• A plea to Microsoft: Keep Cloud definitions true

    May 10, 2012 Author: Craig Taylor
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    After sitting through the MMS keynote slide-deck twice, I finally couldn’t hold my tongue any longer.

    On one key ‘educational’ slide, the speaker informs the audience what the definition of Cloud Delivery is. He mentions four of the many tenets from the widely accepted United States NIST definition.

    He then fails to reference said source, fails to state the existence of other requirements (such as automation, and most tellingly charge-back/usage metering with cost association)

    Now, I appreciate that an icon for ‘usage based’ is presented, but that’s so fluffy as to lack any meaning.

    Could that be that because no native charge-back calculation tools are included in the SC suite (please approach a partner), but a reasonably cool one exists in a vCompetitor’s ‘Cloud’ product?

    Vendor X – I beg you: please don’t rewrite definitions to make your product tick all the boxes. All you’re doing is crudely tampering with the proverbial ‘form’, and you’re fooling no-one. Especially sad when you’re making such fantastic products!

  • MMS 2012 related post: Powershell & SCVMM 2012 – an applied example

    April 19, 2012 Author: Craig Taylor
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    I decided to skip an MMS 2012 session on VMM to get some insight on how one would deploy App-V 5.0 as a current App-V 4.6 user.

    That said – I can tell you now PoSH makes everything better, including VMM! On the flight back, I ‘ll type up a walk-through about, and even a refined version of, the generalized VMM & AD 2008R2 PoSH script I have uploaded and used in anger.

    This script deploys a service template into a cloud the user defines, customizing the name of the guests to follow a convention, and moves the resultant associated AD Computer objects into target OU’s to allow appropriate Group Policy to take effect.

    Why not define the naming convention in the service template using the BLAH## syntax you say? Well, we were deploying multiple instances of this service template in different geographies, so the naming convention had to be regionalised every time. Rather than having multiple different service template versions for each of the naming conventions (meaning we couldn’t perform vHW service changes through a single point, leading to more complex version control), I felt it was easier (longer term) just to define the names at the point of dropping a template in. Same applied for Tags, and descriptions which may need to be translated into the language of the region etc.

    Script v0.1 on SkyDrive. A more gentle introduction to the script will follow.

    https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=9059457923d3101c&resid=9059457923D3101C!401&parid=9059457923D3101C!359