, except for those features that really didn’t make sense for midsize IT,” said Jason Buffington, a Microsoft senior technical product manager, during a webcast with Redmond Channel Partner magazine in mid-April.

SYSTEM CENTER ESSENTIALS 2010The System Center Essentials (SCE) single-console design is meant to allow IT administrators to discover devices in their networks, manage virtualization, monitor their systems, manage updates and deploy software. To help with all those tasks, the product includes predefi ned reports, which cover standard-ized management information, and management packs, which are preloaded and help monitor and manage common operating system components, services and applications.

Discovery allows administrators to determine what computers and groups of computers are on the network, as well as view other devices. Once systems are discovered, administrators can run tasks on those computers, and also create inventories of the hardware and software on the network. An important 2010 improvement to the discovery process allows automated discovery to cover only specifi c and relevant parts of the network. Users had said they were unable to use the automated discovery feature in the past because

In late April Microsoft released to manufactur-ing two new products in its System Center suite, System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010. With the RTMs, Microsoft is making a major eff ort to reach

partners ahead of the products’ general availability. That’s a marketing move that has been missing from past releases of the products and from most products in the System Center family.

“There are still a lot of partners who are not aware that Essentials is out there,” says David Mills, senior product manager, Microsoft. “There’s a lot of noise in [the management] space.” Mills says that because of the number of Microsoft partners and the potential midmar-ket customers, the opportunity for partners to help those customers manage their networks is relatively huge.


it created too much noisy alert activity, such as false reports that licensing limits were being exceeded. Aside from adding no value, the problem ran counter to the stated goals of SCE (pronounced “ski”), which was to make administrators’ lives easier.

A major investment in the 2010 version refl ects the industry movement toward virtu-alization. SCE 2010 allows administrators to designate virtual hosts from the consoles and create virtual machines and workloads on those hosts. Capabilities include confi guring virtual machines, migrating virtual machines to new host servers, deleting virtual machines and removing a host server.

In the webcast, Buffi ngton listed the virtu-alization enhancements as among the most hotly anticipated elements of the release, and a fl ash poll of partner participants in the webcast rated the virtualization features as the most interesting.

Buffington said choosing which third-party virtualization technologies to support in the Essentials 2010 release fit into the usual feature dance among Essentials and its enterprise-focused sibling products.

“On almost every part of Essentials, if you compare it with the big brother from our enterprise portfolio, there are a few features that we’ve chosen to withhold either to provide additional value to the enterprise product or places where it didn’t make sense for a midsize IT environment,” Buffington said. “We really focused this product squarely on midsize IT. When we looked at what IT was doing with virtualization, we were not seeing that legacy approach, [or a] broader penetration of virtualization.

“You see a few early adopters using something like VMware, so we’ve made sure there was a migration utility available for that [in Essentials], as opposed to the full-fledged Virtual Machine Manager product, which assumes that you might have a long-installed

base of the software, and which will help you manage the software. [In Essentials] we will just simply help you migrate off of [VMware],” he said.

“As far as the other platforms out there for virtual-ization, you saw even less of those in midsize IT than we did of VMware,” Buffi ngton said. For that reason, Microsoft chose not to support Citrix XenServer in SCE 2010, he said.PH

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“We can help them with the installation and the confi guration and get [customers] all ready because we have the experience of doing it in multiple environments, and we can tailor it to their environments.” Dave Sobel, CEO, Evolve Technologies

with the most recent updates from Microsoft and third-party application providers, plus hardware updates and security patches. Often, it can be difficult for them to tell whether all of their machines have the latest updates.

• Keeping Track of Assets. Another area where midsize customers have expressed frustration is in accurately tracking what IT assets they have. Often, customers are manually tracking hardware and software inventory in spreadsheets that may not be up-to-date. This is critical information for inventory reporting and planning purposes. With virtual servers becoming prevalent, it’s even more critical to have an automated and integrated way to track physical and virtual assets. You can help them find a more unified, proactive and efficient way of keeping track of hardware and software inventory.

Microsoft has specifically created a solution designed for midsize IT businesses to more proactively and efficiently manage their infrastructure in a unified way.

Q How do Microsoft management and virtualization solutions help your customers better manage their IT infrastructure?A With the introduction of Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, Microsoft can now deliver the integrated IT management solution our midsize business customers need to address their challenges.• Keep IT Infrastructure Up and Running.

Microsoft solutions provide our customers with a unified view of physical and virtual servers, PCs, laptops, hardware, software and services running in their company’s IT environments. With built-in configuration intelligence, monitoring alerts, and expert knowledge to quickly troubleshoot and fix issues before they become big problems, System Center Essentials enables IT administrators to move from a reactive to a proactive mode when managing infrastructure.

• Lower Costs Through Virtualization. The Microsoft management solution for midsize businesses utilizes the Windows Server® Hyper-V™ virtualization platform to enable quick and easy consolidation of physical server workloads by making it easy to create and manage multiple

Q What does Microsoft consider to be a midsize business?A Microsoft defines a “midsize” business as one that typically has 50 to 500 PCs/laptops, and anywhere from 5 to 50 servers. The reason for this is that it’s where we find IT departments of 1 to 5 IT professionals who do a little bit of everything. These IT professionals have to effectively deal with the same challenges as larger IT departments, but they don’t have the luxury of specializing. They function more as “generalists” who have to be able to manage the entire IT infrastructure of the company.

Q What are some of the challenges midsize businesses face in IT management?A Each of our customers is different. However, based on Microsoft’s numerous customer engagements with midsize businesses, we have identified some of the most common issues that these customers struggle with to effectively manage their IT environments. Typically, these IT challenges fall into four main categories:• Keeping the IT Infrastructure Up and Running. Typically, IT

generalists rely on several different “point” solutions that perform tasks such as monitoring critical servers for up/down status, which often forces them into a reactive mode in dealing with server management. The time and cost required to provision a new physical server is typically weeks, making it difficult for customers to bring new servers online. They also need to ensure critical business data is highly protected and can be quickly restored when necessary.

• Improving End-User Productivity. Some IT generalists working in midsize businesses spend a great deal of their time and effort helping company employees to quickly either remotely or locally troubleshoot PC or laptop issues for employees working locally or in branch offices. They also are randomly called upon to deploy the latest business applications and updates, or investigate database issues with custom line-of-business applications. These issues can cause lost productivity for the company, especially when the employee is not local.

• Keeping up with Security Patches and Updates. A frequent chore for midsize customers is keeping servers, PCs and laptops up-to-date

Opportunity Knocks: Selling Management and Virtualization to Midsize BusinessesZane AdamGeneral Manager, Virtualization, Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft can now deliver the integrated IT management solution our midsize business customers need to address their challenges.

REDMOND CHANNEL PARTNER PROFILE

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virtual servers on a single physical machine. These customers can reduce costs by consolidating resources through virtualization and unified management, which means they only need a single set of tools to manage both physical and virtual resources.

• Consolidate Servers with Virtualization. Pointing our customers to server consolidation through virtualization is a great opportunity to help them cut costs. System Center not only provides our customers with the server consolidation tools they need, but also enables businesses to more dynamically manage their resources. For example, pooling applications and servers simplifies and speeds an organization’s ability to respond to new requirements and other important changes. Using Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010—which now includes Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 technology—and Windows Server Hyper-V, customers can quickly and easily provision new virtual servers and consolidate multiple server workloads onto a single physical machine. Also, customers can take advantage of live migration and backup and restore protection offered by Data Protection Manager 2010 to help improve performance and availability.

• Improve End-User Productivity. System Center Essentials enables customers to quickly troubleshoot PC and laptop issues. Alerts identify performance problems via e-mail, pager or SMS text messages, giving customers the ability and agility to quickly troubleshoot and fix PC and laptop issues before they become big problems. If someone needs an application installed on their PC or laptop, a simple wizard quickly walks them through the process of software deployment to PCs, laptops or servers in the user’s network. Even something like the Microsoft Office suite of products can be quickly deployed to an entire company. With System Center Essentials, customers can deploy Microsoft and non-Microsoft applications, drivers, and accurately target software installations.

• Keep Systems Up-to-Date. Using Essentials allows your customers to easily control download, configuration and deployment of Microsoft and third-party software and hardware updates from the unified management console. It’s also very easy to quickly check update status and know whether the entire IT department environment is up-to-date and highly secure. In addition, with integrated capabilities, customers can scale their automated deployment and patching across the entire IT

Help your customers better manage their physical and virtualized environments.

environment, using the same tools for both physical and virtual environments.

• Deliver IT Business Continuity. Our customers can help their customers deliver business continuity to their organizations by helping ensure that data and services remain highly protected and available. For example, Data Protection Manager enables rapid data and server/client recovery, as well as efficient and reliable failover capabilities. This solution can also extend backup and recovery beyond the customer’s local environment and into the cloud. And, through capabilities like live migration of hosts, this solution provides the ability to dynamically respond to change.

I encourage customers to review the following resources and discover how they can help their midsize and small business customers better manage their physical and virtual environments.

Resources• Microsoft System Center Essentials Web site:

microsoft.com/sce• Microsoft System Center Data Protection

Manager Web site: microsoft/dpm• Microsoft System Center Partner Web site:

https://partner.microsoft.com/global/products solutions/servers/systemcenter

• Microsoft Integrated Virtualization Web site:microsoft.com/virtualization

• Microsoft Midsize Business Portal:microsoft.com/midsizebusiness/products/microsoft-windows-server.aspx

• Microsoft Core Infrastructure Web site:microsoft.com/infrastructure/solutions/virtualization.mspx

• Microsoft Virtualization Partner Portal:https://partner.microsoft.com/US/products solutions/productsvirtualization

Current Pricing and Licensing:• Data Protection Manager 2010 microsoft.com/systemcenter/dataprotection

manager/en/us/pricing-licensing.aspx• System Center Essentials 2010 microsoft.com/Systemcenter/essentials/en/us/

pricing-licensing.aspx

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Once systems are discovered and virtualized, SCE provides numerous monitoring functions, which repre-sent the heart of the day-to-day value of the product. Administrators can view alerts, create state views, set up diagram views of the network, manage monitoring data, put systems into maintenance mode when necessary and change Group Policy settings.

Another core set of ongoing management functional-ity in SCE is the ability to deploy software packages and update software. The record Microsoft Patch Tuesday event in April, along with the out-of-band update in March, triggered IT fire drills all over the world as administrators rushed to protect systems against nearly three dozen newly fi xed vulnerabilities.

With SCE in place, administrators can confi gure the synchronization frequency with Microsoft Update or automatically select and apply updates. The combination also allows for manual synchronization—but through the single-console of SCE—and the ability to approve or decline updates. Should a patch cause a problem, admin-istrators can also uninstall them from the SCE console. Of no small value when the boss reads headlines about a Microsoft Patch Tuesday is the ability to present him or her with a SCE status report on the rollout of Microsoft Critical and Security Updates.

While upgrading System Center Essentials for the 2010 release, Microsoft also worked to give the UI a look-and-feel that is similar to the ubiquitous and familiar Microsoft Outlook.

“One of the big things that was important to Microsoft is, if we’re going to help IT admins do something better than what they’re doing today, let’s not force them to do a lot of new things,” Buffi ngton said.

SYSTEM CENTER DATA PROTECTION MANAGER 2010While System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 includes the enterprise in its target market, the product’s tight focus on backup and recovery of Windows servers, clients and other Microsoft servers makes it a better fi t for the midmar-ket, where Microsoft IT shops are far more common.

That said, the product has evolved a much more robust feature set from its original 2006 release. That version included disk-based replication of files, end-user restore capabilities without requiring help desk assistance, and centralized backup of branch offices. Microsoft rapidly upgraded the product with another release in the 2007 wave of System Center products. The second version added tape protection to the disk-based capabilities from 2006. It also added support for Windows application servers and clusters, among other things. Microsoft continued its support for different backup media in the 2010 release, by adding cloud backup and disaster recovery options to the previous disk and tape support. Other new features include more advanced Microsoft workloads that are more consistent with enterprise requirements, Windows client protec-tion and better scalability

On the client side, DPM 2010 supports Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, and Microsoft supports the backup of up to 1,000 clients per DPM server. That scale is allowed by an approach that backs up user data only, rather than backing up the whole machine, such as OSes and common applications. The server also integrates with local shadow copies for Windows Vista and Windows 7. A selling point is that no end-user inter-vention is required by default—allowing administrators to be ready for the inevitable calls from users that they need that local data they never attempted to back up.

Microsoft servers and technologies that DPM can back up in intervals as short as every 15 minutes include Exchange Server, SQL Server, the SharePoint family, Active Directory system state, Dynamics, Virtual Server, Hyper-V Server, Windows Server Hyper-V and Windows Server fi le services. DPM is capable of maintaining up to 512 online snapshots for disk-based recovery and can back up to tape or the cloud. For disaster recovery, the system is designed for a direct one-click recovery from off -site and the servers can be chained for additional redundancy.

THE PARTNER OPPORTUNITYMicrosoft is making more of an eff ort than usual to encourage partners to take the new System Center products to the market. For example, the company held a Partner Readiness Week for System Center Essentials 2010 in late February. During that week,

“For the most part, you get around 70 percent to 80 percent of the enterprise product, except for those features that really didn’t make sense for midsize IT.” Jason Buffi ngton, Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft


Microsoft off ered fi ve online training courses about SCE 2010 and DPM 2010.

Dave Sobel, CEO of Evolve Technologies, which is based in the Washington, D.C., area, is already talking to customers about the products and sees a lot of opportuni-ties for his Certifi ed Partner fi rm.

“We can help them with the installation and the confi guration and get [customers] all ready because we have the experience of doing it in multiple environ-ments, and we can tailor it to their environments,” Sobel said during the RCP webcast. “Then we leave them with the tools and help them when they need the partner for escalation on the parts they want assistance with or for the new project work as an add-on.”

So far, Sobel said customers have been interested in having the management pieces that SCE 2010 and DPM 2010 provide, particularly the simplifi ed management of the environment when they want to enable their people to do a little bit more.

“What you can do is you can give an organization that has those IT generalists on-site that are doing that work, you can give them the tools to effectively manage and maintain their own environment,” Sobel said. “They get that single dashboard, and they can really work with their environment. [They use] auto discover and really take control of their environment. With the 2010 release, you get both the physical and the virtual pieces.”

“As more and more midmarket organiza-tions are virtualizing, this is a great way for them to keep a handle on correct management of all of those moving parts. What we’ve been finding is that this is a great, simplifi ed platform to let our customers dig in deep and manage their environment,” Sobel said.

Customers are in two camps, Sobel said. Some already have management technology that SCE 2010—espe-cially—could replace or consolidate. Others know they have problems, but they’re not sure how to solve them.

“In general, most organizations have some kind of management technology. But often that can be a lot of management process where they run around and do inventory or they’ve got these four or fi ve little tools that aren’t really a unifi ed piece. Or they have some Tivoli and older management tools or they have some of the tools that come from the hardware vendors,” Sobel said.

“They’re really looking for one that’s more robust. I think it’s a little bit more greenfi eld than it is displacement. But you do fi nd that there are these homegrown mismatches of pieces that are doing the management already.”

When he engages with one of those greenfield customers, Sobel said, very few of them are happy with their situations and most are open to a new way of handling IT.

“I really never talk to a small IT shop where they tell me they have so much time and everything is work-ing great. Generally those kinds of departments are stressed. They’ve got a lot of demands put on them, they’re working with limited resources and they really are trying to do more with what they’ve got,” Sobel said. “When you can give them a tool that simplifi es the management, it becomes really easy for them to look and say, ‘Yeah, that’s a great investment for us.’

“I really don’t fi nd a lot of organizations out there that are saying, ‘It’s all just really easy and well put together. We have everything that we need to run this environ-ment.’ Often times they really are pushed a lot and they’re trying to do more.”

NOT FOR MANAGED SERVICES PROVIDERSThe most apparent partner opportunities involve pointing customers to SCE 2010 and DPM 2010, helping them configure and use the tools, and developing project work later. One area Microsoft

previously dabbled in with SCE was using the platform to run the technical side of a managed services provider (MSP) business. But Microsoft has backed off that emphasis with the 2010 release.

During the webcast, a partner asked Buffington if there was a consolidated console planned for SCE so that it could be used as an MSP solution.

“That is not currently in the plan,” Buffi ngton replied, although he added that Microsoft would consider it again if enough partners asked for the capability. “For channel partners that have been looking at Essentials for awhile, we did have technology that was similar to that for Essentials 2007, which we called Remote Operations Manager. That’s not currently in the [2010] plan. Again, IT is one of those things where you have to focus on what the customer segment needs right now. We’re just not seeing as much of that.”

Microsoft briefl y touted Remote Operations Manager 2007 as a platform for managing agents in client sites. The product supported up to 2,000 agents on a manage-ment server and up to 530 agents through a gateway server. The company made some presentations at the Microsoft Management Summit in 2008 and at Microsoft Tech·Ed 2008, and briefly had a homep-

The System Center Essentials single-console design is meant to allow IT administrators to discover devices in their networks, manage virtualization, monitor their systems,manage updates and deploy software.



age for the product on the Microsoft Partner Portal. However, the offi cial Remote Operations Manager blog hasn’t been updated since May 2008, and the Partner Portal page is gone.

For his part, Sobel discouraged other partners on the webinar from approaching SCE 2010 as any type of MSP platform.

“The intention of System Center Essentials is to be an on-premises solution, managing the environment, and local to the environment itself. You’re selling it on-premises to the customer,” Sobel said. “If you’re an IT provider and you’re reaching into the environment, and logging in and using the product in that way, that certainly is one facet of it. But from a use standpoint, the product is intended to be used on-premises by the people on-site with the environment.”

A CUSTOMER’S VIEWWhile many opportunities are in the greenfield side, customers who already have System Center Essentials 2007 may be ripe for an upgrade, as well.

SCE has been a key part of the management infra-structure at Tulsa, Okla.-based Explorer Pipeline since before the 2007 version came out, and the company is looking forward to several features in the 2010 release, according to Tim Vander Kooi.

The systems administrator at the fuel transportation company is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) on SCE 2007, and Vander Kooi said during the webcast that the centralization of SCE is key.

“The great thing is that it’s all those things all in one place. It just allows us to be so much more proac-tive. We used to know when somebody’s hard drive crashed because they called us and said ‘Our hard drive crashed.’ With SCE, now we’re able to see those things happen and be proactive before we have issues,” Vander Kooi said.

“When you have people’s hard drives about to be fi lled up, you see it in the SCE console. If a software update doesn’t get installed correctly, we can contact our end users and help them with the problem before they even know about it,” he said.

Return on investment might be a good selling point, too, judging by Vander Kooi’s experience. Explorer Pipeline is a distributed company with offi ces through-out the Midwest and Southwest. “We used to have to pay FedEx to ship [computers with problems]. The greatest part is that you can see all the things in one place and act on it very quickly.”

One little-heralded feature that Explorer Pipeline’s IT team fi nds extremely useful is SCE 2010’s built-in knowledge base, with its option for companies to add their own specialized notes. “Anytime an alert is fi red,

there are tabs on that alert that take you right to a help page. And it allows you to keep your own company knowledge base on these issues that are happening on your network. There are only three of us in the IT department. We can see what’s going on among ourselves without worrying about somebody being out sick or on vacation,” he said.

At 250 desktops, 40 servers and three IT professionals, Explorer Pipeline is near the upper end of Microsoft’s segmentation charts for customers.

From that perspective, one aspect of SCE 2010 that Vander Kooi appreciates is the improvements to automatic discovery. Now that he can set automated discovery to certain Organizational Units within the Active Directory, it’s allowed him to use the feature. Junk alerts made the feature more trouble than it was worth in the SCE 2007 release.

But he’s also comfortable with the upgrade path if his employer grows in employees, number of servers, complexity or all of the above.

“Before SCE came out, it was really kind of a no-man’s land,” Vander Kooi said of the situation of midmarket and smaller IT organizations. “With Essentials, it’s been a great product that’s really helped us tremen-dously. There’s a migration path in place to move into Operations Manager and Confi guration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager. You can move your business into the enterprise arena without disrupting your envi-ronment too much.” •

Scott Bekker ([email protected]) is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine. Jeff rey Schwartz and Lee Pender contributed to this report.

GET MORE ONLINEVisit RCPmag.com to view the one-hour webinar referenced in this article, hosted by RCP Executive Editor Jeff rey Schwartz.

Of no small value when the boss reads headlines about a Microsoft Patch Tuesday is the ability to present him or her with a SCE status report on the rollout of Microsoft Critical and Security Updates.

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Partners Guide - System Center