EMC World is just around the corner (May 6-9) and we are busy behind the scenes preparing for a big week!   As part of EMC's Solutions Group (ESG), my team is responsible for helping to educate and promote EMC's many Microsoft solutions.  

As you might imagine, there is a lot to talk about so the hardest part about something like this is how to cover everything (for a full listing of our Microsoft activities, be sure to check out this great overview on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community)!

For starters we will be showcasing some key recent EMC solutions as part of the EMC ESG booth (#1035) at EMC World.   This year we decided to focus on two major application categories that many customers tend to ask us about: Databases and Collaboration. Specifically we will have demos, publishes best practices and technical information about:

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 & Exchange 2013 (& earlier)

• Data Protection including Single Item Level Restore
• Virtualized Deployments for Messaging and Collaboration
• Multi-site Disaster Recovery

Microsoft SQL Server 2012

• Highly Available SQL Server (including AlwaysOn Support)
• Xtrem Performance for SQL Databases
• End to End SQL Server Data Protection

The ESG booth will be highlighting integration with many key applications including Oracle, SAP and Cloud & Big Data so it will be a chance for attendees to meet with Subject Matter Experts in one place about their business applications.

What's unique about the booth this year is we will have a live art experience taking place all week with a speed painter performing his Paintjam and a contest for someone to win a trip for two to attend any museum in the world! It should be colorful (sorry, couldn't resist)!

There are also many sessions devoted to Microsoft technologies. I'll be presenting a topic entitled "Automate & Provision VNX Storage with Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track Solutions" where I'll be discussing EMC's continued support for Microsoft virtualization and Private Cloud technologies including Microsoft System Center. The session will cover automation and management orchestrator through our integration with technologies such as Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager and Microsoft Orchestrator.

You can find me on Tuesday, May 5^th from 5:30-6:30PM in Lando 4201A or Thursday, May 9^th from 1:00-2:00 in Palazzo A.  Hope to see you there!

Additional sessions I would recommend for my Microsoft friends and followers include:

• Powering Microsoft Applications with VNX – this is being delivered by my good friend Stefan Voss from EMC's Unified Division.   He is awesome and you won't want to miss this as he discusses in-depth performance and support for key Microsoft workloads!  This session will be on Monday, May 4^th at 1:00-2:00 and Thursday from 8:30-9:30.

• Storage Provisioning, Monitoring & Orchestration of Your Microsoft Applications – another technical wizard and all around great guy, Giri Basava of our Microsoft Partner Engineering team will discuss EMC's Storage Integrator (ESI) for provisioning and managing in a Microsoft environment.   Giri is fresh off his presentation at Microsoft's Management Summit (MMS) where he got great feedback!   You can catch him on Tuesday from 4:00-5:00 (he's my warm up act) or Thursday May 9^th from 1:00-2:00 (which unfortunately you will miss since you'll be in my session).

And many more sessions including:

• IT Trends: Microsoft SharePoint, Office and EMC Documentum – Better Together
  
• AppSync: Managing VNX Protection of Critical Microsoft Applications and VMware
  
• Optimize Business Application Performance & Protection with EMC Solutions for Microsoft, Oracle, SAP & VMware
  
• VMAX & Application Deployment: Best Practices for Virtualized Microsoft Applications
  
• VNX Family Integration with VMware, Microsoft and Citrix Virtualized Environments
  
• Accelerating SQL and Oracle Database Environments with EMC XtremSW Cache and EMC FAST
  
• EMC Backup: Strategies for Backup & Recovery of Microsoft Applications
  

And that's just the Microsoft focused sessions; there will be A LOT more on EMC technologies including new updates we can't talk about just yet! We'll also have the Hands-On Labs which have become one of the most popular parts of EMC World!

Are you a partner?   Be sure to attend our Global Partner Summit that will be taking place at the same time (as well as EMC's SE Conference with all of our field SEs in town for their own separate training including many Microsoft sessions of their own).

It will be a wild week for sure and a lot of fun!  If you are going then be sure to come by the ESG booth and say hi, I'll be there most of the week!   If you're not going, then hurry up and register and book that flight to Vegas!

See you soon!

Guest blog post by Roberto Mendizabal, EMC Corporation

During the last several years virtualization has taken the center stage and become one of the key enabler technologies for private cloud deployments across many different IT shops. From customers who prefer to deploy their services in-house, as there is still much reluctance to embrace public clouds, primarily due to the short comings in public cloud SLAs, to those customers who need to have full control over their data.

While virtualization does facilitate asset consolidation and provide great hardware ROI, it does bring many new challenges such as management and monitoring. As the consolidation of the hardware and software bring the convergence of heterogeneous technologies together in our data centers, we must now find a way to manage this convergence of elements that were previously managed individually

Until recently, there have been various different management and provisioning offerings that only provide only a partial view into private cloud deployments; but as the heterogeneous technologies come together, it drives the need for better monitoring capabilities and the landscape of tools has changed.

We are going through an awesome change in the industry. We are looking to make decisions on how to take advantage of cloud computing deployments, how to embrace it and the single most important part of this trend is your management strategy.

As the consumerization of IT assets is changing, technology providers need to change their approach and integration of the technologies that enable private clouds and that is what EMC has done.

This blog is going to talk about these management solutions.

 I had a chance to participate and represent EMC at this year's Microsoft Management Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada. From talking with various attendees, the single largest challenge was the discovery and management of datacenter assets within their own deployments.

Another challenge widely discussed was the automation of provisioning processes, and the efficiency that needs to be adopted as part of this new technology consumption that takes place in private clouds

In my technical lecture I spoke about the key ingredients that must be part of any private cloud deployment which are: Automated Provisioning, Intelligent Monitoring and Efficient Management.

The strategic response EMC has provided to those customers seeking this effectiveness can be found within the technology features now provided by "EMC Storage Integrator" or ESI. It facilitates provisioning integrated with the automation provided by System Center Orchestrator and it's layered by monitoring capabilities found in our System Center Operation Manager management packs.

Taking apart ESI and what it provides customers, we are now able to empower our end users to finally see a view of their assets mapping in a way it can be effectively monitored, viewed and managed. We have been able to take that technology convergence, extend our monitoring layer and extend the necessary management capabilities into these technology assets.

I have repeatedly mentioned the convergence of storage, server & application in your private clouds, but what is more important is the ability our customers have to eliminate the need of requiring multiple resources to manage heterogeneous environments with one single tool.

Server and storage consolidation means you're running multiple workloads on a single shared hardware environment, and this was equated in the past that you're not going to get that same performance as if that workload was being deployed on a physical environment. Hardware has changed and improved so much that we have been able to address these performance issues from a design perspective, but what if performance or provisioning issues were to come from other sources? Wouldn't it be nice to have a proactive mechanism that allows you to have insight into your utilization and be able to give you the necessary alerts as issues are happening? That is exactly what EMC's ESI is doing with its integration with SCOM, and now allows us to depart from being reactive, to getting ahead of the issues.

As we now enter a new chapter of more sophisticated monitoring tools, we are now in the driver's seat and can begin to design data centers in our private clouds that will adapt for faster and more unpredictable changes.

While other vendors are focused on storage topologies and connectivity protocols, I view that the key ingredients to a successful private cloud are automated provisioning, intelligent monitoring and efficient management. Combining these elements with technology that drives consolidation and effective utilization of share resources, our customer's will be enabled to deploy their private clouds very efficiently.

Wow, what a week! Amazing how fast the time went by this week at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013 but that's what happens when you are busy and having fun!

We at EMC had a great show and hopefully those attending had a good time as well! A few things I learned this week is that a lot of customers are using System Center 2012 even if they are just kicking the tires and the response has been that the product looks great! We had many people come by the booth to learn about EMC's support for Microsoft System Center including the management packs for EMC VNX and VMAX storage arrays. While people were interested in EMC's support for System Center Orchestrator including an Integration Pack for EMC storage commands, most people admitted that they weren't using Orchestrator just yet but they have plans in the next 6 to 12 months. Interested to learn more? Be sure to read my previous blog post on our support for SCOM!

Many customers were also excited to learn that EMC and Cisco have partnered up again to announce support for the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track solution version 3 based on System Center 2012, Windows 2012 and Hyper-V. These Private Cloud Fast Track solutions help customers easily and quickly deploy a Private Cloud infrastructure pre-built and pre-validated helping to remove the complexity for customers interested in accelerating their journey to a Microsoft Private Cloud.

Other topics we were asked about included high availability of Hyper-V virtual machines supporting CSVs (cluster shared volumes) across local and remote sites, backup and recovery of virtualized workloads, best practices for deploying EMC storage with Hyper-V and key application such as Exchange and SQL Server and EMC support for Microsoft Windows 2012 features including SMB 3.0 and ODX (Offloaded Data Transfers). Not only does EMC support all of these scenarios and technologies but we have solutions showing customers how best to deploy these scenarios in their Datacenter on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community!

While Microsoft had many sessions at MMS devoted to Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform, I found most customers were interested in creating their own private cloud network using technologies like Windows and System Center in house. One thing that is for certain, Microsoft virtualization adoption continues to grow at a fast pace and continues to be "Enterprise Ready" as Microsoft has been suggesting since the release of Windows 2012.

Overall, it was a fun and exciting week! Thanks to all of our great customers who came by to meet up again or introduce themselves for the first time! As one show comes to a close we set our sights on the next few with EMC World starting in a few shorts weeks (more to come on this as EMC will have plenty of demos and sessions on Microsoft) and then Microsoft TechEd in early June. But for now I'll kick back and reminisce on the fun times while listening to the ringing of slot machines in my head.

Yesterday kicked off Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2013 with a keynote from Brad Anderson, Microsoft's VP for Windows Server and System Center. The keynote started with pumped up music from a live DJ during a 25 minute delay leaving the crowd wondering with anticipation, are they building up to something big? And then the show started with a big…thump.

The delay? Well that was caused by an Internet outage which was going to make Microsoft's live demos a bit problematic (which also kicked off a series of jokes about availability of the cloud and a solid backup plan. Unfortunately for Microsoft there wasn't a cloud in site in Vegas.). Brad then talked about a big year for Microsoft with the release of Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 and System Center 2012 but spent the remainder of the keynote sharing features and facts that quite frankly we've heard before.

What was the message? Microsoft provides the ability to manage both private and public cloud; Azure is Microsoft's public cloud option that customers should be using (but don't appear to be) more; Microsoft Hyper-V is better than the "other guys" and especially when running Microsoft workloads on Microsoft technologies; Microsoft provides what they call the Cloud OS which includes all of the software tools to create and manage a virtual Datacenter.

Sounds good but I don't know the vision was ever realized in the keynote. While Microsoft provides all of the tools to deploy and manage both public and private clouds, their solution for deploying an Azure like cloud in-house includes software such as System Center, Windows 2012, Hyper-V and SQL Server. Not exactly something that comes from a box. Microsoft has faster performance and availability with Hyper-V in 2012 but when giving an example of how Microsoft was able to run 48,000 mailboxes on a single host with 12 Hyper-V virtual machines, Brad made sure to point out this wasn't supported by Microsoft Exchange best practices so than what is the benefit to being faster and more scalable if it isn't supported?

While yesterday's keynote fell a little flat with Microsoft looking to make something out of nothing in a year following all of their big product releases, the most exciting thing to talk about was right there all along – System Center 2012! System Center provides advanced virtual machine management, integration with storage (including EMC) through SMI-S, datacenter monitoring and management, application packaging and deployment, service manager, and workflow automation all from a single toolset!

While Microsoft wants Hyper-V adoption to grow and challenge "the other guys", hypervisors are still just an infrastructure layer and only a part of a cloud strategy. System Center provides all of the key ingredients to managing and deploying applications in the cloud as well as in the physical Datacenter which for many customers is the simple management layer they have been looking for as they transition into virtualization and eventually the cloud.

And while talking with customers this week, they too are catching on to the value of System Center. Almost every customer I've talked with at MMS told me they have deployed System Center 2012 or plan to in the next few months.

Microsoft should realize that while a high performing hypervisor is good to show you can compete with "the other guys" and while a public cloud offering helps for those customers who have given up on managing their own environment – it is a single easy to use tool to manage everything in the Datacenter that will help customers get closer to the cloud then ever before.

Earlier this week I blogged about all of the great Microsoft Virtualization and Management integration that EMC has been developing and that will be showcased during Microsoft's Management Summit (MMS) next week.

But don't take it just from me; here are some articles, blogs, white papers and videos from EMC's Microsoft Specialist and EMC's Solutions Group community highlighting EMC technologies and our support for Microsoft management technologies:

• How can I not start with Karsten Bott's ESIPSToolkit Series?? Karsten has written a series of Powershell cmdlet blogs showing how to write scripts using Powershell to manage EMC storage arrays. His blogs include examples of creating EMC LUNs and connecting to EMC arrays, expanding volumes and working with HBAs. It is a must see for anyone who is interested in using Powershell to perform storage operations!

• Just posted a week ago, a presentation showcasing EMC's Integration Pack for Microsoft Orchestrator. EMC Orchestrator is Microsoft's System Center workflow management tool invoking the use of IT tools and applications to respond to a defined process. EMC's Integration pack for System Center provides storage actions into a Orchestrator workflow process including connecting hosts and clusters to EMC storage arrays and providing storage provisioning.

• Another series of great videos from Karsten including Creating a SMB 3.0 Continuous Access Share on an EMC VNX, How to Create a Clustered Virtual Machine on the EMC VNX Share with SMB 3.0, and then How to Failover Between EMC VNX Arrays to a Remote Site via SMB 3.0 While the Virtual Machines Remain Highly Available.

• Maybe you are involved in planning an upgrade from an earlier version of System Center to System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2012? Why not read this excellent blog post from one of EMC's many Microsoft Consulting Specialists who provides an overview of the process he took when conducting an in place upgrade of SCOM 2007R2 to SCOM 2012?

• A video demonstration showing how to deploy up to 512 Windows Desktops on an EMC VNX using SAN based snapshot copies with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Rapid Deployment feature.

• EMC Management Integration for Microsoft Private Cloud Solution Overview. This solution overview consists of a technical white paper, technical articles, video demonstrations and a presentation showcasing how to virtualize multiple Microsoft workloads using highly-available Hyper-V and VMware clusters across multiple storage arrays and being completely managed by Microsoft System Center and EMC Storage Integrator (ESI). It is an excellent overview for someone looking to build a highly-available and high performance private cloud infrastructure!

Where can you learn more? Come visit EMC at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) next week where we will have many of the technical specialists behind these solutions available to discuss these solutions and more! If you can't make it to MMS, be sure to visit and follow the Everything Microsoft Community for more regular updates like this one highlighting EMC's solutions for Microsoft management and Microsoft technologies!