Product Description
Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed is the first and only definitive real-world guide to the entire Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite. It brings together tips, tricks, best practices, and lessons learned by top consultants who’ve deployed System Center in some of the world’s largest enterprises and most successful small businesses.
Drawing on years of early adopter and production experience, Rand Morimoto, Chris Amaris, and their team cover the entire System Center lifecycle and its components for system configuration, operations management, data protection, virtual machine management, help desk support, change management, asset control, capacity planning, and mobile device management. You’ll learn about individual components and how to integrate them to build automated, exceptionally efficient managed environments.
For smaller businesses, the book also presents Microsoft’s streamlined, lower-cost IT management offering, System Center Essentials 2010.
- Use System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to image, update, manage, and support servers and clients
- Proactively monitor your systems to identify and fix problems before they fail
- Use System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 to provide reliable, timely backup/recovery
- Implement and manage all aspects of virtualization, including virtual guest sessions on both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware
- Make the most of System Center Service Manager 2010’s integrated tools for managing help desks, incidents, assets, and changes
- Use System Center Capacity Planner to properly size, procure, and deploy new systems
- Remotely track, secure, patch, update, and support mobile devices with System Center Mobile Device Manager
- Simplify small business IT management with System Center Essentials 2010’s wizards and auto-configuration components
I was amazed to find a book out on System Center Service Manager 2010 already, the product was just released by Microsoft! I’ve bought several of the Unleashed books in the past and have been very pleased with the books by Chris Amaris and Rand Morimoto, so I bought this one. I am VERY pleased with the purchased, used the book to guide me through the planning and implementation of Service Manager 2010, and I needed some guidance on integrating SCSM with my existing SCOM implementation, which this book covered step by step for me as well!
And I was pleased to see that the authors also covered DPM 2010, this is a product I am looking to install next for the backup of our SharePoint and Exchange environments, so that’s the next set of chapters I’m sure I’m going to dogear as I fiddle with this stuff in my network environment.
Excellent book coverage on all of the latest System Center products, I highly recommend this book!
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5
System Center is actually a collection of about 7 different products that you can use to manage and monitor your software and hardware, from drive space through Microsoft Office, UNIX systems, and yes, SQL Server. It’s that last part I care about the most, and so I’ve dealt with Data Protection Manager and System Center Operations Manager (I call it SCOM) in SQL Server. But I wasn’t familiar with the rest of the suite nor was I as familiar as I needed to be with the “Essentials” release – a separate product that groups together the main features of System Center into a single offering for smaller organizations. These companies usually run with a smaller IT shop, so they sometimes opt for this product to help them monitor everything, including SQL Server.
So I picked up “Microsoft System Center Enterprise Suite Unleashed” by Chris Amaris and a cast of others. I don’t normally like to get a technical book by multiple authors – I just find that most of the time it’s quite jarring to switch from author to author, but I think this group did pretty well here. The first chapter on introducing System Center has helped me talk with others about what the product does, and which pieces fit well together with SQL Server.
The writing is well done, and I didn’t find a jump from author to author as I went along. The information is sequential, meaning that they lead you from install to configuration and then use. It’s very much a concepts-and-how-to book, and a big one at that – over 950 pages of learning! It was a pretty quick read, though, since I skipped the installation parts and there are lots of screenshots. While I’m not sure you’d be an expert on the product when you finish reading this book, but I would say you’re more than halfway there. I would say it suits someone that learns through examples the best, since they have a lot of step-by-step examples
I do recommend that you take a look if you have to interact with this product, or even if you are a smaller shop and you’re the primary IT resource. The last few chapters deal with System Center Essentials, and honestly it was the best part of the book for me.
Amazon User Rating: 4 / 5
I got this book earlier this week as I wanted to implement a couple new products, one being System Center Service Manager 2010, and the other is Data Protection Manager 2010. This book covered the planning, implementation, and best practices in a very concise and clear manner! I got everything working quickly and now I’m fiddling more with the products in our network environment. This is a very practical book. Haven’t gotten around to the chapters on System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 or Operations Manager 2007 R2, those are next on my list! Excellent book!!!
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5