A Beginner’s Guide to EMC and Microsoft Management

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!