Thanks to everyone who helped us get the new year started off right with a great January meeting.  For February we are going to continue our System Center 2012 breakout sessions.

As a quick reminder, Microsoft is offering a free 2-Day online course “Creating and Managing a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 Jump Start” on Feb 21 – 22, 9:00 – 5:00 AM PST. This looks like a really nice offer. You can check out the details and register here

http://mctreadiness.com/MicrosoftCareerConferenceRegistration.aspx?pid=298

As always, food and beverages will be provided.

5:30 - 5:45 Introductions & Announcements

We'll keep the intro short and sweet so we can get to the meat of the evening.

5:45 - 6:45 Building a Hyper-V Foundation for Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Since our presenter was under the weather last month, we're going to run two Hyper-V sessions this month.  In this breakout session, we will examine the foundations for building a rock-solid Hyper-V deployment upon which VMM 2012 can run. Discussion topics will include back-end storage, networking best practices, hardware selection, and Windows clustering.  Our second session (see below) will focus on deploying Hyper-V on Windows Server Core.

5:45 - 6:45 Deploying Software with Configuration Manager 2012

Come see how Software Deployments have been implemented in SCCM 2012. We’ll demonstrate how it’s done, and how to organize for an efficient deployment environment.  We’ll discuss new features and the shift in focus from machine-based to user-based deployment strategy. We will also compare and contrast the methodologies moving from an existing SCCM 2007 environment to the new SCCM 2012 philosophy.

5:45 - 6:45 Using Orchestrator 2012 to Automate Activities (This session may be extended to after the break if needed).

Last meeting we created a few new activities in Service Manager.  For our next trick we will take those activities and use Orchestrator to automate as much as possible.  Content shown will be lots of little tips that individually will help you get immediate functionality with the two products.  We will also discuss how using these concepts can allow us to start to build larger and more complex solutions.
 
Activities to be automated: Deleting AD User, Creating File Share, Provision VM, Creating AD Account

*** Mike Bergin, one of our user group members from Deloitte will be taking a few minutes to share how his company is using Orchestrator to automate provisioning for VMware.

6:45 - 7:00 Break

7:00 - 8:00 Network Monitoring with Operations Manager 2012

In this session, we are going to discuss one of most exciting new features of the upcoming Operations Manager 2012 release. And yes, that is “Network Monitoring.” We will discover network devices, monitor them and take a look at related dashboards and reports. At the end of the session, as always, there will be an open floor-Q/A session where anything SCOM 2012 related is fair game.

7:00 - 8:00 Deploying Hyper-V on Windows Server Core

OK, you've heard that Windows Server Core is great way to have a reduced footprint and attack surface by eliminating the GUI from Windows Server.  Many of you have asked how to take advantage of this method for installing Windows Server with Hyper-V.  In this session we will do a complete walkthrough of how to deploy a Hyper-V cluster using the core installation option for Windows Server 2008 R2 Data Center Edition.  We provide a cheat sheet for how to get started with references to our favorite tips and tools.