Brad Anderson: Microsoft Management Summit 2012 – Day 1

BRAD ANDERSON: (Applause.) All right, let’s get started. Good morning. Oh, come on, we can do a little better than that. I know it’s 8:30 in Las Vegas, but good morning! (Crowd responds.) All right, let’s go.

Hey, you know, ten-year anniversary of MMS this year. What an amazing opportunity to be here. On behalf of all of Microsoft and all of our partners, I want to welcome not only the people that are in the room here, but the thousands that are watching this online.

As many of you know, we sold out the event almost two months ago. Unprecedented amounts of interest in it, and we’re incredibly humbled and grateful that you would take a week out of your time to be here with us. I think you’re going to be interested and excited about what we’re going to talk about. You know, like we’ve done in previous years, we’re going to focus on what we do in the data center and on the desktop, but the ten-year anniversary, back in Vegas, and a time really to celebrate what we’ve been talking about for many, many years with you about some of the innovations and really deliver on some of those promises.

So, we’re going to talk about some of the key trends that we’re facing in the industry. And in the trends, undoubtedly, the things that we talk about and the conversation that is driving the industry and what’s going to really shape the industry for the near future is cloud computing and the consumerization of IT. But I want to talk about them in a little bit different context.

You know, I want to talk about cloud computing in the context of what it enables is, it enables you to deploy continuous services that are available always, always on, always available, and deliver those services down to a set of connected devices that your users are using, and enable your users to be productive on any device that they choose to work on.

So, while we’ll talk about cloud computing, we’ll talk about the consumerization of IT. I want to take it one click down and really talk about what it enables you to do, and that really is about continuous services and connected devices. And make no mistake; these things are very, very intimately connected. In fact, one of the interesting data points is we know that for every 600 cell phones or smart phones that are deployed somewhere in the world, a server is stood up to support and deliver services to those phones.

That ratio for PCs is about one to 100. So, as these devices continue to proliferate, as these devices continue to be used, we’re just going to see more and more services and more and more services being consumed by users on those devices.

So, like in previous years, on day one, we’re going to focus on the data center efforts and the innovation that we’ve done there, and day two, tomorrow we come back, we’ll focus on how we’re going to enable users to be productive on any device they want to work on.

Let’s talk a little bit about what’s happening in the data center. What you’re looking at here is a representation of the OS instances that are deployed today in the data centers around the world. You know, 2011 was an interesting year. 2011 was the year where the install base of virtual OS instances surpassed the install base of physical OS instances.

In calendar year 2012, there will be about 8 million new X86 servers purchased and deployed. Of that 8 million, roughly 6 million will be physical servers, and 2 million will be virtual hosts. On those virtual hosts, 13 million OS instances will be deployed, more than two times the physical instances this year. And as you look at the projections, those projections roll out to where in 2015 the expectation is you’ll have more than 30 million virtual OS instances deployed new in calendar year 2015.

So, what does this mean? What it means is the mix is going to shift. With this explosion of OS instances, we as an industry have just got to get better at management and automation and really enabling this ever-expanding set of OS instances to be well managed and well optimized. And so this shift is going to happen as we increasingly add automation, orchestration, and more and more management, and we’ll shift from a highly virtualized world into a cloud world. And make no mistake; cloud is not dependent on a location. It can be a cloud running on your data center, it’s in a partner’s data center, or in a public data center like Microsoft does with Windows Azure.

But the shift will happen. And as we designed System Center 2012, we had this in mind. So, two points. One, we built this in a way that allows you to manage across the entire spectrum. So, your physical server, virtual server, private and public cloud. We’ve also optimized in a way to help you move towards the cloud computing and really make that cloud computing approach approachable for you. And that really has been the focus of what we’ve done.

Now, let’s just set some common context here so we’re talking a common lingo and we have a common understanding of what cloud computing is.

All too often when I talk with people and I talk about cloud computing, you know, the first thing everybody thinks about is public cloud, moving everything into the public cloud. And many organizations are just not ready for that.

Cloud computing is a compute model, not an indication of where it is running at. I talk about cloud computing, it’s a way of doing compute and it’s a way of consuming capacity independent of location that has these four common attributes. So, if you ask yourself, hey, am I running in a cloud computing type of model? If you can answer yes to these four questions, then you are running in a cloud model.

The first question is: Do I think about and manage my resources in a pooled fashion rather than as individual entities? Second, are the services and applications that I have truly elastic and can expand and contract on demand as needed? Third, have I given a self-service experience to those individuals and teams that are going to consume the infrastructure and the capacity that I’ve built out? And fourth, is there a way to track the usage so that I can do show-back and bill-back and really let the organization know what is being used? If you can answer yes to those four questions, then you’re in a cloud computing model.

Now, let’s just be clear on what private and public cloud means just as we set the context today. If there is a single organization consuming that shared capacity, that pool of capacity, that’s a private cloud. If that shared or pooled capacity is being consumed by multiple organizations, that’s a public cloud. So, that’s the terminology I’m going to use today.

Now, in terms of why people are looking at cloud computing and why are they moving towards it, you know, it really comes down to three things: First, it’s all about increasing the agility of the organization. It’s about doing it in an economic model that is dramatically less expensive, dramatically more efficient than anything else on the market today, and the bottom line is it’s about getting innovation out to your users, your partners, and your customers faster and faster than you’ve ever been able to do in the past.

And, certainly, we at Microsoft are huge believers in this as we run many of the world’s largest services and the cloud platform on Windows Azure.

And I think Microsoft’s perspective on the cloud and our experience in the cloud is unique. And the reason I think it’s unique is we live every single day operating these incredibly large services. You know, these are some of the services that we run there in our public cloud that are commercial-based services. And then think about some of the services we run like Hotmail and Communicator, Xbox Live, Windows Update. These are many of the world’s largest services. And you couple that with Windows Azure, and every day we get a chance to learn. Every day we get a chance to learn and take that learning and then drive it into the product that we’re going to deliver to all of you for your private cloud offering, which is System Center and Windows Server.

You know, there is no substitute for experience. I can just guarantee you that. You know, one of the things that has been brought home to me again and again as we’ve stood up Windows Intune is the value of the engineering team having to live with the cost and the complexity and the problems of operating a service is the single best training ground for that team to also deliver the best solution for you to run in your data center. Because they take that experience every day, and they drive it right into the product.

One of the things that you’ve been super clear with us on is you want to make sure that you’ve got the flexibility and the agility and you want to make common investments that apply in the private cloud as well as in the public.

So, at Microsoft, we’ve done a lot of focus on what we call the common technology. And there are four areas that we put a lot of focus on that we believe are common technologies that basically form the glue that allows you to unite a private and a public cloud.

So, we believe in a common identity delivered through Active Directory. We believe in common virtualization, you have a common virtualization model independent of where you’re running or consuming cloud services from. Common management that spans across everything that you have to manage. Public cloud, private cloud, as well as your physical and virtualized assets.

And then finally, common dev tools. So, as you invest and you develop your applications, you can then choose where best to have that application hosted at, but it’s the same technology and it’s the same effort.

So, today, we’re going to focus on the private cloud. OK? We talked a little bit about the public cloud, and we’ll just take a couple of references to it, but the day is going to focus on the private cloud. Throughout the event, throughout the week, what we’re going to be talking to you about is how we want to help you cloud optimize your business, how we want to help you embrace the model of cloud computing, and move at your own pace and your own rate to consume these cloud computing types of models.

So, when I talk about the private cloud, that’s Windows Server and that’s System Center, OK? So today is a great day, April 17th, 2012. Today, System Center 2012 is available globally. Every customer, every partner worldwide. (Applause.)

You know, as we’ve built the event, as we’ve built the keynote, it’s been this kind of walk down memory lane as we’ve remembered and hearkening back to two and three years ago when we defined System Center 2012 and what our aspirations were and what we wanted to deliver and how much that’s even changed and how much we had to adjust over the last three years.

But I can tell you in my career, I have never seen as much value being delivered in a single release and a single product as what you’re seeing in System Center 2012. And I hope as you go through the week, you see some of the areas that we emphasize. And one of the things that we really put a lot of effort in was simplification. You were just super clear with us. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Simplify how it’s deployed. Simplify how I use it every day. Simplify how it’s packaged and priced and licensed. Make it easy for me to get.

One of the most interesting innovations we did with System Center 2012 is we reduced from over 100 SKUs to two. Simple, easy. OK? I think it’s a big deal. You know, what that allows you to do is you can start to virtualize, you can continue to virtualize, move to cloud computing, and you don’t have to worry about your cost increasing. You don’t have to worry about being taxed like others in the industry would do as you increase your virtualization. You can just do all that you want to do and have a simple licensing and pricing model from Microsoft.

OK, so with that in mind, what I want to do now for the next kind of 60 minutes is walk you through some of the details of System Center 2012, then give you a peek of what’s coming with Windows Server “8” and the update of System Center that will come out at the same time.

So, with that, I want to start with some of the amazing things that we saw in the past program as we’ve built and delivered 2012. Amazing, amazing program; you had 5500 customers that were participating in the program. 200 of those agreed with us to join what we call the TAP program. One of the requirements of the TAP program is that you have to deploy the pre-release bits into production and run your business on it.

We had over 100,000 servers that were being managed worldwide by the pre-release bits, and incidentally, only 10,000 of those were inside of Microsoft. So, 90,000 servers around the world and your data centers were using the pre-release bits and running your business using this product.

And the reason I give you these data points is I want you to just understand how deeply ready this product is for you. This product is ready to embrace your most sophisticated and most high availability and most mission-critical applications and platforms and services. We want to be the solution that monitors that and manages that.

Now, I thought it would be good if you actually heard from some of the customers that actually took the steps and deployed and built their private cloud with the beta bits of System Center 2012. So, let’s just watch a quick video here where four of those customers are going to walk you through what they did with the pre-release bits.

(Break for Customer Montage video.)

BRAD ANDERSON: What a thrill to hear a customer say the product you just built is a game-changer. To give you just an idea of the scale that these organizations are running at, you know, these four customers, they’ve got 1500 to 2500 VMs in their private cloud. So, that’s kind of the size that they’ve been running in production, again, with the beta bits.

A couple of interesting data points that I just found fascinating. And I just want to point out something from Unilever. Unilever has a corporate goal with close to 170,000 employees; they want to double the size of their business without increasing their environmental footprint at all. And it’s an honor and privilege to be one of the partners participating with them in making that happen through what they’re doing with the Microsoft private cloud.

You can bet on what you’re going to have in your hands today, you can bet on System Center 2012 to run your business.

Now, at Microsoft, we certainly realize that it’s not just what we do, but it’s what we do with our partners. What you’re looking at here are some of the most core and critical partners that we have — not only ours, but your partners as well. We’ve worked with these partners throughout the years on what we call the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track.

Now what Fast Track is, it’s a set of requirements that actually comes from the engineering organization for Windows Server and System Center. And what we do is we lay out what the requirements are for the best and most optimized, most secure, and best-configured private cloud solutions. And then we work with these partners to certify their configurations.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that across these key partners, there are 12 certified configurations that we’ve worked with them, they’re pre-optimized, they’re pre-tested, they’re pre-configured, they’re optimized to give you the absolutely best experience out of the box you can have.

The whole Fast Track program is about flexibility and it’s about choice. We certainly understand one size does not fit all. You’ve got multiple partners, you want to have the choice that you want to be able to say, “I want this particular hardware vendor to provide my data center capabilities and I’m going to get storage from this particular vendor.” And with these Fast Track solutions, you have that flexibility rather than being forced into trying to just look at one particular option. So, hats off to these partners, and I would really encourage you to go take a look and talk with them throughout the week here, and really understand what these Fast Track solutions do for you. Because, literally, you can get ahold of these and have a private cloud up and running in a very, very short period of time.

Now, last year at the event, we were walking you through some of the research that we had done as we defined System Center 2012. And one of the big kind of ah-has for us is we needed to build experiences for two different contingencies within our customers’ accounts.

There’s the organizations on your left, and these are the teams that are all about delivering the infrastructure. These are the infrastructure teams, which most of the people in this room and most of the people watching this are going to align with. You know, they’re all about delivering an SLA, they’re all about making sure that infrastructure is secure and doing it in a predictable way.

Then you’ve got the teams inside your corporation that are consuming that capacity, or that serve a consumer. You know, these are the line-of-business administrators. Maybe it’s dev and test, but they’re not so much worried about the infrastructure, they’re just worried about the applications and services that they want to deploy on that, and their goals are all about agility. They want to be empowered. They want to do things in a simple, simple manner.

So, as we set out and designed System Center 2012, we actually built two experiences, one for the traditional enterprise infrastructure team, the service provider, and one for the application owner or the service consumer. What you’re going to see through the rest of the keynote today is we’re going to be demonstrating these, and we’re going to be demonstrating both consoles. We’ll have one individual who is going to represent the service provider, and we’ll have one individual who is going to represent that service consumer, so you’ll get a feel for that interoperability, because we wanted to really enable these organizations, these teams to connect.

So, with that, let me give you kind of like the three-minute version of what System Center 2012 is and then we’re going to dive into some of the common scenarios that you see every day in your organization and show you how we simplify, how we’ve automated those common tasks, and really help you move from a highly virtualized world into a cloud computing world.

So, first of all, if you think about historically, when you deploy an application onto a Windows Server, when you actually deploy the application, the application and Windows kind of go through a mating ritual, and they kind of just come together in a way where you can no longer identify what’s the application and what’s the operating system.

So, one of the biggest things that we’ve done in System Center 2012 is we’ve broken that tight coupling. When you were tightly coupled, you lost flexibility. You lost the ability to provide the level of resilience from your service that you needed. Every time, you know, you had to do something like patch a server or update a server, you had to bring the server down because everything was so tightly coupled.

Now that that coupling is broken, you can start to think about things in terms of pools. So, you can think about all your servers. You can think about your storage and your network, and you can start to think about the infrastructure completely separated now from the application.

As you’re thinking about how you manage your compute, your storage, and your network as one cohesive whole, that actually is a cloud. That actually is what the definition of a cloud is. It’s looking at those things in a pooled manner.

Now, once you start being able to think about that in a cloud perspective, you can start to think about your services. And you can start — we’ve done a bunch of innovation in how you can model a service, you can represent all the different tiers, what the dependencies are, how much capacity is needed in each service, when each service should automatically scale up and scale down, what those conditions are. And then what constitutes appropriate performance and availability of that service.

Then when you actually go to deploy the service, you want to be able to select which cloud you’re going to put that into, whether that’s a cloud running in your data center, in a service provider, or in a public cloud like Windows Azure.

Those are kind of the four basic things I would have you remember that System Center 2012 delivers for you. The ability to think about your applications and your infrastructure separately, the ability to manage all your infrastructure as one cohesive whole, the ability to manage at the service level, not just at the individual server level, but at the service level. And then, fourth, the flexibility to choose, in a simple way, which cloud you want to deploy that service in. And that’s what we’re going to walk you through for the rest of the morning.

So, here’s a common scenario number one. You just purchased a bunch of new capacity, a bunch of new servers. What has to happen in order for you to take that new capacity, all those same servers and bring them online so that they can be consumed?

Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to take a visit over to the storage team. Make sure that all the storage you need is configured and allocated. Then you have to go make a visit to the networking team. And I thought about maybe having some fun here and having, you know, an individual walk over and get on their knees and beg for the appropriate thing.

But there are a whole lot of other things that have to happen, right? I’m seeing a bunch of heads go up and down here. You’ve got to connect it to the network. You’ve got to configure the BIOS, you’ve got to join the domain, you’ve got to deploy the agent. There are a whole bunch of things that have to happen in order for that capacity to come online and be productive.

The reality is all these things take time. They just take time. And when you’re working in a cloud model, all of that can be automated.

What I want to walk you through is a demonstration here where you can start to think about your storage, your compute, and your network as one. And as new capacity comes into your organization, new servers, how easily and how simply you can deploy that new capacity for it to be consumed.

To do that, I’m going to invite Vijay Tewari up, one of our principal leaders in the program management team in System Center. Let’s give him a hand. (Applause.)

VIJAY TEWARI: Thanks, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: OK, thanks, Vijay.

VIJAY TEWARI: Good morning, everyone. How are you doing today? Oh, come on, you can do better than that. How are you doing today? (Cheers.) That’s better.

First of all, it’s a privilege and an honor to represent System Center 2012 here. And I want to thank each and every one of you who provided us invaluable feedback so we could develop System Center to meet your needs.

In this demo, what we’re going to show you is how easy it is to add capacity to your data center and provision your private cloud resources.

Let’s start here in the System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager component console. We, as data center administrators, have to manage a variety of resources. We manage storage, we manage network, we manage Hyper-V hosts and clusters, and yes, we also manage those third-party hypervisors like VMware and Citrix XenServer.

With System Center 2012, you can manage all those resources right from in here from Virtual Machine Manager. Isn’t that great?

Now, as you move from virtualization to the private cloud, Brad mentioned about self service. With increased self service, we as data center administrators want to make sure that our infrastructure can respond to the variability in workload. We want to be able to provision capacity before my application owners ask me for that. Let’s see how System Center 2012 helps me with that.

Here, I have a report from System Center 2012, which is showing me the estimated growth in utilization of my CPU over time. As you can see, I’m going to run out of buffer capacity in a few days.

To be proactive, I’ll go ahead and provision some capacity in my private cloud. In order to do that, I ordered a rack of servers. They’ve been wired up. They’re connected to the network, but they now need to be provisioned before they’re added to my private cloud resource pool.

Let’s go see how easy it is to make that happen. I come here. I go to add my resources. I add Hyper-V hosts and clusters. Now, remember at this stage, the machine does not have an operating system on it, but I still need to be able to communicate with it. So, we have base code management controllers on these physical servers, and I, using industry-standard protocols like IPMI and SMASH, can communicate to these servers.

I’ll select IPMI here. Let me select an account that allows me to communicate with the base code management controller. Let me select an IP range so that I can go ahead and discover my resources inside the data center.

As you’ll see here, System Center has discovered a variety of different servers in the environment. I’ll pick one that I want to provision. Now, at this stage, I need to give it a few pieces of information so the automation in Virtual Machine Manager can take care of the rest. I need to tell it which particular resource pool the machine needs to show up under. I need to give it a set of configuration parameters so that the host can be configured according to the policies that are set up inside my data center. And I need to give it a name so after it is provisioned, I can actually talk to the machine.

There you have it. That’s all it took for me to go and start provisioning a host. And automation will take care of the rest.

Now, this takes a little while. So, we did one earlier. I want to show you how that went.

(Break for video segment.)

VIJAY TEWARI: Oh, that’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it, right? And, by the way, that sketch that I made, I’m going to auction it right after MMS, so come see me in case you want that sketch.

Alright. Then we come back to what we did with the host after that. So, now that we’ve got compute, let’s start networking. You know, I have yet to meet an application owner who comes to me and says, “I want my application or virtual machines to connect to VLAN 25 subnet 10.0.0.0/29.” It just doesn’t happen. They use language like, “I want my virtual machine to connect to the Internet. I want to connect it to the corporate network.”

In Virtual Machine Manager, Logical Networks allows us to speak the language of our application. Here, you can see that we have the definition of the Contoso corporate network. Contoso has three different data centers, and this network is defined differently in each of those two data centers.

But the application just expresses its connectivity through the Contoso network. And automation in VMM will take care of connecting and configuring the underlying environment so that the virtual machine connects to the Contoso network regardless of the data center that it gets deployed to.

All right, so we’ve got compute, we’ve got networking. What are we missing here? Let’s talk storage. All right, in System Center Virtual Machine Manager, we allow you to classify your storage based on the performance of that storage. And we allow you to express the SLA requirement of the application inside the application template. So, at the time of deployment, we can make sure that we deploy your VMs and services and applications to the right storage environment so that your application SLAs can be met.

Now, in this particular private cloud, I’m using a Dell Compellent storage center. But the industry has defined a protocol called SMIS, which allows me to manage the storage that is provided to me by my storage team so I can not only discover LUNs but I can also just create LUNs right from in here. This makes it far easier both for my storage team and for myself and it prevents the back and forth between both of us.

Alright, so we’ve got compute. We’ve got networking. We’ve got storage. Now, I need to go add my compute node into a cluster. Let’s go see how to make that happen.

Alright. Now, watch this. I’m just going to take this node and I’m going to drag it into my cluster. I need to just configure it with a set of credentials that are required. And there you have it. With just a few clicks, I’ve taken a machine and I’ve added it to the cluster. Virtual Machine Manager will make sure that under the covers, the automation will mask and unmask the storage, enable clustering, and then add it to the resource pool so it’s available for my workload to get deployed.

In this demo, what you saw was how we took a machine from bare metal, we configured the network, we configured the storage, and we have added capacity to your private cloud resource pool. So, it’s available for your workload to get deployed on. Thank you. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Vijay. I got so excited. Oh, you know what? I had a question for you, though.

VIJAY TEWARI: Yes?

BRAD ANDERSON: You know, you talked about how you can add additional capacity, but how long and how much effort is it to actually create a cloud infrastructure from scratch? Is that something you can show me?

VIJAY TEWARI: I wasn’t set up for it, but sure, I can try. Now, in the past, I’ve done that for about 30 seconds. Let me see if I can beat that today.

BRAD ANDERSON: Let me see if I understand what you said. You said you can set up the infrastructure for a private cloud in 30 seconds or less?

VIJAY TEWARI: Let’s try. Ready to time me?

BRAD ANDERSON: All right.

VIJAY TEWARI: All right, let’s go. So, I’ll give it a name. I’ll select all hosts. I’ll select the Contoso data center network. I’ll configure my load balancer. I’ll select appropriate bit profile. I’ll select my storage for this. And since I’m giving you the cloud, I’ll give you about two VMs to start off with. I get to tell my VP how much resources he gets, right?

BRAD ANDERSON: I do good when I do what I’m told.

VIJAY TEWARI: I select hypervisor. Of course I’m going to select Hyper-V, right guys? Alright. And there you have it, Brad.

BRAD ANDERSON: All right. 35 seconds, I know you were talking as you were going. Thanks, Vijay.

VIJAY TEWARI: Thanks, Brad, I really appreciate it.

BRAD ANDERSON: Yes. (Applause.) Everybody really understand what you just saw? A private cloud infrastructure in 30 seconds.

I mentioned we focused a lot on simplicity. We focused a lot on making the concept of the cloud approachable for you and literally being able to set up your compute, your storage, and your network and have that infrastructure set up and ready for you to start to deploy continuous services on that infrastructure, you can do the configuration in the 30 seconds to get that up and running. That’s simplicity, OK? That’s the kind of solution you should demand of us. That’s the kind of solution you should demand of your vendor and say make it just easy, make it just simple while you’re making it high value.

OK, so now we talked a little bit about the underlying infrastructure. Vijay came out and showed how you can now manage your compute, your storage, and your network as one cohesive whole. The work we’ve done inside of System Center to really integrate in the network and really bring in the storage is really, really good work. And, again, this isn’t trying to replace what the network administrators do or the storage administrators do, it’s about taking capacity they allocate to you to then be able to quickly associate that with different clouds and different capacity, and they really quickly get that capacity online for the organization.

Let’s take it up to the next level. Now, let’s start to talk about the innovations we’ve done at the service level. Just like we’ve done the innovation to help you manage all your infrastructure as one, we also wanted to make sure that you can manage your services as one.

Now, think about just for a minute the services that you deploy inside your organization. They’re generally multi-tier. You know, this architecture of a three-tier application, a Web tier, an app tier, and a data tier is very, very common. Each one of those tiers generally has multiple servers. You’ve got to associate all the configuration, the settings, how much capacity each one needs. And you certainly then want to have a view of the performance and availability of the service. This is what everyone wants to get to.

But just like with the previous demo, we know that it’s not that easy. In order to get this up and running, there are all kinds of things you’ve got to do, and it’s all manual. You’ve got to go out and do things like provision the applications, configure them, associate the different associations to the network, to the storage. You’ve got to do things like run it and test it in test, then move it to pre-prod, and then into production.

The work of actually defining, deploying a service, and then moving that service through its lifecycle from test into pre-production into production and then managing that service in production is something that the industry has not been able to do in the past.

So, it’s a problem we wanted to tackle. And we said just like we’ve done the work to enable you to manage your infrastructure in one cohesive and one consistent way, we want to change the way in which you manage your services and no longer manage at a server level, but literally get a view of the entire service, all the associations, all the relationships, all the interdependencies, be able to define that through a service template, and then from that actually be able to deploy and update and move at a service level.

OK, that is what we set out to do, and that’s what we want to show you. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to invite Ryan O’Hara out. Ryan runs all program management for System Center, to show you the innovations we’ve done at the service level. Let’s give him a welcome. (Applause.) And Vijay is coming out as well, that’s right. (Applause.)

RYAN O’HARA: Thanks, Brad. So, Vijay showed you earlier System Center 2012 has a ton of capabilities for simplifying data center administration. So, what I want to show you is how self service and automation are really going to change the dynamic between app owners like myself and data center admins like Vijay.

So, let’s go into the console here where we’ve got a pretty typical line of business application that’s been deployed. In this case, it’s the expense management application for that ever-famous Contoso Corporation.

You can see from the title here, it’s been deployed to a pre-prod environment that’s running on Vijay’s private cloud. And we’ve been running some simulated transactions through the application to validate the logic of the application before we move it into the production environment.

Now, as an application owner, I would typically manage a portfolio of applications. And in order to do that, I would look to App Controller to get my day-to-day job done. Now as I move to the App Controller component of System Center 2012, the first thing that you’ll notice is that we’ve got an integrated understanding of my identity, working across the cloud.

Now, as a result of this, I can have single-sign-on visibility and control over all of my cloud resources, whether they’re in the private cloud or running in the public cloud instance of Azure.

Now, as I move over here to the services tab, you get a simple tile layout of all of the applications that I manage. You can see that Contoso application that’s been deployed for managing expenses as well as an application that’s been deployed into my Azure subscription.

Now, these tiles are pretty simple, but if you click on them, you can see some of the insight that they have about my application. Like the tiers that make up the application as well as any of the instances that make up each one of those tiers.

So, I’m feeling pretty good about the application logic at this point, but I want to see how Vijay’s private cloud holds up when I apply some load to the application. I want to make sure that the infrastructure responds as I would expect.

So, in order to do this, we created a load simulation tool where I can create some CPU and memory stress on the application itself. I’ll just dial up the resources here and commit some of these settings. Vijay, let’s see how your private cloud holds up with this.

VIJAY TEWARI: It’s really easy for me, Ryan, because it’s System Center 2012 that’s doing all the work. What’s happening here is that the performance metrics are being breached in an SLA that you define, and System Center Operations Manager is picking up that breach in performance SLA. And it is providing an alert to System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and there you see that we are scaling out the Web tier because we are breaching the SLA that I provided to you.

Let me just show you what happens in the operations console as well. You’ll see here that Operations Manager has picked up the alert and then forwarded it on to VMM so I meet your SLA.

RYAN O’HARA: All right, well, if what you’ve said is true, if we go back to my console, we should see that the application is undergoing change. And, in fact, that’s what’s happening here. The Contoso pre-prod deployment of the expense application is now undergoing change and new instances of the Web tier are being spun up. And I’m getting the response that I was looking for. So, you’re doing a good job over there, Vijay.

All right, so I’m feeling good about how the private cloud infrastructure is responding. I’m feeling pretty good about how my application logic is responding. It’s time to move this into production.

Now, if I move over to the cloud view, I can see that I have access to the pre-production environment, as well as that Windows Azure subscription that I talked about earlier. But I don’t have access to the production resources. Now, in the past, this would have been a pretty complicated back and forth between Vijay and I as I described the resources that I need and what capabilities my application was composed of.

So, in this case, we’re using System Center to automate this process. We’ve established an IT portal where I have self-service access to this type of request. I’ll just go to this request form, and I can identify the resources that I want access to, I can also describe the type of resources and the capacity that I require for this application, and I can configure my business continuity policy.

It looks like down here every application that’s deployed into the production cloud is going to get AD protection as well as ongoing monitoring.

So, as I click next, I’m essentially assembling a service request, once again, that is a tall order of work for Vijay over there. So, as I click “submit” let’s see how he’s going to handle what is a tall order for an infrastructure buildout. Vijay, what have you got for me?

VIJAY TEWARI: Hey, Ryan. You seem to be making my life difficult, but let me tell you, System Center really makes my life easy here. What happened here was that System Center Service Manager received the request from Ryan. The automation of System Center Orchestrator configured the business continuity policies in Data Production Manager, and it provided access in Virtual Machine Manager that’s completely automated.

However, we do log the request in Service Manager for subsequent audit. And, of course, we know that some organizations they want to have a manual approval process, and System Center Service Manager completely allows you to do that as well.

Maybe I need to go see the rest of Vegas while I’m here, right?

RYAN O’HARA: Man, you’re making things easy on me as well, Vijay. Thanks a lot. (Laughter.)

So, now as we jump back into my console, you can see that App Controller has refreshed and now it’s brought back that production cloud capacity that I’m going to need to drive this application out into the production deployment.

So, now App Controller really simplifies the deployment process from here as well. I simply choose the cloud that I want to deploy to, click on the “deploy” button here, and now App Controller is going to prompt me for a service template.

Now, a service template is a recipe of my application. It captures all of the deployment parameters and processes in a standardized fashion so that every application that I deploy will be predictable, automated, and repeatable. So, there’s my new deployment of the Contoso application. I’ll click through the wizard here and let the system do its work. And I’ll be back out in a little bit to give you a tour of that application that’s deployed in the production cloud. Thanks a lot.

VIJAY TEWARI: Thanks a lot. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Hey, can I get one of those mugs too? All right.

You know, one of the things I just love about the keynote today and the demos is it’s just all very, very practical. It’s all about what you can do with the technology that sits in your hands today. You know, we’re talking about what our vision is, we’re talking about how we’re delivering on that. But every single thing that you’ve seen so far today are things that you can do today. And this last demo I love. It integrates all the components of System Center from Virtual Machine Manager managing the workflow and the approval to Orchestrator orchestrating the process, the experience that we built for the application owner in that tiled view of all the different clouds and the services. And, finally, with Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager showing how the infrastructure is performing and making sure that the right things happen.

You know, when you talk about that move from a highly virtualized world into a cloud world, that’s what it is. It’s not some nebulous concept. It literally is taking the tool that you’ve been using in System Center for years and years and using it more fully and doing more automation, doing more orchestration and management, and really taking advantage of all the technology to automate and get rid of having to do all these things in a manual fashion. That really is how you move from virtualized into the cloud.

You know, one thing I love about social media as well is I get a chance to, real time, when I kind of step back up, what are people tweeting right now? I just thought I’d read you a couple here. One, Jonathan, the keynote is about enabling us to run the business. Mike, the new, improved technology makes me want to be a better IT professional. Dan, wow, clustering cannot get easier than that.

And I have to admit, there are a bunch of tweets going on right now about why Brad is so tan. (Laughter.) So I do feel I have to comment on that. You know, in Seattle we have two seasons, we have rain and the month of August. And so when spring break comes around, the city just empties and everyone tries to kind of refresh themselves with the sun. Actually, it’s the first time ever we’ve had spring break and MMS line up back to back, so my family and I, we were on vacation. I guess I should have used a little more sunscreen.

OK. So, let’s talk about the next level of detail. In that demo, what you saw there was, you know, Ryan had an increased load put on his service. System Center automatically provisioned a new Web server, brought the utilization back down, and life was good. OK, and that’s just a regular occurrence. You can set the policies, you can set the thresholds and System Center will take care of all that for you.

But we all know that stuff happens. And so how can we help you and what have we done from an innovation standpoint that when the service is having problems, how can we help you understand where the problem is, what the problem is, and troubleshoot it?

Wouldn’t it be nice that when you see that there’s some type of an issue with the service, that we could actually help you now through that root cause analysis that shows, hey, the problem, you have availability, you know, the service is on. The performance is there, but your availability in certain parts of the world is poor or not at all, non-existent.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could help you understand, hey, it actually is this server in the app here and it’s a network connectivity issue. So, what we have done in System Center 2012 is really try to bring all of this together. Take all the knowledge that we have of the infrastructure, the increased knowledge in the network and the storage, not only from Microsoft, but across our partners. Take the knowledge that we have of the applications, and I will tell you the knowledge that we ship with System Center and the knowledge about your applications, what you get from Microsoft is unparalleled. And that value and the knowledge is really what makes this so valuable.

But then we’re able to bring it all together and we can tell you how the system is performing, how the server is doing, how is the hypervisor doing? Whether it’s our hypervisor or somebody else’s hypervisor, how is the service doing? Because as you built out that service template, we understand the intricacies and the interrelationships and the dependencies, and we can bring this all together in a way that we can give you performance and availability, but when things happen, we can help you rapidly understand where the issue is so you can address it and troubleshoot it to move forward.

But we’ve even done more. We’ve done the work that we can also help you understand is it an issue with the system, with the configuration, or is it a code issue? You know, one of the most frustrating things that many of us struggle with is we have something in production, there’s a problem with it, you think it’s a code issue. You go to toss it to developers, and of course the developers say, “Hey, it can’t be a code issue, it’s got to be something in your configuration.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was integration with Visual Studio so that when an issue occurs, you can automatically snap a picture of that VM, have it automatically sent to the development team, they can hydrate the VM inside of Visual Studio, troubleshoot, do all the things they have to do. Oh, boy, it is my problem, I get it fixed, and then let you know. Wouldn’t that be nice if there’s that kind of automation across operations and development?

Let me show you what we’ve done there. OK. So, we’re going to invite Ryan back out, and he’s going to show you some of the things that we’ve done in terms of monitoring and getting to the root cause at the service level. Give him a hand back. (Applause.)

RYAN O’HARA: All right. So, a few minutes ago, I showed you how System Center is enabling application owners to get their jobs done. In the case of acquiring new capacity or deploying new instances of an application.

But as Brad just mentioned, the SLA is really won or lost in the day-to-day operations of the application. So, this time, I’ve left my coffee cup backstage, and we’re going to get into some of the hardcore performance details of this expense management application.

So, we’ll jump into the console here. And we’ll take a look at some of the deep insights that we’ve invested in across Operations Manager as well as across Visual Studio and System Center to simplify processes as they flow across the dev-ops lifecycle.

Now, here I am in the Ops Manager Web console. And, once again, you’ll notice that we have this understanding of my identity, just as we did in App Controller. Now, as a result, this entire experience is customized to just the things that I want to see. In this case, we’re looking at this expense management application.

Now, the surface of this dashboard is configurable. And so I’ve decided to create a service-level objective for the availability of the application as well as one that’s monitoring the performance of the application.

Now, if we look at the availability, you can see that we’re doing pretty well. We’re running a series of synthetic transactions on watcher nodes deployed in my data center. And they’re pinging the end points of the application and telling me that we’re at 100 percent availability over the last 24 hours.

Now, if I toggle over here to the performance view of the application, the story is going to be a little bit different. As it refreshes, you can see that the actual response time of the application is nearing 20 seconds, or 18.8 seconds relative to a threshold of seven. So, clearly, we’ve hit an unacceptable state for my application. Now, the interesting thing is that if I were living in just a VM world, I would have no insight like this at all. I would be blind to the performance of my application.

In fact, all I would know is that my VM is up and running, and from that I might infer that my application is available, but I would have no clue that my application is, in fact, responding like this every time my users hit it. And, effectively, they’re all experiencing an outage.

But in System Center 2012, we don’t just help you to identify issues, we help you to diagnose and remediate these as well.

I’ll move over here to the Ops Manager application diagnostics console. Here, again, I can see all of the application tiers that make up the Contoso expense management application. I can see that the problem seems to lie in this Web services tier where the response time is really getting bogged down. But I can simply click to drill in, and I get trended performance information over time as well as a set of key metrics, including some of the application failures that are being thrown off this application.

Now, once again, I can click in. And this time I’m presented with a ton of detail about this particular failure. I’m getting line-of-code-level detail about what seems to be an errant SQL call, and I can also include any of the parameters that are being tasked as part of this query. So, pretty rich detail.

As an application owner, I’m typically not going to troubleshoot this one myself. This is clearly a code bug, and it’s one that I’m going to push back into my development team. But System Center 2012 helps us there as well. You know, Brad mentioned that we have an opportunity to work with the Visual Studio team to build this bridge between System Center and Visual Studio. And that’s exactly what we’ve done in this release. In fact, I’ve got a Visual Studio console fired up over here, and I can start to share with you what the development experience looks like. Developers are going to find those same issues from operations forwarded into the work items over here. And you can see on the tree, we’ve got the Contoso Expenses work item.

And if I click into here, you can see the issue is actually here in the Visual Studio context, familiar for the developer, and it has all of that same rich information that I had in my Ops Manager tools.

So, that’s just an example of how System Center 2012 is giving you insight across the infrastructure and virtual machines and into your applications and your SLAs. Thanks very much. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: Thanks, Ryan. All right. What an amazing amount of technology, OK? System Center 2012, you know, one of the tweets that just went across was, you know, System Center 2012 gives me more time to drink coffee from my giant mug. And people are asking if they can actually buy Vijay’s mug right now.

OK. Now, one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear, one of the things that’s been really interesting to me as I’ve walked through the halls the last couple of days is I get a chance to talk with a few of you, I’ve heard the following: Boy, the demand in my area and my company for people who understand System Center 2012 is just through the roof. There is so much demand out there to embrace and start to use this technology, and there’s just so much opportunity for me as an IT professional to show leadership and demonstrate leadership. What are you doing to help us be certified, be recognized and certified in the Microsoft private cloud, and then what are you going to do to help me get my hands on, as quickly as I can, and get experience with it?

Just as we’re watching much of the industry be re-imagined with cloud computing, we’ve also taken the opportunity to step back and look at the Microsoft certified program and take a look at updating that for the cloud.

So, I’m happy to announce here that now you can see on the Web for those who are viewing this online, we’ve now updated the Microsoft certification program to include specifically a support engineer for the private cloud. And for those of you who are attending here in Vegas, you can actually take this test here while you’re in Vegas and be the first in your area, the first in your company, the first in your community to be certified and have on your business card, “I am a certified professional in the Microsoft private cloud.” I would really encourage you to do that. Take advantage of that opportunity.

The next thing is I asked the team, I said, “Listen, I want everyone who comes to the event to be able to walk away with a private cloud in their pocket.” How many of you have noticed what this little key drive is in your backpacks? Anybody take it out experimented with it yet? OK, see a couple hands.

Let me tell you about this. This right here, literally, is a private cloud on a stick or a private cloud in your pocket. On this, you have everything that is needed to get the Microsoft private cloud up and running. You’ve got SQL instances, you’ve got every aspect of System Center, all ready to go and ready to be deployed. Literally, what you can do is take, insert this in, answer a handful of questions, go have dinner, come back, the entire Microsoft private cloud will be set up and running for you. OK? Private cloud in the pocket. (Applause.)

I think that goes a long way to just show you the proof of the work that we’ve done to simplify that you might be interested. What actually is doing the entire process of deploying the entire private cloud, it’s a giant run book from System Center Orchestrator, if you wanted to pop that open and take a look at how we’ve orchestrated the entire deployment of the Microsoft private cloud through System Center 2012.

So, now we’ve talked about System Center 2012, and really I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve delivered in the market. I hope you give us feedback, I hope you’re pleased with what you get a chance to see and experiment with, and ultimately I hope we accelerate your business and accelerate your personal careers with what we’ve built. But I’ve got to tell you, it gets even better. It gets even better this year, because this year we’re going to be releasing Windows Server “8.” And with our partners, we’re going to be doing some amazing things.

One thing I did want to point out is, as you walk out and go take a look at the server aquarium that we’ve built in conjunction with HP, this is a Microsoft private cloud running on the HP virtual system. And it is powering all of the hands-on labs that you’re going to be using all week.

To give you an idea of just what this is doing for us, every 90 minutes, we reprovision 1,200 VMs to support the hands-on labs. It takes us less than 10 minutes to reprovision or provision those 1,200 VMs. Over the week, we will literally be provisioning over 45,000 VMs as all of you participate in the hands-on labs. So, go take a look at that, and take a look at the work of that Microsoft private cloud running on the HP virtual system hardware.

Now, as I mentioned, it just gets better, and it gets a lot better. I’ve got to tell you, 2012 is an amazing, amazing product. We’re going to have updates of the System Center 2012 in conjunction when Windows Server “8” releases, and things are even going to get better. You know, I read some of these quotes on this as we released the beta a couple of months ago. And I’ve seen quotes of things like: It’s the most ambitious. Nothing Microsoft has ever done, and I mean nothing  I’m going to read right here  “nothing literally has been ever this ambitious.” Windows Server “8” takes your breath away. 200 TAP customers working with it. Let me say it again, it’s an amazing product, and far and away the most amazing release of Windows Server we’ve ever done.

Now, we’ve code named it Windows Server “8.” I think it’s about time we actually give it a name. What do you think? Should we announce today what the official name of this is going to be? (Applause.) Watch carefully. (Cheers and applause.) All right. So, you’re the first to know, Windows Server Code Name 8 henceforth and from here on will be called Windows Server 2012. A couple of things that means, it will be releasing this calendar year. (Cheers.) We will also be releasing an update to System Center 2012 that lights up all those new capabilities.

Now, as I mentioned, this is a phenomenal product. And the work that we’ve been doing together across the System Center and Windows Server organization is phenomenal, so much so that the product just speaks for itself. I thought actually the best way to introduce you to Windows Server 8, and the update that we’ll do for System Center along with that is just literally to see it. So, with that, we’re going to invite Jeff Woolsey out. He’s going to give you just a five-minute highlight of just a handful of the new value coming in Windows Server 2012, and I think you’re going to be impressed.

Let’s welcome Jeff.

(Applause.)

JEFF WOOLSEY: Thanks, Brad. It’s a pleasure to be here.

How is everybody doing? (Audience response.) Oh, come on, how is everybody doing? (Audience response.) All right, folks, finally I get to say it, Windows Server 2012.

Windows Server 2012 is about making your business more agile. It’s about making your data centers more flexible. It’s about providing you the ability to securely extend your data centers to the cloud on your terms. Quite simply, Windows Server 2012 is about providing you the best platform for cloud.

Let’s start with some of our investments in storage. One of our key areas of focus has been to make continuously available storage more cost-effective for businesses of all sizes. For Storage Spaces, we can aggregate physical storage resources and create flexible, resilient storage pools that can be easily expanded based on your business needs.

Let me show you. So, here I’ve got a storage pool, and you can see that I’m running low on capacity. I’ve got less than 10 gigabytes. Anybody run into this issue before?

So, I would like to quickly add some more capacity. So, I’m going to right click, and you can see with Storage Space, it’s literally “OK, let’s go add a physical disk.” In fact, I’ve got two that I’m ready to add because I need capacity right now. And if I, by the way, wanted to add it with additional resiliency and reliability, I can also make this is a Hot Spare. But I know right now, I just need to get the capacity online, I’ll add some Hot Spares later.

So, literally, in three clicks, I’m adding 270 gigabytes of storage to my pool. My workloads, my services, my applications that are accessing this storage are all doing it without any interruption to the service, all hot, all without any downtime. All of that capability is built into the box.

Now let’s talk about scale for just a minute. With Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 R2 today, we can already virtualize the vast majority of your workloads. However, we also recognize that folks want to virtualize more and more of their scale up workloads, workloads that use dozens of cores, hundreds of gigabytes of memory are likely span attached with high I/O requirements, think massive SQL Server. Well, these are the workloads we targeted with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012.

So, here you can see I’ve got a virtual machine with 32 virtual processors. In addition, this virtual machine has also been allocated over 120 gigabytes of memory. I should also point out, we now support up to a full terabyte of memory per virtual machine. And whether your VM needs a gigabyte of memory, 10 gigabytes of memory, 100 gigabytes of memory, or a full terabyte, it costs the same.

From a virtual storage standpoint, we now support up to 64 terabytes per virtual disk, or 32 times anyone else in the industry. From a cluster standpoint, we now support the largest clusters in the industry, up to 64 nodes in 4,000 virtual machines in a cluster. All of this is available today in the Windows Server 2012 beta.

Now, let’s get to one of your favorite topics, VM mobility. Live Migration in Windows Server 2012 has been greatly enhanced. With Live Migration in Server 2012, we now can perform concurrent Live Migration limited only by the hardware you want to provide. We now provide Live Storage Migration so you can move your virtual disks without any downtime from direct attach storage to SANs to files, any combination. That’s Live Storage Migration.

But, you know what, that wasn’t enough. You told us to take Live Migration to the next level. For example, today there’s no way to live migrate a virtual machine between two separate clusters on any virtualization platform. In fact, long considered the holy grail of Live Migration, wouldn’t it be great if you could live migrate a VM between two servers, or between two clusters with nothing but an Ethernet cable? We think so, too. No shared storage, no SANs, no fiber channel, no clustering, just Ethernet. That’s why we’re introducing Shared Nothing Live Migration. And for the first time ever, I want to show you Shared Nothing Live Migration with Virtual Machine Manager.

Here you can see I’ve got Virtual Machine Manager and all my VMs in my infrastructure. I’ve got a VM here that I would simply like to Live Migrate. I’m going to right click, and click on Migrate Virtual Machine. Now, you can see I’ve got a couple of different options. Number one, I could choose to do a Live Storage Migration, or I could Live Migrate the entire virtual machine, the virtual and the storage.

So, I’m going to go ahead and select that. I’m going to click next. Now it asks me if I’d like to change the storage location. I’m going to go with the default, that’s fine. It asks me, by the way, would you like to reconfigure the network for the new host you’re moving into? No, I’m fine with the defaults, thank you. And finally, before I actually click on the final move, let’s view the script. Here’s the actual Power Shell that VMM is using to call the Share Nothing Live Migration. You can simply copy and paste this into a script, and use this as the basis for some automation with Orchestrator in the future. I’m simply going to click on move, and what you’re seeing right now is I’m simply live migrating a virtual machine from one server to another, with nothing but an Ethernet cable, using Shared Nothing Live Migration. (Applause.)

Now, while that Live Migration is finishing up, I want to tell you about a key challenge facing the entire industry, network multi-tenancy. One of the big challenges to cloud is the fact that I need to have multiple groups, multiple organizations, multiple companies sharing my same physical network fabric, but I need to keep them isolated on the same fabric. This is a key challenge. For example, if I just want to take a virtual machine and run it in a service provider context, most likely he’s going to say, absolutely we can do that, but you’re going to need to change your IP addresses around. We’ll give you some new IP addresses. Most companies, that’s the last thing you want to do, IP addresses mean more to them, they have much more semantic value than just an IP address.

In fact, wouldn’t it be great if you could move a virtual machine between data centers, or to a service provider without having to re-IP your workload? We think so, too. That’s why we’re introducing network virtualization into Windows Server 2012. Let me show you.

You’ll see up here on the console, we’ve got VMM, and we’ve got a variety of different companies. In fact, we’ve got seven different companies here, and if you’ll notice, if you look at the subnets, for example, you’ll see that Wingtip Networks, Tailspin Toys, and Contoso Networks are actually sharing the same subnet, the same IP address range, but they’re using the same physical fabric and by that I mean the same switches, the same NICs, the same routers, the same cables, yet they’re completely isolated, even though they’re running on the same fabric. To make this point even clearer, let’s click into this one step further and take a look, and what you see is actually Contoso and Wingtip not only share the same fabric, they’re actually using the same exact IP addresses on the same network, yet they’re completely isolated. Folks, this is game-changing technology. No other virtualization platform has this, and we’re simply including this in the box with Windows Server 2012.

So, I’ve shown you storage space. I’ve shown you massive scale, complete VM mobility and network virtualization with Windows Server 2012. And folks, let me be very clear, I am just barely scratching the surface of what’s new in Server 2012. Quite simply, with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012, this is the best way to cloud-optimize your business.

Thank you very much. (Cheers and applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON: So, with the capabilities you’ve seen today we can certainly look ahead to an ecosystem of Windows clouds. We’ve got Windows Azure running in the public cloud; we’ve got Windows and System Center running in the private cloud in your data center. And we can see Windows and System Center powering hosted data centers and hosted clouds. Now, our job in System Center is to put you in the middle of this ecosystem, put you in the middle of this ecosystem, put you in the middle of the ecosystem with control, with consistency, and to give you a choice of what resources that you want to run your business on.

So, throughout the day I’ve been demoing primarily in this App Controller context. So, I want to jump back into the console and show you just a couple of the improvements that we’re going to bring forward in conjunction with Windows Server 2012. So, here we are in my clouds view, and it’s pretty familiar. We’ve got my pre-production environment, as well as that production environment that I had requested from Vijay. If I click down here on the connections portion of App Controller, this is where I would typically administer connections between my Azure subscriptions, or my underlying VMM servers. But, here I can go ahead and have the option to connect to a hoster, in this case, where we have acquired some capacity in conjunction with these other clouds that I’m working on.

I’m just going to simply give it a name here and I’ll be prompted to drop in some credentials from the hoster certificate, and the URL, and a quick password here. And with a couple of clicks what App Controller is doing is reaching out and brokering a connection between my App Controller Console and the hoster capacity that’s been acquired.

So, now if I go back to clouds view I should see it refresh with that hoster cloud right here in that same context, next to my Windows Azure cloud, and my private cloud, as well. Now, from here I’ve got all the same capabilities as you saw earlier. I can go in and initiate a deployment, and I can select from templates and recipes for my VMs and my applications. That’s you in the middle of that ecosystem of clouds with choice, control, and consistency.

So, that’s what we have for you. You see, in System Center what we’re working towards is to simplify your infrastructure administration, your application insight, and ultimately give you the cloud on your terms. Thank you very much, and we hope you had a great MMS. (Applause.)

BRAD ANDERSON
: I’m going to reiterate and maybe put some of this in a little additional context for you. Jeff showed you some of the innovations in Windows Server 2012, talked about the scale, some of the things that we’ve done to really take this concept that we have, and we really believe in, we want to design everything for the public cloud, for that scale and for that cost, and then bring it into your data centers. So, things like storage spaces allows you to get all the resiliency and all the things you’re looking for in your storage, but do it on commodity hardware.

Jeff mentioned some of the performance and some of the scalability numbers. With the beta, OK, with the beta our performance and our scalability numbers are at least on par and in many cases better than every single measurement from the other guys. You ask, are we serious about the private cloud? Boy, you’d better believe it. And as you see, System Center 2012 comes out, and Windows Server 2012 comes out later this year, it truly is the most comprehensive solution for you to build your cloud on, the most simple, and far and away the most cost-effective.

So, what I hope you’ve seen throughout the day, really kind of bucketed into these four big areas of investment, as we think about what is really required to deliver to you the best private cloud solution. Deep application insight, it’s all about the apps. The whole reason why we deploy infrastructure, whether that’s physical, virtual or cloud, it’s to support apps and deliver great apps to our users, and to our customers. We have more knowledge about the apps. We have a greater experience about your applications than anyone in the industry. So, bank on us to deliver that for you.

The second is called cross-platform from the bare metal up. We showed you in Vijay’s demo that we were able to actually administer cloud capacity as being delivered from our hyper-visor, from VMware, from Xen Server. You can make the choice of what is best for you to use, then we’ll make it all appear in one cohesive and one consistent manner. From an architectural standpoint we treat all the hyper-visors as first class citizens. And what we’re seeing more and more often, and time and time again, organizations are tired of paying the high prices and taxes that others in the market charge and so they’re standing up Hyper-V alongside others, and then they’re using System Center to manage all of that in one cohesive and one consistent way.

And not only that, we also do a great job of managing your guests, including Linux. A couple of years ago here at MMS we released the updates to Operations Manager that included the ability to monitor Linux. A data point you might find interesting, almost 20 percent of the customers that use System Center Operations Manager today are using it to monitor their Linux workloads. I would debate that System Center is managing more instances of Linux than anybody in the market is today, so cross-platform from the bare metal up.

Third, foundation for the future, we talked about some of the performance things, we talked about some of the scalability things. You see some of the things that are coming in Windows Server 2012. We are heavily investing in the private cloud. We are heavily investing in the public cloud, but we want to make it easy and simple for you to make that journey, and we want to be your partner as you make that journey. And then finally the four pieces, we want you to be able to approach the cloud on your own terms. You decide when you want to start to use cloud capacity, where you want to use it from in your data centers, and the service providers, from a public cloud.

And as Ryan showed you, we’ll bring it all together in one consistent way. You’ll be able to see all your cloud capacity. You’ll be able to deliver that experience to your customers, to the individuals and organizations in your business that are consuming your cloud capacity, and not only will you give them that experience for your own cloud capacity, but if they’re using public or hosted capacity, that all comes together in one place. You offer value as the infrastructure teams; you can offer value to the teams that are consuming your capacity independent of the cloud.

So, all about the apps, cross-platform from the bare metal up, foundation for the future, and then the cloud on your terms really are the four core pillars of Microsoft’s private cloud, and what I think differentiates us from others in the market.

So, if I can ask a couple of things from all of you it would be the following: Really embrace the cloud computing model. It’s not something that’s incredibly difficult. I think the “off in the cloud” concepts just scare people. The intent today was to help you understand that you’re using the same tools you’re already using. Let’s move you from a virtualized world into a cloud world using System Center 2012 and Windows Server. Let’s embrace it.

The second thing, deploy the Microsoft Private Cloud. Get your private cloud on a stick out, get that deployed in your environments, start using it. And really take advantage of all that capability.

And finally what I would say is, in every situation in life, personal, professional, you can lead or you can follow. It’s a lot more fun to be a leader, and I hope and I would encourage all of you to do that; lead, don’t follow. This is a time of just massive change in the industry. There’s so much going on, so much opportunity, so much opportunity to rise to the top, so much opportunity to really stand out and show the world what you’re capable of doing, what your organization is capable of doing, what you individually are doing.

So, my final admonition and my final ask today would be: Honestly, ladies and gentlemen, seize the opportunities, and take that opportunity to really be known as a cloud innovator in your company, in your community, and in the world.

And with that, I thank you. I hope you have a great day. We’ll see you tomorrow to talk about connected devices. Thank you very, very much.

(Cheers and applause.)

END

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