SCE Sunday - part 1 installation

Years ago I spent many a happy Sunday afternoon watching the SKI Sunday on the off chance a hapless brit would avoid the orange crash barriers and post a decent score. In porbably the most tenous link on any blog System Center Essentials or SCE is pronounced SKI by the engineering team that developed it.

So my SCE sunday will be a slalom through the various things you can do in SCE  and one reason for making a series like this is that SCE takes a long time to setup and so is not easy to demo live.  It really needs about 20 minutes to install not because it’s especially difficult but because of all the things it needs to touch. Thanks to the power of video editing I have got this down to under 5 minutes.  So just like the original SKI Sunday you can watch all the action of the edited highlights..

Incidentally the screenshot above is my SCE demo environment, which is 4 x virtual machines one for SCE itself, a domain controller and 2 windows 7 clients, as that covers the basics and allows it all to run on my trusty old dual core laptop.

I am also hoping that just like the real SKI Sunday which inspired a generation to go on the piste, you’ll take a closer look at  SCE which is included in TechNet subscriptions here or you can get a time bombed trial version here.

Next Sunday I’ll go through configuration using both the wizard and the built in tools.