Cireson have done a great job optimizing the performance of the Self Service Portal for Service Manager. Since the Self Service Portal is running on a web site in IIS, some additional configurations can help you keeping the portal site ready and alive. From my experience working with the Self Service Portal, some operations can take a while to respond if you have not been active for a while. This is especially true when using the portal in a pilot or test environment where traffic is more intermittent.

Cireson recently released a Remote Manage App for Configuration Manager, read more about it here: http://cireson.com/blog/remote-manage-app/ . The App is even free, so go get your download. As I am working a lot on Service Manager and customizations, I thought it would be useful to create a console task in Service Manager Console for this Remote Manage App. I have previously been using a similar task for the built in Remote Control functionality in Configuration Manager.

Microsoft just recently announced the availability of Operational Insights App for Windows Phone: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/operational-insights/4823b935-83ce-466c-82bb-bd0a3f58d865?signin=true The App require that you sign in with a Microsoft Account: Many organizations, as ourselves, are using Organizational Accounts for our Azure and Office 365 services. Therefore, to be able to use this App I will need to create/use a Microsoft Account with access to my Operational Insights workspace. First, I will need to log on to my workspace at https://preview.

I have for a while been working on my System Center Service Manager environment to run on Azure Virtual Machines, and to increase availability for this environment I have created a SQL Server AlwaysOn Cluster also in Azure. While my environment is mostly for demo and development, and availability is not that critical, I find it important to look into high availability scenarios for knowledge and guidance for our customers. There are some great tutorials and support on how to create SQL Server AlwaysOn in Azure, and how Service Manager supports AlwaysOn in these links:

I have been running a SQL Server AlwaysOn Cluster in Azure for my System Center environment. I use this mostly for Demo and Development for partner solutions, so I like to shutdown and deallocate the cloud services when I’m not using them. This would also mean that the Public IP address for my Cloud Services would be deallocated and a new IP adresse would be created when I start the Cloud Service deployment again.

I have some Azure VM’s that I regulary Stop (deallocate) and Start using Azure Automation. The idea is to cut costs while at night or weekends, as these VM’s are not used then anyway. I recently had a problem with one of these Virtual Machines, I was unable to browse or connect to network resources, could not connect to the domain to get Group Policy updates and more. When looking into it, I found out that I had a lot of hidden Network Adapters in Device Manager.