Intro to System Center Essentials

Posted By: Dave Morehouse | Oct 8th, 2008 @ 12:31 PM | 41,008 Views | 4 Comments

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If you happen to be managing a mid-sized business IT environment (with, shall we say, ~50-500 desktops and up to 30 servers), and are tired of dealing with multiple tools and processes, and just wish you had a better way, David Mills, technical product manager, will show you what Microsoft has to offer in this space, System Center Essentials.

My chat with him starts with an intro to the product and the core issues it's designed to address, and he then shows us the product interface and gives us a walkthrough of the main features and benefits.

Tags: Essentials, IT, Management, mid-market, SCE, System Center

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srenman

Hi,

I'm looking to demo this product before we decide on purchasing or not and thought this VHD might be the eaisest way to do a quick Demo.

I have built/loaded a W2K3 R2 SP2 32-Bit server from scratch, applied all the updates from MS then installed Virtual Server and then all updates. Next I took the 1 exe and 3 rar files off the MS web site

WIN2K3R2EE_SCEsp1_v1.part1.exe
WIN2K3R2EE_SCEsp1_v1.part2.rar
WIN2K3R2EE_SCEsp1_v1.part3.rar
IN2K3R2EE_SCEsp1_v1.part4.rar

I downloaded from Microsoft and extracted and ended up with

SCEsp1VHDSERVER.vhd - 4.56Gb
SCEsp1VHDSERVER.vmc - 17kb
Which is fine.

Next I setup the VHD using MS virtual server with recommeded config, setup the nic and fired up the Virtual Server fine. Logged on as admin and noticed that when I browse to the Setupsce.exe shortcut on the desktop to the C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Temp\EvalCDImage the folder structure for the setup is there, but there are no files. Therefore the shortcut is a dud when you try to run it.

Any one else run into this problem when demoing the software?

I have a call into MS but I have to wait for them to open...

I have even redownloaded the whole bit, and rebuilt the physical server OS from scratch thinking I created the problem ending up with the same result again of the software missing from the image.

For this VHD file being tooted as a great quick way to evaluate a product, I must say I am not to happy with it so far..

Thanks for any replies!

srenman

How does SCE 2007 work with Vmware?

When is the next release of SCE slated for release?

Is there a print management console built into SCE2007?

Where do we send comments for things that would make this product even better?

Regards,
SE

remlap54

In reply to srenman

#Jan 12th @ 7:36 AM

I had the same problem and ended up downloading the VHD without SP1 and it worked.

SCEguy

In reply to srenman

#Jan 12th @ 7:36 AM

Hi Folks,

After investigating the issue, it looks like the setup files got stripped during the packaging process. The VHD has now been repackaged and posted. Thanks for your patience and sorry for the incovenience!

~SCEguy