It’s Thursday, and that means one thing: Time for another Feature of the Week! Since I’m on location (along with Joey, who does in fact know everyone) at MMS (Microsoft Management Summit) this week, I thought I’d just give you a roundup of the announcements Microsoft made at the event

MMS Announcements Roundup

Beta availability of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Available immediately for download, VMM 2008 provides complete management of Virtual Server, Hyper-V and VMWare virtual machines. Also includes PRO (Performance and Resource Optimization) tips that can dynamically move and provision VMs to best use the resources available across all your virtual machine hosts.

Beta availability of Cross-Platform extensions for Operations Manager Utilizes industry standards and open source technologies like WS-Man and OpenPegasus to bring SCOM management to HP-UX, Solaris, and Redhat and SUSE Linux. Partners providing Oracle, MySQL and Apache management packs.

Release of Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 The first major MOF release in 5 years, this release moves beyond just operations to include the whole IT lifecycle. It also includes guidance that you can start implementing in just 20 minutes, and strong community engagement and interaction.

Configuration Manager SP1 Integration with Intel’s vPro technologies for deeper hardware layer integration. Asset Inventory Services – cloud based application catalog. Available in May

Configuration Manager R2 native integration of Application Virtualization distribution and streaming. SQL Reporting services and Forefront integration. RC in June.

Links

The Newly redesigned System Center home page

The MOF homepage

MMS coverage on TechNet Edge

Yesterday evening Joey and I ran in to Jeff Newfeld, Clare Henry and friends at the end of the conference day yesterday.  They were celebrating the release of Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0, and took some time to tell us about this latest release.

I've always thought of successful IT as a three-legged stool:  technology is just one part of it, you also need good people and good processes.  MOF provides you with those processes, and they've really put the effort into making this release something that you can read in 20 minutes and start implementing.  There's also a huge community focus in this release, providing a forum for discussion of MOF and other best practices.

For more info, check out the MOF website:  http://www.microsoft.com/mof