New RC versions of System Center 2012 Products

 

  • System Center 2012 Configuration Manager RC provides comprehensive configuration management for the Microsoft platform that can help you empower users with the devices and applications they need to be productive while maintaining corporate compliance and control.
     
  • System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection RC, built on System Center Configuration Manager, provides industry-leading threat detection of malware and exploits as part of a unified infrastructure for managing client security and compliance that can help you simplify and improve endpoint protection.
  • System Center Operations Manager 2012 RC provides deep application diagnostics and infrastructure monitoring that can help you ensure the predictable performance and availability of vital applications and offers a comprehensive view of your datacenter, private, and public clouds.
  • System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 Beta provides unified data protection for Windows servers and clients that can help you deliver scalable, manageable, and cost-effective protection and restore scenarios from disk, tape, and off premise.
  • System Center Orchestrator 2012 RC provides orchestration, integration, and automation of IT processes through the creation of runbooks that can help you to define and standardize best practices and improve operational efficiency.
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC provides virtual machine management and services deployment with support for multi-hypervisor environments that can help you deliver a flexible and cost effective private cloud environment.
  • System Center App Controller 2012 Beta provides a common self-service experience across private and public clouds that can help you empower application owners to easily build, configure, deploy, and manage new services.
  • System Center Service Manager 2012 Beta provides flexible self-service experiences and standardized datacenter processes that can help you integrate people, workflows, and knowledge across enterprise infrastructure and applications.

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Virtualization Resources

This is a link to a groups of resource about Microsoft Virtualization articles and videos.

Topics include

Deploy a private cloud infrastructure

SharePoint Virtualization

Virtualize Exchange 2010

Manage Storage Migration with Virtualization

Run 3-D Applications on Hyper-V Remote Clients

Use Virtual Clustering to Deliver High-Availability Applications

Disaster Recovery Using Virtualization

Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Program
Download Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Reference Architecture Technical White Paper.

Private Cloud Concepts
Consult the Microsoft Private Cloud team blog for advance about building your private cloud and virtualization projects.

Choose your Private Cloud Components
Learn what Microsoft products are available for private cloud solutions and how to combine them.

Microsoft Virtualization Learning Snack
Take an interactive tour of Hyper-V and Integrated Virtualization from Microsoft.

 

Smart Cards and Virtual PC

Using Smart Cards in Windows Virtual PC
Learn how you can use smartcards in any virtual machine (VM) created using Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7, just as you use smartcards on Windows 7. While each type of smartcard device comes with its own device driver software, that will need to be installed in the operating system (OS) on which the smartcard reader is being used, smartcards can be shared between the host OS (Windows 7) and the VM, or can be assigned exclusively to VMs.

Cross Post From Microsoft

 

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Security Articles On Windows Hyper-V

Security Tip of the Month: Simple Security Recommendations When Using Hyper-V
As more small to midsize companies consider virtualization solutions, questions about security and virtualization inevitably arise. Microsoft has a few articles on TechNet that outline some of the key aspects of a secure deployment of the Hyper-V virtualization technology, a feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. To complement the guidelines offered in "Planning for Hyper-V Security," Microsoft IT Evangelist Howard Wong offers some additional thoughts and security considerations around Hyper-V.

Planning for Hyper-V Security
Overall, you should secure the virtual machines running on the virtualization server according to your procedures for securing that kind of server or workload. This document provides best practices to help improve the security of your Windows Server 2008 servers running Hyper-V.

 

Hyper-V Security Guide
Find instructions and recommendations to help strengthen the security of computers running the Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2008. This guide covers three core topics: hardening Hyper-V, delegating virtual machine management, and protecting virtual machines.

Cross Post From Microsoft

 

SQL Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC)

SQL Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC) is now  will extend beyond traditional database capabilities with a cloud-ready information platform.

With AlwaysOn availability for faster failover and greater hardware utilization and in-memory ColumnStore for 10x the data warehouse performance gains. SQL Server 2012 will also enable breakthrough insights with business intelligence solutions such as Power View for stunning, interactive data visualizations and enhancements to PowerPivot. Lastly, SQL Server 2012 will uniquely support hybrid IT environments with common management and development tools, scale elastically, and extend applications directly to the cloud through SQL Azure.

To Download go HERE

To learn more about SQL Server 2012 , including

SQL Server 2012 Editions and Licensing FAQ

SQL Server AlwaysOn Video

SQL Server Column StoreI ndex

SQL Server 2012 Security

SQL Server 2012 Overview

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