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Update your RSS feeds for our move to SystemCenterCentral.com

Pete — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:00:13 +0000

We’d mentioned some weeks ago that when the System Center Central site was feature-complete, and all our content migrated that I, several other prominent System Center bloggers and our associated System Center User Groups would be moving. We thought it an appropriate way to consolidate some of our efforts around Operations Manager and the indeed System Center suite in general.

The time is drawing near, so please visit the RSS list at the new site and update your feeds. This feed will switch automatically in a few days time, so just want to avoid getting you subscribed twice in your RSS reader.

RSS Feeds at SystemCenterCentral.com

We’re definitely looking forward to what the future holds in our new community, which is already off to a great start. Hope to see your there.

Blogging from MMS @ System Center Central this year

Pete — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:39:31 +0000

Maarten, Rory and myself will be blogging our MMS experience at the new System Center Central site this year.

Follow events from my perspective at http://www.systemcentercentral.com

RSS SIte Feed - http://feeds2.feedburner.com/systemcentercentral/cSJf

SystemCenterCentral.com launches at MMS 2009

Pete — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:53:27 +0000

We are proud to announce SystemCenterCentral.com, the site to visit for “Everything System Center”.

SystemCenterCentral.com was founded by three System Center community members; Pete Zerger, Rory McCaw and Maarten Goet. SystemCenterCentral.com is a community initiative that will combine a number of existing Internet properties under a single community site and strive to become the leading community landing page for all System Center technologies. Sites to be consolidated include Sytem Center Forum, Techlog and several user group sites.

Soft launch for the site was announced at MMS 2009, with additional feature releases planned throughout May. The site combines traditional blogging with easy integration / sharing with your favorite social network platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us and many others.

We would like to thank our sponsors for making this possible. Both Microsoft and Quest Software are supporting SystemCenterCentral.com as Gold Sponsors and will be active participants in this new online community.

Not going to MMS, but still want to check out this new System Center community site? Go to www.systemcentercentral.com now and join!

SCOM: LDAP Query snippets for AD Integration - computer roles and OS

Pete — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:58:05 +0000

I’ll be talking about the AD integration feature and MMS 2009 next week in Vegas, and wanted to drop a few LDAP query snippets here to supplement the OpsMgr 2007 AD Integration Guide that Raphael, Anders and myself updated recently.

You can find the AD HERE. The guide includes tips for how to use security groups and OUs (indirectly) in your AD Integration strategy.

By request, here are some queries that could be incorporated into more complex queries to group machines based on multiple criteria that include the computers role and operating system. I can’t say that incorporating OS / computer role into AD Integration is something I’ve heard come up very often, but if it fits your model, so be it.

Find All Workstations
(sAMAccountType=805306369)

Find all 2003 Servers Non-DCs
(&(&(&(samAccountType=805306369)(!(primaryGroupId=516)))(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows Server 2003*)))

Find all 2003 Servers - DCs
(&(&(&(samAccountType=805306369)(primaryGroupID=516)(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows Server 2003*))))

Find all Server 2008
(&(&(&(&(samAccountType=805306369)(!(primaryGroupId=516)))(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows Server 2008*))))

Find all Windows 2000 SP4 computers
(&(&(&(objectCategory=Computer)(operatingSystem=Windows 2000 Professional)(operatingSystemServicePack=Service Pack 4))))

Find all Windows XP SP2 computers
(&(&(&(&(&(&(&(objectCategory=Computer)(operatingSystem=Windows XP Professional)(operatingSystemServicePack=Service Pack 2))))))))

Find all Windows XP SP3 computers
(&(&(&(&(&(&(&(objectCategory=Computer)(operatingSystem=Windows XP Professional)(operatingSystemServicePack=Service Pack 3))))))))

Find all Vista SP1 computers
(&(&(&(&(sAMAccountType=805306369)(objectCategory=computer)(operatingSystem=Windows Vista*)(operatingSystemServicePack=Service Pack 1)))))

Pete’s AD Integration Session at MMS 2009

Scott Weisler — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:38:56 +0000

The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is the premier event of the year for IT Professionals, offering deep technical information and training on the latest IT management solutions from Microsoft.

This year the Microsoft Management Summit is held from the 27th of April until the 1st of May in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Pete Zerger will also give a session about Operations Manager 2007 R2 titled “Active Directory Integration for Large / Complex Environments“.

Pete will discuss strategies and best practices for implementing the Active Directory Integration feature of Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM). He will talk about and demonstrate RunAs security for AD integratoin, as well as LDAP tips for granular control of load balancing across multiple mgmt servers. Session with wrap up with troubleshooting tips for identifying causes of unexpected isssues.

For an overview of the other sessions held look here.

Hyper-V & VMware Architecture Comparison - the truth is out there…somewhere

Pete — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:59:50 +0000

A friend of mine once said “It’s okay to be wrong, just never uncertain. Unless of course you’re a jackass about it, in which case you better be right”.

True understanding of the available virtualization architectures is a complex task.I think the recent and ongoing debate really calls that to light, and we have yet to see the bottom line. It showcases the importance of respectful dialogue. Debate is healthy, but the most productive debate is one that leaves out insulting analogies and heaping spoonfuls of sarcasm. Here’s the story where it stands thus far.

The Catalyst

It all started with this video in which Michael, a well respected blogger a 4 sysops, incorrectly describes Hyper-V as essentially a hosted hypervisor, ala Virtual Server 2005. The explanation leveraged what could only be described as a mildly insulting analogies comparing Hyper-V very unfavorably to VMware’s enterprise platform (VI3)

The Rebuttal

Soon after appeared a detailed rebuttal from Greg Shields titled “How to Incorrectly Explain the Architectural Differences Between Hyper-V and ESX”, in which he explained at length why Michael is patently incorrect.

But wait, it gets better.

Rebuke of the Rebuttal

Kevin of Kevinsvirtualreality.com follows today with a rebuttal of his own, calling Greg to the carpet for his description of paravirtualization in Hyper-V and VMware, along with a few other items, in an article titled “ Reaction to: “How to Correctly Explain the Architectural Differences Between Hyper-V and ESX” “.

But it’s not over yet.

Within a few hours of Kevin’s rant, Ben Armstrong , the Virtualization PM at Microsoft calls out a couple of inaccuracies in Kevin’s analysis.

Smart guys all, but seems some direct and friendly dialogue (and some more answers) are in order here. Sounds like a good theme for the July SC Virtual User Group meeting.

SCE Tip: How to remove unwanted updates to reclaim disk space

Pete — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:54:38 +0000

I recently received a very good question regarding update management in Essentials 2007.

Q: How can I remove unwanted update content to reclaim disk space?

Here’s a bit of background information on how updates are handled in Essentials (WSUS). Metadata and file content are separate in the WSUS architecture (which is leveraged by SCE for update and software deployment. The synchronization process with Microsoft Update only downloads the metadata (which is xml), so it is small in size.

However, after you approve an update in the Updates workspace of the SCE console, the update file content will be downloaded to the WSUS instance on the SCE Server. Contained in the metadata of the update is applicability criteria that is passed down to the UA client for determining whether the client needs the update.

How to Remove Unwanted Update File Content

If you want to delete the unnecessary update file content in SCE you need to decline it first.

2) Open SCE console, navigate to Updates space, right-click the update which you want to delete, and choose “decline”

3) Open WSUS console, click Options –> Server Cleanup Wizard to delete the unnecessary updates. Run the wizard with only the “Unneeded Update Files” option selected.

When the wizard is complete, you should have additional file space equivalent to the number of updates you declined before running the cleanup wizard.

Scheduled Task MP 1.1.1.0 for SCOM and SCE now available

Pete — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:39:19 +0000

Raphael Burri has released an update to his Scheduled Task MP. The new version (1.1.1.0) now works with:

English (granted – that’s now news)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Spanish

You can download the updated version from Raphael’s blog. There’s a link to the source in the Community MP Catalog.

Hyper-V Tip: Remove VM Additions without a mouse

Pete — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:58:15 +0000

I recently converted a large number of Virtual PC guests to Hyper-V (using the VMC to Hyper-V Import Tool), but ran into a bit of a snag in that I forgot to remove VMAdditions before the converion.

Thus, when I attempted to install Hyper-V Integration Services I was greeted with the error message “you must uninstall VM Additions before installing Integration Services…”.

The Problem

And I had to do it without a mouse. (Windows 2003 on Hyper-V…no Integration Services, no mouse). While I was able to get to Add / Remove Programs, I just could hit the Remove button. I thought there must be a faster way.

Turns out, there is.

The Workaround

1. Start by copying the VMAdditions.iso from your Virtual PC 2007 installation directory on your workstation or server to the Hyper-V server.

2. Mount VMAdditions.iso from Hyper-V manager -> Media -> DVD Drive -> Insert Disk…

3. The Remove VMAdditions wizard should launch automatically. If not, you should be able to use a command prompt to get to setup pretty easily.

Additional Resources

Certainly there are other activities with legacy OS setup where keyboard know-how comes in handy. Ben Armstrong, the Virtual PC Guy, has a couple of posts that are helpful when you find yourself lost in a VM without a mouse.

Controlling Hyper-V without a mouse

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2008/03/23/controlling-vms-under-hyper-v-without-the-mouse.aspx

Hyper-V Key Combinations

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/01/14/virtual-machine-connection-key-combinations-with-hyper-v.aspx

Webinar: Extending Ops Manager to a Mobile Device with Mobile Admin

Pete — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:57:14 +0000

There’s a webinar coming up the week of MMS OpsMgr (SCOM) admins may be interested in checking out.

Rove develops system administration software that provides mobilemanagement of IT systems and infrastructure. Rove recently introduced IT infrastructure monitoring to its flagship product Mobile Admin as of version 4.2, which launched in March. Mobile Admin users can now view and filter on events raised by System Center Operation Manager, as well as take proactive actions to resolve critical situations – all from their mobile devices.

For more information, join Rove on Wednesday, April 29 for an exclusive look at the integration between Microsoft System Center Operation Manager andMobile Admin.

Trial Mobile Admin - www.roveit.com/trial/

Learn more about Mobile Admin – www.roveit.com/mobileadmin

Great Articles on vSwitching and Networking in Hyper-V & VMware ESX

Pete — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:46:13 +0000

There are some truly awesome resources explaining virtual networking and switching in VMware and Hyper-V. The 46 page Dell guide includes best practices for working with network adapters and virtual networking in Hyper-V. The VMware vSwitching series is just amazing…great to see that level of quality together in a blog series.

Hyper-V

____

If you have more Hyper-V resources on virtual networking, I am interested in knowing about them.

____

vSwitches in VMware

PowerShell Hyper-V/SCVMM Webcast

Pete — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:49:54 +0000

On April 23, 2009 Marco Shaw, Darin Pendergraft, and Peter Zerger are giving a TechNet webcast on “Using Windows PowerShell with Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager“:

Windows PowerShell is likely to become the automation tool of choice. In this webcast, we provide examples of Windows PowerShell being used to perform common administration tasks in Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. We compare the two automation methods in detail, and we discuss some online community-focused PowerShell resources such as http://powershellcommunity.org.

Learn more about the webcast and register here.

SCOM 2007 KB Articles April 1 - 15th, 2009

Pete — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:09:30 +0000

A few recent Operations Manager 2007 KB articles

Deleting an application in the Operations Manager console may fail with verification errors

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970047/

Error message when you manually change an agent setting for System Center Operations Manager 2007 by using the Change option in Add or Remove Programs: “Microsoft ESENT Keys are required”

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969569/

Error message when you try to print the reports in System Center Operations Manager 2007 Web console: “Unable to load client print control”

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969571

Error message when you try to access the Web console: “HTTP Error 401.2 – Unauthorized. You are not authorized to view this page due to invalid authentication headers”

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/970043/

Error message when you manually change an agent setting for System Center Operations Manager 2007 by using the Change option in Add or Remove Programs: “Microsoft ESENT Keys are required”

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969569/

SCOM R2: Service Display Name Changes

Scott Weisler — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:54:18 +0000

I noticed in the lab that the display names of the services changed in the R2 version of Opsmgr 2007. The names themselves did NOT change, so if you do a ‘net stop’ or ‘net start’, that won’t change a bit.

Here’s a breakdown:

Name (SP1/R2) DisplayName (SP1) DisplayName (R2)

OMCFG OpsMgr Config Service System Center Management Configuration

OMSDK OpsMgr SDK Service System Center Data Access

HealthService OpsMgr Health Service System Center Management

Active Directory Helper Object (OOMADS) and SCOM Gateway

Pete — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:22:56 +0000

An issue we were just discussing regarding the Gateway server roles and the AD Helper Object (OOMADS.MSI). This helper object is copied to the agent-managed computer as part of the agent installation and installed when needed by an MP.

ISSUE

The AD helper object (OOMADS.MSI) was not copied to the \AgentManagement directory on the Gateway for agent push installations.The result is that if you have a DC in the untrusted forest reporting to a gateway, the helper will not get copied to the agent-managed computer or be installed automatically.

FIX

You will need to manually copy and install Oomands on domain controllers being monitored in the untrusted forest. You can also try to copy the OOMADS.MSI to this same directory on the Gateway (as on a regular MS / RMS) before deploying agents, which should result in AD Helper Objects being copied to the push-installed computers as normal.

MOSS 2007 Management Pack (6.0.6542.0) for SCOM 2007 now available

Pete — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:38:14 +0000

Overview

This Management Pack monitors the health state of the components in your SharePoint environment that affect performance and availability. When there is an issue that may cause service or performance degradation, Operations Manager 2007 uses the Management Pack to detect the issue, alert you to its existence, and facilitate diagnosis and corrective actions.

Feature Bullet Summary:

The monitored components include:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007-related services (Single Sign On, Load Balancer, Launcher and Search)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007-related Events
IIS-related Events
Microsoft SQL Server database-related events
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server performance

Download

At the URL below

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=626252c5-ad59-4842-9c6f-6ed24b6b1426&displaylang=en

Microsoft Windows Server Cluster Management Pack (6.0.6568.0) for SCOM 2007 now available

Pete — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:34:49 +0000

An updated version of the Cluster MP for OpsMgr 2007 (SCOM) was posted late last week.

Overview

The Windows Server Cluster Management Pack provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of your Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 cluster deployments. It monitors Cluster services components—such as nodes, networks, resources, and resource groups—to report issues that can cause downtime or poor performance.

Feature Summary

Some of the conditions monitored by this management pack are as follows:

Configuration or hardware issues that interfere with starting the Cluster service
Connectivity problems that affect communication between cluster nodes or between a node and a domain controller
Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) settings that affect the cluster; for example, permissions needed by the computer account that is used by the cluster
Configuration issues with the network infrastructure needed by the cluster; for example, issues with Domain Name System (DNS)
Issues with the availability of a cluster resource, such as a clustered file share
Issues with the cluster storage

Download

At the URL below

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AC7F42F5-33E9-453D-A923-171C8E1E8E55&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

IBM Hardware MP for Microsoft SCOM 2007 SP1, Version 2.1 now available

Pete — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:57:49 +0000

The v2.1 IBM Hardware Management Pack for Microsoft SCOM 2007 provides our customers with ability to manage the health state of IBM System x Servers, Blades and BladeCenter® Chassis all wrapped up in a single install file.

Key features include of the v2.1 MP include:

Unified Management of IBM® System x™ Servers, IBM® BlaceCenter® Blade Servers and IBM® BlaceCenter®
Reflect BladeCenter® health onto Blades
Override-able Discovery/Health-Monitoring Intervals
Scalable Management of IBM BladeCenter®
Extensive hardware knowledge articles
Comprehensive per component instance and per condition monitoring

SCOM v2.1 content and docs available at:
http://www.ibm.com/systems/management/director/partners/microsoft/

SCVMM Tip: Moving guests between Hyper-V hosts with different processor architectures

Pete — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:51:10 +0000

A great workaround and hotfix I just saw on my RSS.

The Problem

If you have multiple Hyper-V hosts of varying architectures, some Intel and some AMD, you’ve also no doubt seen the following message when you attempt to migrate a VM guest from one host to the other as I’ve seen in my lab:

“Unable to migrate the virtual machine because the processor is not compatible with the host ”

“Unable to migrate the virtual machine because the processor is not compatible with the host .”

When migrating a Virtual Machine which has a saved state, SCVMM uses built-in checks to determine whether a saved state VM can be migrated between hosts or deployed from a library to a host. If these checks fail then we get the error message. A few things compared include:

Manufacturer (eg. Intel vs AMD)
Processor architecture (x86 vs x64)
Virtual Server version (SP1 vs R2 SP1)
Family of the processor

Workaound

Part of the issue is that you cannot move guests between hosts if snapshots exist.

Apply patch in ‘http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=969726
Delete checkpoints / snapshots and shut the VM down
You can then move between hosts of differing processor architectures.

Hyper-V FAQ: What is the difference between Synthetic and Emulated devices?

Pete — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:06:57 +0000

This is an FAQ when talking with groups about virtualization on Windows 2008, so I wanted to tatke a moment to provide an explanation here for future reference.

Emulated Device

Emulated devices are the hardware that is presented inside of the virtual machine. If you have used Virtual Server / Virtual PC you have seen this hardware before. This includes devices such as an Intel 440bx motherboard and an Intel 21140 network adapter. These devices are handled through emulation that runs in the management operating system (parent partition). The advantage of emulated devices is that most operating systems have in-box drivers for them and are able to install and boot using them. The disadvantage of emulated devices is that because they were not designed with virtualization in mind they do not perform well.

Synthetic Device

Synthetic devices are the new high performance devices that are available with Hyper-V. Instead of emulating an existing hardware device, a new hardware device is exposed that has been designed for optimal performance in a virtualized environment. Generally speaking you will never see reference to a “synthetic” or “emulated” device in the user interface as that has been hidden as much as possible.

So how can I tell the difference?

Just open the device manager for the guest VM by right clicking Computer (for Windows Server 2008 or My Computer for Windows Server 2003) then select Manage from the context menu. For Windows Server 2008 expand the Diagnostics node to open Device Manager.

If the OS is using the higher performance Synthetic devices you’ll see the “VMBus Video Device” under the Display adapters, Microsoft “VMBus Network Adapter” under Network Adapters, and VMBus under System devices.

Performance Advantages

I have not seen a great many detailed explanations of specific performance advantages (or the architectural differences behind them), but there is some good information in this post on the Windows Server Performance Team blog.

http://blogs.technet.com/winserverperformance/archive/2008/02/29/hyper-v-and-multiprocessor-vms.aspx

Hyper-V Terminology Update

There was also a recent update to Hyper-V terminology you should check out on Ben Armstrongs blog.

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/03/04/hyper-v-terminology-update.aspx

Tools: Change Reporting for SCVMM 2008

Pete — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:00:58 +0000

While looking for something else entirely, I ran across an interesting tool for auditing changes in Virtual Machine Manager 20008. It’s called Netwrix Change Reporter for SCVMM. They offer commercial and free versions. The free version basically sends change reports via e-mail on a schedule. Nice way to monitor for VM sprawl.

NetWrix Change Reporter for System Center Virtual Machine Manager can be used to:

Overview configuration changes on a daily basis to improve internal IT governance.
Prepare reports for your IT compliance auditors, such as SOX, HIPPA, GLBA, and others.
Audit the creation of new virtual machines and control excessive resource utilization.

The product is provided free of charge for unlimited use by organizations and individuals. We also provide free of charge technical support for the freeware version on the Support Forum.

The company also offers a version for VMware.

WHERE TO GET IT

Download the Netwrix Change Reporter for SCVMM at the URL below.

http://www.netwrix.com/change_reporter_system_center_virtual_machine_manager_freeware.html

Recent MP Releases for Operations Manager and Essentials 3/15/2009 - 3/31/2009

Pete — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:01:23 +0000

A couple of MP releases have recently been posted to the System Center Pack Catalog. The SQL Server MP delivers a number of fixes spelled out in the MP Guide.

Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007
The SQL Server Management Pack provides the capabilities for Operations Manager 2007 to discover SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 installations and components and to monitor them, primarily from the perspective of availability and performance. The availability and performance monitoring is done using a combination of scripts and native Operations Manager capabilities.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1
The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Management Pack monitors Standard and Enterprise Edition of Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This release also incorporates the Quality of Experience (QoE) MP which was previously a separate Management Pack. Monitored types are event log entries, performance counters, as well as stateful monitoring of QoE. Note that this version of the Management Pack only monitors Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and cannot be used to monitor Office Communications Server 2007

Microsoft System Center Network Device Monitoring Management Pack for System Center Essentials 2007
The Microsoft System Center Network Device Monitoring Library Management Pack provides System Center Essentials 2007 with the ability to identify and monitor network devices such as routers and switches. This update resolves an issue where Essentials is unable to monitor network devices that report an interface speed greater than 2147483647. Refer to KB960569 for more information. Note: It is necessary to delete the existing Network Device Monitoring Library Management Pack before importing this updated version.

Recent Hotfixes for Operations Manager (SCOM) and SCE 2007

Pete — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:55:29 +0000

There are a few recent hotfixes for Operations Manager 2007 and Essentials you should check out. The Essentials hotfix, which updates the network device monitoring MP, is a required precaution for me.

Operations Manager 2007

Essentials 2007

System Center Essentials 2007 Service Pack 1 cannot monitor network devices that report an interface speed greater than 2,147,483,647 Gbps (2 GB per second)

Live Meeting Audio/Video of System Center Virtual User Group for March 2009

Pete — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 03:20:12 +0000

Below is a link to the Live Meeting audio and video of the March ‘09 meeting of the System Center Virtual User Group. Special Thanks to the presenters - Marco Shaw, Jason Sandys, Randy Roffey of Silect Software, and Kevin Holman. Full agenda from the meeting can be found HERE.

The Next System Center Virtual User Group Meeting #6 will be May 21st. We should have some excellent content from MMS 2009 to share with the user group.

Get the Live Meeting content at the URL below:

http://cid-1590b798c9cd6d68.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/SCVUG/Mar%202009?uc=1

Thank you for supporting the System Center Virtual User Group!

Update: New VM from Template Powershell Script

Scott Weisler — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:45:09 +0000

A couple of you reported that you were having trouble running the script. I downloaded and found a smart quote in the output, updated and uploaded. Tests fine now.

Download the updated version at the original location.

http://www.systemcenterforum.org/downloads/create-vm-from-template-scvmm-powershell-script/

Updates to the OpsMgr 2007 Community Toolbox

Scott Weisler — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:40:47 +0000

I updated the OpsMgr 2007 Community Toolbox with a couple of new tools, including the new Maintenance Mode GUI from Mark Walzak. The list of community-generated tools is now much larger than official resource kit.

Have a look at http://www.systemcenterforum.org/tools/

SQL MP 6.0.6569.0 for OpsMgr & SCE 2007 now available

Pete — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:26:06 +0000

A new SQL MP was released today.

Fixes

Fixed performance issues caused by excessive CPU utilization and script timeouts from Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) queries in the following management pack discoveries: Discover SQL Server 2005 Database Engines (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2008 Database Engines (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services (Windows Server).
Fixed an issue where SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services and Reporting Services discoveries were not reliably discovering these objects on instances of SQL Server that did not have the Database Engine installed.
Removed the hard-coded exception in rules and monitors that prevented the monitoring of the System, Temp, and Master databases.
Improved the means by which database discoveries recognize auto growth enabled settings. Database discoveries now recognize both “KB” and “%” growth settings; previously the database discoveries recognized only the “KB” growth setting.
Corrected typographical errors in product knowledge and improved the quality of the text.

Update: Collection of Maintenance Mode Scripts, Utilities and MPs for Opsmgr and Essentials 2007

Pete — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:01:44 +0000

For my own reference, I put together a collection of several of the original and known functional maintenance mode scripts, utilities and MPs.

Revisions:

4/1/2009 - Added link to Mark Wolzaks Maintenance Mode GUI
7/26/2008 - Added link to Timothy McFaddens Remote Maintenance Mode Scheduler
6/28/2008 - Added link to Timothy McFaddens Powershell group maint mode script that handles nested groups.
5/7/2008 - Added link to Andrzej version of group maintenance mode that provides up to 10 maintenance schedules through the rules in the console UI.

Put a computer in maintenance mode - To truly silence an agent management computer, you must put the computer, health service and health service watcher in maintenance mode. This script does exactly that. Boris put some Powershell together to make that happen, and then Timothy quickly packaged it into a .ps1 file with the appropriate connection string.

Get the classic maintenance mode Powershell script HERE.

Put a group of computers in maintenance mode - Putting a group of computers into maintenance mode is an obvious timesaver. Timothy McFadden put a nice script together to put a group of computers into maintenance mode, and Boris created a similar script several months later.

April 1, 2009 - Get Mak Wolzaks Maintenance Mode GUI HERE.
July 26th, 2008 - Get Timothy McFaddens Remote Maintenance Mode Scheduler HERE.
Get Timothy’s group maintenance mode script HERE.
June 28th, 2008 - Timothy updated his group maintenance mode Powershell script to handle nested groups, HERE.
Get group maintenance mode, Boris flavor HERE
However, Brian Wren’s treatment of group maintenance mode (wrapped in an MP) is not to be missed when you’re learning about maintenance, Powershell or MP authoring. Check it out HERE.
May 7th, 2008 - Andrej posted an updated version of Brians MP that allows up to 10 maintenance mode schedules for groups of computers, configurable through the UI. It can be found HERE.

Target this to the ?Agent Managed Computer Group’ and you can put just about everything Windows into maintenance mode all at once.

Put an object type (other than a computer) in maintenance mode - This puts an instance of any object type you specify into maintenance mode. This allows you to put an object, such as a web application, into maintenance mode while monitoring of the computer and its other components remains active.

See the code snippet for maintenance mode for any object class HERE or HERE.

AgentMM Command Line Utility - Written by Clive Eastwood, this command line tool puts Ops Mgr 2007 agents into maintenance mode (all 3 object classes necessary).

Download Clive’s tool HERE.

Putting agents in maintenance mode remotely - Andrzej has a nice walkthrough incorporating Clive’s AgentMM.exe maintenance mode CLI tool for a scheduled batch job or ad-hoc execution.

Find a description and link HERE.

Updated Network Device Monitoring Management Pack for SCE 2007 (fixes and download)

Pete — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:06:33 +0000

This updated version of the the Network Device Monitoring MP resolves an issue we experienced in a live environment with network devices reporting Interface speeds greater than 2GB per second. In our case, the reported speed was an invalid value due to a bug in router IOS, but it’s great that MS provides some additional protection in this release.

NOTE:

You have to delete the existing Network Device Monitoring MP before you install this one.
This MP only functions in Essentials 2007.

Download the new Network Device Monitoring MP for Essentials 2007 HERE.

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OpsMgr 2007 R2 Release Candidate (RC) Now Available

Pete — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:51:03 +0000

Tonight Microsoft announced the availability of the Operations Manger 2007 R2 Release Candidate on Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com). There are a number of enhancements over the beta released in November, including:

New Power Management MP template (the monitored system must be either Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7)
Updated branding across all user interfaces, including a new skin
Improved trace configuration tools to help support issues escalated to Customer Support (if applicable)
Improved Run As Account Distribution Configuration
Ability to run inline tasks for non-Microsoft servers
Support for upgrade from Beta deployments to the Release Candidate
New and updated documentation, including the Usage Guide, Design Guide, Deployment Guide, Upgrade Guide, Security Guide, and Operations Guide

The RC should be upgradeable to the RTM version once that is available, but is not for production use without prior arrangement with Microsoft.

April 1st, 2009: Microsoft TechDays - Defy All Challenges (virtual event)

Pete — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 04:28:53 +0000

On April 1st, 2009, Microsoft is putting on a free 24 hour virtual event covering developer-related topics.

There will be 95 live sessions provided via Live Meeting in the following tracks:

Windows Development and Frameworks
Windows Mobile Development
Office and SharePoint Development
Developer Tools, Languages & Practices
Web Development & User Experience

More information on each track can be found here: http://www.msfttechdays.com/public/sessions.aspx

Marco Shaw will be presenting the only session covering Windows PowerShell:

WIN300 Scripting the Microsoft .NET Framework Using Windows PowerShell
Now that PowerShell is part of the Microsoft Common Engineering Criteria, expect to see more and more PowerShell in Microsoft server products. This session looks at how PowerShell can be used to directly access the .NET Framework. Some simple examples are demonstrated, but also more advanced examples of using Windows Presentation Foundation (.NET 3.0) and LINQ (.NET 3.5) are discussed.”

This is a FREE event, so you can’t possibly go wrong. If you want to learn more about Windows PowerShell and how it can help increase the efficiency of .NET development, I think you’ll Marco’s session.

What you can get for attending:

Get a second chance to pass your Microsoft Certification exam
50% off Microsoft Certification exam
MSDN Premium Subscriptions (draw)

More information on the prizes is on the site.

The sessions will last 60 minutes with levels varying from 200 to 400 and will also be available offline after the event.

Extending OpsMgr visibility with Xian and Savision solutions

Pete — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:48:49 +0000

WIth the release of a free edition of Savision Live Maps, the capability to extend service level visibility into your monitored systems is easier than ever. The team at Jalasoft has delivered an informative whitepaper that demonstrates you’re not limited to your Microsoft infrastructure when leveraging Savision Live Maps.

Check out these tutorials on how to leverage Jalasoft and Savision solutions to extend the service level monitoring capabilities of System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Topology Diagrams with Jalasoft Xian and Savision Live Maps

How to integrate Live Maps with Sharepoint

How-to: Integrate a Live Maps view in the OpsMgr Web Console

Community written Multi-Host Ping Management Pack V3

Pete — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:42:14 +0000

Over the last few weeks the Multi-Host Ping Management Pack developed as a joint work by the System Center Community has seen a major update from version 2.0 to 3.0. The new Management Pack is class-based and represents the health of each Ping Target (address being pinged) as seen by one or more Ping Watchers (agent issuing the ping).

Great care has been taken to increase the scalability and keep the performance impact on the Ping Watchers low. Other than the discovery process, all datasources rely on native Operations Manager modules instead of VBScripts. Furthermore all monitors and rules of the management pack incorporate ‘cookdown’ resulting in just a single ICMP ping per cycle for all circuits.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Raphael Burri, Jaime Correia and Neale Brown for their hard work and collaboration in developing what we hope you’ll find to be a highly functional, stable and scalable MP.

Download the Multi-Host Ping MP v3.0 at the following URL:

http://www.systemcenterforum.org/downloads/multi-host-ping-mp-30

HERMES SoftLab releases MP for Oracle Siebel on OpsMgr 2007

Pete — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:47:34 +0000

Hermes Softlab announced availability of their new MP for Oracle Siebel today. Excerpt from the press release below.

Full details at the source.

Hermes SoftLab, today released its leading management solution for Oracle Siebel on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.

The Siebel Management Pack extends the benefits of Microsoft Operations Manager by enabling the end-to-end management perspective of Oracle Siebel CRM, and by improving the availability and performance of the overall CRM estate. It offers not only a 360 degree, holistic view of all key Siebel service chain components, but also helps ensure that the user experience is, and remains positive.

Siebel Management Pack will be featured at the upcoming Microsoft Management Summit 2009 in Las Vegas at HERMES SoftLab booth (#627).

HERMES SoftLab has partnered with Microsoft and Siebel to bring end-to-end service-management strategies and best practices to their customer base. HERMES SoftLab, a leading provider of power-user grade solutions that address enterprise applications like Oracle Siebel or EMC Documentum, is today further extending its reach to a Microsoft platform. The release of its highly successful offering for the Siebel environment is the first in a line of announced products that work closely with Microsoft Operations Manager.

Updated Dell Hardware MP v3.1.1 now available (fixes and OS support)

Pete — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:19:22 +0000

There are several bugfixes in the MP, including the important storage discovery problem when running OMSA 5.5. However, Windows 2008 is still not listed as a supported operating system.

Where to get it:

MP can be downloaded from the Dell website by clicking HERE.

Supported OS Versions:

Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64
Microsoft Windows XP x64

Version A00 changes:

Dell Server and Printer Management Pack (Dell.Connections.001.mp) code was modified with fixes for discovery of Storage Controllers with Server Administrator version 5.5, and a known defect with health of Virtual Disks, where in some scenarios health of Virtual Disks were not shown correctly.
The executable ‘DellBMCLog.exe’ was modified to include improved error handling.
The Storage Array Management Pack (Dell.Connections.StorageArray.mp) and the executable ‘dellabb.exe’ was modified to add support for MD Storage Arrays (MD3000/MD3000i), both generation 1 with firmware version 06.xx.xx.xx as well as generation 2 with firmware version 07.xx.xx.xx.

Savision announces free version of Live Maps v3 for OpsMgr 2007

Pete — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:26:09 +0000

What a great surprise! Savision as announced a free 3-map version of Live Maps v3 for Operations Manager 2007. Press release below…

The Netherlands - Tuesday, March 17, 2009 Savision B.V., the leader in Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager visualization, today announced the availability of a free version of Live Maps for Microsoft Operations Manager 2007. Microsoft Operations Manager administrators everywhere can now benefit from the extraordinary visualization capabilities of Live Maps v3. The free version is fully functional and allows IT organizations to create three maps of any type.

Live Maps allows IT organizations to easily conceive, build and maintain large-scale monitoring maps. New wizards and templates allow IT professionals to quickly construct dynamically updated network and application topologies, geographical views, complex business processes and executive dashboards. Network link-awareness features ensure that the full IT picture is provided. This ensures that employees at all levels, from the IT operator to the business executive, have access to the information needed to proactively manage IT problems.

“Associating IT failures to our applications and IT services is a difficult proposition without understanding the relationships between components that connect a specified service. Being able to visualize these relationships and their associated alerts is a vital element that our organization has strived to achieve for years“, said Brian Muffley, Global Framework Engineering Manager (ICT), Lend Lease Corporation. “Live Maps allows us to meet this requirement and provides a dynamic environment that simplifies impact analysis and availability monitoring. We have found that Live Maps is helping us to communicate the health of our services, not only to applications and support teams but also to senior management by utilizing their dashboards and drill through technology.”

The free version of Live Maps may be downloaded at www.savision.com/free.

Reminder: System Center Virtual User Group Meeting #5 March 19th

Pete — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:00:31 +0000

The next System Center Virtual User group meeting #5 will be March 19th, 12 noon central time. We have a good mix of SCCM, DCM, Powershell and OpsMgr 2007, on with the agenda!

Agenda (Central Time Zone)

Presenter	Topic
	Introduction	12:00 - 12:05
Jason Sandys	Desired Configuration Management (DCM): Objectives and Strategies	12:05 - 12:30
Harold Dyck	Extending DCM in ConfigMgr 2007	12:35 - 1:00
Marco Shaw	Powershell v2	1:05 - 1:30
Kevin Holman	Improving Console Performance in Operations Manager 2007	1:35 - 2:00
	Closing - open for questions	2:00 - 2:10

Registration

We have an excellent line up for this meeting so join us by registering here.

Presenter Bios

Jason Sandys a Senior Consultant at Catapult Systems, has over 10 years of experience in development and systems management. Jason concentrates on implementing and supporting Microsoft-centric solutions for a wide variety of customers, focusing primarily on Configuration Manager and Operations Manager. Jason is a contributing author to System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Unleashed.
Jason’s blog http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys/
Tiny URL for the book on Amazon’s site - http://tinyurl.com/5gtlkg
The ConfigMgr Unleashed blog is at http://configmgr.spaces.live.com/

Harold Dyck with over twenty years in IT, is a thought leader in the Microsoft tools market. After attending Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, Harold spent several years at IBM then moved on to work as a pre-sales engineer at Microsoft. After several years of progressive success with Microsoft, he moved on to become the founder of MessageWise, a provider of enterprise management software solutions, which he subsequently sold to Quest Software (Nasdaq: QSFT) in 2000. Following the sale of MessageWise, Dyck was Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at Venture Coaches, where he reviewed and assessed investment opportunities in a range of technology startups. In 2003, Harold joined forces with Paul Chehowski and Randy Roffey to found Silect Software. Today, he serves as the company’s President and CEO leading its business and execution strategy. http://www.silect.com/

Marco Shaw has been working in the IT industry for over 10 years. Marco runs the Virtual PowerShell User Group, and is one of the Community Directors of the PowerShell Community site http://www.powershellcommunity.org. Marco recently received the Microsoft MVP Award for the second year in a row (2008/2009) for contributions to the Windows PowerShell Community. Marco holds several certifications ITIL, RHCE, LCP, and a MCP. Some of his recent authoring activities have included writing PowerShell content for Windows Server 2008 Administrator’s Companion (Microsoft Press, 2008), a PowerShell related article on System Center Operations Manager 2007 (Microsoft TechNet Magazine, 2008), providing PowerShell content for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Management and Administration (Sams, 2008), and has co-authored Windows PowerShell Unleashed, 2nd edition (Sams, 2008). Marco’s blog: http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com

Kevin Holman is a Senior Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft supporting System Center Operations Manager for large enterprises. He has been with Microsoft for 3 years and has been involved with large scale deployments of MOM 2005 and OpsMgr 2007, out of the Las Colinas, TX office. Kevin has been in the technology industry for 14 years, previously as a Platforms Engineer for EDS. He is active in the OpsMgr community, and maintains an OpsMgr blog, at http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/. He currently lives in Plano, TX.

PC Audio only

Audio will only be available through Live Meeting.

Thank you for the continued support!

Scott Moss

VP - Southeast Management User Group (SMUG)
Virtual Gopher - System Center Virtual User Group

System Center: Turn your old Windows server into a iSCSI Hyper-V storage array

Pete — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:00:57 +0000

A few months ago, I started using iSCSI storage, primarily for the value it provided in providing easy storage for hosting virtual machines when using Hyper-V in my OpsMgr / Essentials / ConfigMgr lab environments.

Clustered storage without a SAN?

My problem was this: I had a server with a half dozen drives (JBOD), but that lacked the appropriate VT technology to support Hyper-V. So I had to determine how to present this storage to my Hyper-V hosts. Since Windows 2008 has an iSCSI initiator, iSCSI was a obvious choice. But how could I quickly turn this server into an iSCSI target for hosting clustered virtual machines? What I wanted to do was simply an iSCSI based Window 2008 Hyper-V host cluster, like this:

What options do I have?

My first thought was Linux. I knew I could configure this server as an iSCSI NAS to facilitate this. Two problems with this: 1) too much work (I wanted storage NOW) and 2) I’ve never configured Linux as an iSCSI target.

So, I took to searching the web. I found Windows Unified Data Storage Server. The problem here was that it’s an OEM product, so the only download available is a time-limited download intended for OEMs. I have since tried this, and after installing the OS and after about 3 hours with messing around with blog-based setup instructions, I had some storage. This was not an ideal.

So, where could I find software iSCSI that was easy to setup and inexpensive or free and within my capabilites to configure? Well, I can now say I have seen the top of the mountain, and it is good. I found the answer in a previously online-only software company called RocketDivision, which produces an iSCSI solution called StarWind Server. This software can turn any Windows Server into an iSCSI target in 30 minutes. And it meets the requirements of a guy trying to setup a lab in a hurry.

Quick and Easy Setup - WIth their Pro version, I had clustered iSCSI storage in less than 30 minutes.
Inexpensive - They have a free version, which works great if you’re not clustering. If you need cluster capable storage, you will need to Pro version of StarWInd Server, which is still relatively inexpensive at $995.
Documentation - Their documentation library has a host of PDFs that make setup a breeze.

StarWind recently launched their US presense in December 2008, and I spoke with their US head of business development Michael Walsh, who pointed me to their new website - www.starwindsoftware.com. While I was working on a specific lab scenario, the company has several great offerings that will supported a Windows-based iSCSI in a variety of production scenarios.

If you are interested in working with high availability System Center virtualization technologies, but thought it was out of reach due to lack of shared storage, StarWind is your fix. Download StarWind Server free edition or the pro version trial at http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-server-iscsi-san

Should I attempt OpsMgr X-plat agent deployment to VMware ESX 3.x Servers?

Pete — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:26:35 +0000

Someone recently posed this question, and I’m sure this question will be commonplace in the coming months. Here’s my answer and reasoning behind it. I’ll talk about reasoning in terms of

Current and future ESX architecture
APIs and interfaces for extracting monitoring data
3rd partry add-ons for VMware monitoring in OpsMgr

Although there no doubt someone will try, my answer is that it is not a great idea, and for the following reasons. Even if we throw out the “unsupported” nature of this scenario, there are several other reasons that make this a less than optimal solution in my mind. OpsMgr provides an extensible framework for developing homegrown solutions, and the partner community has several options for solving this challenge.

Current and future architecture

Even though the ESX Service Console is based on the Linux kernel (2.4 I believe) which is used ot boot the ESX Server virtualization layer. This kernel is used to load additional code, referred to the vmkernel. So there are really two kernels here. VMware is progressively reducing their reliance on this in each release. The changes are substanital between releases, and anything we do on the 3.5 platform will almost certainly not work with release 4, in which many changes are expected.

In short, no sense reinventing the wheel for a solution with a limited life span.

APIs and interfaces for extracting monitoring data

By proxy (remotely), you can extract monitoring information from a number of sources in a VMware environment, including:

SDK Web Service (requires Virtual Center) - Mark this as the richest source of VMware performance data, and at the lowest cost to host and guest performance.
SYSLOG - These tend to be pretty cryptic.
SSH (screen scrape) - I believe eXc at minimum makes some us of SSH.
vmcontrol-based APIs (including vmPerl / vmCOM) - These were deprecated a couple of years ago I believe, so definitely not a preferred solution.

Jonathan Hambrook documented how to monitor several aspects of your ESX environment on the cheap in this document.

http://www.systemcenterforum.org/downloads/vmware-esx-monitoring-on-opsmgr-2007-how-to

But in short, I believe proxy-based solutions leveraging the SDK web service are the best route.

3rd partry add-ons for VMware monitoring in OpsMgr

In additional to the free options, there are numerous credible third party add-ons for Operations Manager and Essentials 2007 for monitoring your ESX 3.x / VI3 environment (in no particular order), including:

Veaam (formerly nWorks) - The most robust amongst the third party offerings (IMHO), this one also carries the highest price tag…but worth the money in mission critical virtualization scenarios. It’s helped me uncover configuration and performance issues on a couple of occasions. VMware monitoring and management is their primary focus, and they seem know it well. This offering heavily leverages the SDK web service.
Quest (formerly eXc) - eXc has a broad range of “virtual agents”, a term used for their agentless solutions. Less full-featured than Veaam, but also less expensive. If you’re looking for a provider with a broad range of product support (Oracle, Apache, etc), this is an option to consider.
Jalasoft - Jalasoft focuses on *NIX monitoring today, although I have yet to see anything that leverages the X-plat architecture from this provider.
Xandros - Makers of the much-anticipated Bridgeways MP for X-plat in OpsMgr 2007 R2, I have yet to test their beta offering for VMware ESX monitoring. Xandros has a major focus on X-Plat, so I am hoping for big things from these guys in that arena as well.

Good partners all…I encourage you to talk to all when weighing your VMware monitoring options.

Additional Resources

Conclusion

In short, I think an enterprise monitoring solution for VMware should be supported and comprehensive given the complexity of the VMware platform. Hopefully this provides a clearer picture of the possible routes to a successful VMware monitoring solution with Operations Manager 2007.

OpsMgr: Why is an accurate value for the “IsVirtualMachine” attribute important?

Pete — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:27:15 +0000

I posted a copy of the Virtual Machine Discovery MP the other day, which updates the default discovery behavior in OpsMgr to include VMware guests running Windows computers, it brought about a question from a reader.

Why is knowing which computers are virtual machines important?

While this is nothing fancy (I know several other admins using the very same thing), it offers some important benefits.There are a number of situations where knowing you’re dealing with a VM comes in handy:

A troubleshooting aid when a VM is running poorly. If a Windows server is running poorly and I know it’s a VM, it will prompt me to check my VM host to ensure it is not overburdened.
When a discovery script from a Hardware MP is consuming excessive resources. I’ve sen this happen, and it is not the hardware vendors fault. So when we have a true reading for physical versus virtual, we can disable these discoveries from running on virtual machines using an override using a custom group based on this attribute.
When looking for virtualization candidates. If I dont have SCVMM 2008 in place, spotting good virtualization candidates is difficult if I do not know for sure which machines are actually physical servers!

Hope that clears up the reason behind this sample MP. I’ll have a version out that supports XenServer as well in a few weeks.

In the meantime, you can download the Virtual Machine Discovery MP HERE.

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Post tags: System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007

TIP: How to reset / re-run the Feature Configuration Wizard in Essentials 2007

Pete — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:29:42 +0000

Here is a question posed recently that may be useful to adminstrators or consultants working with Essentials.

Question: Once I’ve run the Feature Configuration Wizard in Essentials and selected Local Policy, how can I reverse my decision and switch to Active Directory Group Policies applied at the domain level?

The policy type can be selected only when the Feature Configuration wizard is run for the first time, so this poses a bit of a problem. Once you’ve made the decision, it’s done. After this, the selection will be unavailable next time the wizard is run.

However, there is a workaround:

Answer: This can be changed by running SCECertPolicyConfigUtil.exe /uninstall /ManagementGroup on the Essentials 2007 server.

After you run this command, check the following:

That the “SCE All Computers” and “SCE Managed Computers” GPOs were deleted from AD
That the “SCE Managed Computers” security group was deleted from AD
That the following registry key is set to 0: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\System Center Essentials\1.0\Console\FeatureWizardSettings\FeatureConfigurationCompleted
Certificates were deleted from the \Certificates folder.

After running the command and checking that all the above are true, open SCE console, re-run the “Feature Configuration Wizard”.

No “store certificate in local computer certificate store” option when requesting a certificate from Windows 2008 Certification Authority

Scott Weisler — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:59:09 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was recently configuring an Essentials 2007 environment, and when requesting a certificate for a workgroup computer, noticed that the “store certificate in local computer certificate store” option is missing. The net effect of this is that when you click the “install certificate” link after approving the request, it is stored in the user store instead of the computer store. After some searching, I discovered the reason for this in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922706

The isssue here is that administrative rights are required to request a computer certificate. In Windows Vista and Windows 2008, Microsoft Internet Explorer does not use administrative rights to run. Therefore, the option to store a computer certificate in the computer store was removed from the Windows Server 2008 certificate enrollment pages.

One workarounds is simply export from the user store and import into the computer store. Another is to use certreq.exe or the CertGenWizard to automate this process outside of the web enrollment page.

Update: File System MP v6.5 for OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and R2 (sealed and unsealed)

Pete — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:42:06 +0000

Jaime has updated the File System MP, and this version offers a wildcard option for file monitoring, which was a very popular request.

WHERE TO GET IT

Download links in the Community Management Pack Catalog and the System Center User Group site.

Updates and fixes in releases 6.5:

Added Performance Rule – File Size Performance (folder class)
Added Performance Rule – Single File Size Performance (file class)
Changed the rule for file extensions modified time – added a wildcard * that all can use for all files and fixed the extensions, you can now use any type and size of extensions.
Changed rule – SMB file performance – It will list now all the shares has individual instances and corrected a typo in the view
Added some icons
Added more descriptions

As always, many thanks to Jaime Correia for all his hard work!

Essentials 2 Minute Tune-up: Which hotfixes should I apply to my Essentials 2007 installation?

Pete — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:59:33 +0000

In a recent post, we talked about how to get Essentials 2007 running smoothly on Windows 2008. The next logical question is “Which hotfixes should I apply to my Essentials 2007 Server?”

So let’s assume you are running Essentials 2007 on Windows 2008. We know you’ll need to apply the Windows 2008-specific fixes mentioned in the previous post

Windows 2008 Hotfixes for an Essentials 2007 Server

Install the following hotfixes BEFORE you install 954049. I’ve tried both before and after the Essentials installation, and it doesn’t seem to matter. However, 953141 says you must install these before you install Essentials or OpsMgr server roles.

951327 The System Center Operations Manager 2007 console may crash in Windows Server 2008 or in Windows Vista when you open the Health Explorer window

952664 The Event Log service may stop responding because of a deadlock on a Windows Server 2008-based computer

953290 An application may crash when it uses legacy methods to query performance counter values in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008

Critical Hotfixes for Essentials 2007

Then, perform your Essentials or OpsMgr installation.

Finally, apply KB954049. This should make Essentials or OpsMgr run happily on Windows 2008.

But that is not all. There are several fixes included in the following MPs that are critical to every Essentials 2007 installation.
KB951979 – Updates four system libraries (MPs)
KB954903 - Resolves monitoringhost.exe resource consumption issue
KB956240 – Resolves SQL Server CPU resource consumption issue
KB957511 – Resolves warning alerts and monitor states do not change as expected issue
KB958253 – Resolves issue with display of Patch List property

Conclusion

Applying these fixes should bring your Essentials installation to a state of smooth operation. However, bear in mind new hotfixes are released all the time. Check the list of necessary fixes for Essentials on a regular basis to see if any apply to you.

I like the list of OpsMgr fixes maintained by Kevin Holman. These generally apply to Essentials as well, but be sure to read the hotfix release notes.

http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2009/01/27/which-hotfixes-should-i-apply.aspx

Understanding hotfixes and common issues when installing Essentials or OpsMgr 2007 on Windows 2008

Pete — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:00:14 +0000

I’ve had a handful of questions regarding how to install Essentials 2007 / Operations Manager 2007 on Windows 2008 recently, especially when it relates to hotfixes. That being said, I wanted to break down the contents of KB954049, discuss order of operations, and a couple of common issues.

The first thing to understand that KB954049 is not the only hotfix. This is the hotfix that is applicable to Essentials / OpsMgr, but there are several that must be applied to Windows 2008 BEFORE you apply 954049.

WHERE TO START

Begin by reading http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953141. This article describes the requirements in detail.

INSTALLATION ORDER

951327 The System Center Operations Manager 2007 console may crash in Windows Server 2008 or in Windows Vista when you open the Health Explorer window

952664 The Event Log service may stop responding because of a deadlock on a Windows Server 2008-based computer

953290 An application may crash when it uses legacy methods to query performance counter values in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008

Then, perform your Essentials or OpsMgr installation.

Finally, apply KB954049. This should make Essentials or OpsMgr run happily on Windows 2008.

OTHER COMMON ISSUES

There are a couple of problems I see with SRS all the time.

“Unable to connect to remote server” - SQL Reporting Services on Windows 2008 sometimes does not work out of the box, and this is related to a setting on the /ReportServer virtual directory in IIS. You can correct it by performing the following steps.

In IIS 7 Manager, highlight the ReportServer virtual directory
In right pane click on Handler Mappings
Click Edit Feature Permissions in the Actions Pane
Enable Script and Execute.
Click OK
Restart IIS and SQL Reporting Services service

SRS Instance does appear as available for Essentials - This is because specific IIS features must be installed for SRS to install. There is good information in the following KB article to help you out - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934164

Hopefully this helps. Post questions or feedback as a comment to this post.

News on the IIS 7 MP and Related Hotfix

Pete — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:00:42 +0000

If you downloaded this QFE for IIS7 monitoring we mentioned here a few days ago, you will want to take a look at this post from the Operations Manager team at Microsoft.

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/02/25/problem-with-the-iis-modules-qfe-957123.aspx

The download has now been pulled and will be made available again when it’s all sorted out.

New Operations Manager 2007 KB Articles week of 2/25/2009

Pete — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:54:04 +0000

There are a couple of new KB articles released for OpsMgr 2007 this week…

959497 - The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 SDK service may stop unexpectedly, and you may receive an error message: “Specified argument is out of the range of valid values “

960363 - Charts in a performance report are incorrectly scaled, or a report that contains multiple charts does not display the charts in the correct order in System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1

The Virtualization War Escalates [and where OpsMgr fits in]

Pete — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:30:15 +0000

The day before yesterday, Citrix announced a free version of XenServer will be released at the end of March. Clearly this is a strike at VMware, but they’re doing one better to be sure. The software, available to any user for unlimited production deployment, will include new features such as centralized multi-node management, multi-server resource sharing and full live motion, according to Citrix.

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/66274.html?wlc=1235542540

And now today, Microsoft and Citrix announce a partnership, coupled with the recent Microsoft / Red Hat announcement of mutual virtualization support.

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7252/

Add to this the R2 release of OpsMgr will rich monitoring capabilities for the RHEL OS and the partner community gearing up with application MPs for X-Plat, where does this leave VMware? Xandros and Quest already have quite a portfolio in the works in beta. Should be an exciting launch at MMS.

What if we could get the ball rolling on some freely availble monitoring solutions for the cross-platform community?

System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Internet Information Services 7.0 Monitoring Support

Pete — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:50:59 +0000

This QFE updates the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Agent to allow it to monitor Windows Server 2008 Internet Information Services 7.0 Servers.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f82ef6b3-a08e-4295-b9e3-fb78a74aefa8&displaylang=en

This hotfix must be applied to each computer that meets the following criteria:

Hosts a Microsoft Operations Manager Root Management Server
Hosts a Microsoft Operations Manager Management Server
Hosts a Microsoft Operations Manager Gateway Server
Host a Microsoft Operations Manually Installed Agent (Discover-based agent deployment not used)

Xian Network Manager Io SP2 is all about scalability [press release]

Pete — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:37:08 +0000

I like vendors that listen to their customers. I think scalability was the primary complaint anyone would have voiced with Xian IO and it appears they’ve taken yet another big step toward large enterprise scalability. In the last release, we saw eliminating of targeting the RMS. In SP2, we see a big jump in scalability - capacity to monitor 4 times the number of devices versus the previous release.

Full press release below or at http://www.jalasoft.com/Web/News/Default.aspx?id=29

——————————————-

The many improvements in Service Pack 2 are mainly focused on the performance of Xian Io. As a result of these improvements, SP2 is able to monitor 4 times as many devices as in SP1. Besides that, many small enhancements make Xian more user friendly than ever before.

“Xian Io SP2 provides you with the capacity to monitor large network environments with thousands of devices without you having to worry about performance issues” said Davor Pavisic, CTO at Jalasoft.

The performance enhancements in Xian are most notable in large environments, but administrators that have smaller environments will also notice that Xian runs smoother and more stable in addition to using fewer resources.

Xian Io SP2 can be downloaded from the Jalasoft website. Users with Xian Io SP1 will be able to upgrade with the upgrade tool which will be available end of March 2009.

For more information contact:

Claudia Ricaldez, Claudia.Ricaldez@jalasoft.com, +1 888 402 6717

Part 5: Exploring Discovery Data with the OpsMgr Command Shell - Virtual Machine Inventory

Pete — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:40:55 +0000

Previous Installments

What we illustrated in part 4 with Dell Server inventory is equally applicable to digging into the properties of any object class. In this case, we want to retrieve a list of all computers for which the IsVirtualMachine property equals true.

“But the IsVirtualMachine property only reveals VMs running on Microsoft virtualization platforms!”. I know, I know, but the solution for that is another story. I demonstrate how to get your VMware guests in the list in my next post. So, for the moment, back to our Virtual Machine Inventory report.

I started by finding the name of the Windows Computer object class by running using the Get-MonitoringClass cmdlet like so:

get-monitoringclass | where {$_.DisplayName -match ‘Windows Computer’} | select Name, DisplayName

This returned a list that made it easy to pick out the class name for Windows Computer, which is Microsoft.Windows.Computer.

To create a computer inventory, we will first retrieve at least one instance of the object class so we can enumerate all the properties of the class. We will assign it to a variable ($computer) for easy reuse, as shown below:

$computer = Get-MonitoringClass | where {$_.Name -eq ‘Microsoft.Windows.Computer’} | get-monitoring

bject

Now, let’s return all the properties of the class. That’s another simple one-liner

$computer | get-member

As with the Dell inventory in part 4, you can also retrieve just the Noteproperty membertype. This will be important, as it takes a slight change in how we retrieve those properties. So, retrieve these so you know which they are.

$computer | get-member -Membertype Noteproperty

Figure 1 - Portion of output of $computer | get-member -Membertype Noteproperty

PathName

UniquePathName

[Microsoft.SystemCenter.ManagedComputer].InstallDirectory

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].ActiveDirectoryObjectSid

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].ActiveDirectorySite

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].DNSName

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].DomainDnsName

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].ForestDnsName

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].IPAddress

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].IsVirtualMachine

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].NetbiosComputerName

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].NetbiosDomainName

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].NetworkName

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].OrganizationalUnit

[Microsoft.Windows.Computer].PrincipalName

[Microsoft.Windows.Server.Computer].IsVirtualNode

[System.Entity].DisplayName

[System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Computer].Bridgehead_Server

[System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Computer].BusinessCriticality

[System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Computer].ComputerType

[System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Computer].Computer_Manufacturer

[System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Computer].Computer_Model

[System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Computer].DomainControllerService

[System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Computer].ExchangeService

[System.Mom.BackwardCompatibility.Computer].Front_end_Server

Retrieving Data for the Report

At this point, I wanted to simply retrieve the Name, IsVirtualMachine, for each server. Again, the NoteProperty type is. As mentioned in Part 4, Marco had covered in his guest post. So, with a quick modification to replace the bracketed string with a wildcard, the output came as desired.

$computer|select *.NetbiosComputerName, *.IsVirtualMachine

You can add properties from above as you like and, as illustrated in previous posts, you can export to an Excel-friendly csv file. The problem remains that VMware guests are not included in the report.

Tomorrow, we’ll post a fix to work around that problem.

Tip: Web Certificate Enrollment issue on a Windows 2008 Server

Scott Weisler — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:08:59 +0000

When working in a purely Windows 2008 environment (lab), I found I was unable to request a certificate for a Windows 2008 computer (in a workgroup) where I’d installed an Operations Manager 2007 agent. When I accessed the Web Enrollment URL (http:///certsrv) to request a certificate, I received the the following error dialogue:

“In order to complete certificate enrollment, the Web site for the CA must be configured to use HTTPS authentication.”

While it may be a best practice, I certainly do not want to be forced to the trouble of configuring SSL just to work in the lab.

The Cause

After digging around, I found little in the way of documentation on the problem outside of a couple obscure newsgroup posts. As it turns out, IE is actually blocking the ActiveX control used by the page due to security, and providing this misleading error that implies SSL is required. However, this error message is simply misleading. As it turns out, you can force the use of HTTP with a couple of change in Internet Explorer

The Workaround

1. In the Internet Explorer, Tools –>Internet Options–>Security tab–>Trusted Sites.

2. Click Sites, clear the option “Require server verification (https for all sites in this zone” and add the current CA web enrollment site into the list.

3. Then in Internet Explorer settings on the Windows 2008 Server where you are requesting the certificate, enable “Initialize ActiveX unsafe for scripting” You can find this under Tools->Internet Options->Security. Select the zone [Trusted Sites] and then select the “Custom Level…” button.

4. Find “Initialize and script ActiveX controls not marked as safe for scripting” and set it’s value to ENABLE.

5. Close IE and access the http:///certsrv URL again, and you should see the Certificate Web Enrollment Form using HTTP as you do on Windows 2003 and XP.

New Tool in the Operations Manager 2007 Community Toolbox

Pete — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:17:58 +0000

Vin DiPippo has a situationally useful troubleshooting tool, the OpsMgr DW Timeouts and TableCount Utility.

Description:

A small utility that does a table count on all the tables in a database and reports the number of milliseconds that the operation takes on each. Good for identifying tables that may be fragmented and need to be reindexed.

Where to get it:

Find links to this and all OpsMgr community tools in the Operations Manager Community Toolbox at http://www.systemcenterforum.org/tools

Well done Vin!

OpsMgr 2007 MP Module Reference (with examples!) now on TechNet

Pete — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 05:39:06 +0000

MP authoring resources are popping up from Microsoft sources.

Supported Modules on TechNet

Modules are the main building blocks of a management pack. And can be put together in various combinations to create workflows, which are the foundation of Operations Manager. This reference guide documents the most commonly used modules.

Finally, a list of at least some of the most common modules has been published to TechNet. And the examples included are fairly we explained, complete with xml you can cut-and-paste.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd391800.aspx

Additional Examples at AuthorMPs.com

After a foray to a different product team, Steve Wilson is back and adding content to AuthorMPs.com

Three recent additions:

Using property bags for multi-instance monitoring - this shows how to best use property bags in scripts and common mistakes made
Consolidation and composition - this shows how to use our consolidation module type and also how to build into a custom composition
OLEDB discovery - this shows how to use the little known OLEDB module type to query SQL without using scripts

Windows 2003 & 2008 Scheduled Task MP v1.1.0.10 now available

Pete — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:34:10 +0000

An updated version of the Scheduled Task MP for Operations Manager 2007 that works with Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 is now available. You can download the latest copy HERE or in the Community Management Pack Catalog.

Unsealed Management Pack Backup MP 3.0 (sealed) for OpsMgr 2007

Pete — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:14:38 +0000

The Unsealed Management Pack Backup MP v3.0 provides an automated process for backup and archival of your unsealed management packs in System Center Operations Manager 2007. I made a couple of quick updates by request.

New in this release

Added a RunAs Profile to allow association of a domain user with OpsMgr Administrator rights needed to run the backup script.
Sealed the MP to allow for easy upgrade to future releases.
Updated MP Guide

Where to get it

Download the new version from the SCF Community Management Pack Catalog.

How it works

Full details in the Readme.pdf included with the MP. Also see this description of v2 of the MP, which explains basic functionality.

Feedback

Send feedback and bug reports to address in the MP Guide included in the MP download.

Reminder: Microsoft wants your feedback on Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack Quality (survey)

Pete — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:54:51 +0000

Microsoft and the Operations Manager 2007 product team would like to know what you think about the quality of Microsoft management packs for Operations Manager 2007. This community survey is your chance to rate the quality and features of several management packs to help Microsoft understand where they need to focus their time and effort to improve management pack quality.

This is a short survey (only 9 questions) allowing you to rate the individual quality of several management packs, and communicate your thoughts on monitoring features, tuning effort required - everything that makes for a good MP.

The survey should only take about 5 minutes. We’d like to get your feedback by Monday, February 16th if possible. However, we’ll leave the survey open longer if responses are still coming in sufficient numbers.

Click Here to take the survey

If you have questions or any problems taking the survey, please contact us at admin systemcenterusergroup.com.

SCCM 2007: How to monitor ConfigMgr inboxes using Powershell

Pete — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 04:56:36 +0000

The inbox folders in the \inboxes subdirectory of the ConfigMgr 2007 install directory temporarily store files before they are processed to the site database or transferred to another site or site component. Monitoring inbox folders on a Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 can help you troubleshoot problems with different ConfigMgr components.You should periodically examine the Configuration Manager 2007 inbox folders for a backlog of files that wait to be processed, as this can indicate that a component is not running or is experiencing a problem.

Especially when deploying a large number of agents, or doing anything else likely to cause a burst activity, I am an inbox watcher. There are a number of VBScripts floating about that will do this, but it’s so much nicer in Powershell…only a single line.

That being said, watch the line wrap when you cut-and-paste.

Get-ChildItem “c:\Program Files\Microsoft Configuration Manager\inboxes” -recurse | Where {!$_.PSIsContainer} | Group Directory | Format-Table Name, Count -autosize

Update the path to the \inboxes folder to the appropriate value for your installation.

If you want to see a list of ConfigMgr 2007inboxes and how they can help in monitoring and troubleshooting your ConfigMgr deployment, see the TechNet link below.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb892790.aspx

OpsMgr Command Shell samples from Southeast SMUG meeting

Pete — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:14:53 +0000

The Southeast Management User Group had a meeting this week, and one of the speakers (Scott Moss) posted a pretty long list of one-liners. If you’re not Powershell inclined, you might pick up a few things from his list.

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/smoss/archive/2009/02/05/smug-presentation-february-3rd-2009-administrative-uses-of-powershell-in-opsmgr-2007.aspx

Microsoft is looking for your feedback on the Management Pack Quality Survey for Operations Manager 2007. Take 5 minutes to complete the survey to let Microsoft know what they are doing right and where they need to improve.

Click Here to take the survey

Q&A Follow-up to OpsMgr Top Alerts Report Powershell samples

Pete — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:13:27 +0000

There are a few additional items that I need to expound upon related to the Top Alerts Report Powershell posts from a few months ago, but for the moment, I wanted to respond to a specific readers question from Top Alerts Report - Part 1.

Q: I am using Get-alert cmdlet to get some specific results. I am trying to get the specific services with the following criteria :

get-alert -criteria ‘Name = ”The service cannot be started”’ | Select-Object -Property NetbiosComputerName

Anybody has got any idea of how to get the specific service using powershell. Please help!!

A: So it appears our reader wants to create an ad-hoc report of service failures amongst the alerts received in OpsMgr, but only for a particular service.

The answer of how to do this is relatively simple, but depends on how you are receiving the alerts. I will assume in this example that you’ve enabled the service monitoring rules, which are named “Service or Driver Failed to Start” and “A service terminated unexpectedly”. If not, simply substitute the name of your rules or monitors in place of these in the example below.

As an example, let’s use the VMware Server service on the VirtualCenter host in my SCVMM/Hyper-V/ESX test lab. With the following one-liner, I can retrieve only the alerts generated by the rules above where the service name includes the string “VMware” in the alert description field.

get-alert | where {($_.Name -match “Service Terminated Unexpectedly”) -or ($_.Name -match “A service or driver failed to start”) -and ($_.Description -match “VMware”) } | select NetbiosComputerName, Description

If you want to get more specific in terms of service name, you can simply adjust the text match string description field.

How to run a monitor during business hours in Operations Manager 2007 [FAQ]

Pete — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:09:12 +0000

Q: Can I configure a rule or monitor to run only during business hours in Operations Manager 2007?

A: Yes, but you must edit the monitor in XML directory. To achieve the same result with a monitor you just need to build a composite module with a System.SchedulerFilter condition in your workflow.

See step-by-step instructions at:

Boris Yanuspolsky’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2008/09/19/configuring-rules-to-run-during-business-hours-only.aspx
Quaue Nocent Docent: http://nocentdocent.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/running-a-monitor-during-business-hours/

Q&A Follow up to Virtual Operations Manager: Part 1 - Should I Virtualize?

Pete — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:12:48 +0000

Part 1 of the Virtual Operations Manager series prompted some interesting questions, which I wanted to address before we move on to the next installment. The most important question was this one:

Q: Should I virtualize a Management Server hosting the Audit Collection Services (ACS) Collector Role?

A: This is a great question, because management servers are listed as a “recommended”. However, when the management server is configured to function as an ACS Collector, this is not always the case. With the 1-to-1 relationship between ACS Collector and Audit database, we do not have the same freedom to scale out to multiple collectors without impacting the reporting experience (remember there is no summary reporting mechanism in ACS).

My opinion on the topic is that the ACS Collector role should not be virtualized except in small environments or DMZ / gateway scenarios where high scalability is not required. However, this leads to another valid question:

Where is the line between low and high scalability and when do I make the move from virtual to physical?

To answer this question, I wanted to get feedback from the ACS experts at SecureVantage, who have seen and supported more enterprise ACS deployments than perhaps anyone else outside of MS. When I posed this question to Ryan Brennan, co-founder and strategist at SecureVantage.

Ryan suggests the following:

“I typically watch the forwarder disconnect rate, queue lengths, and performance load via AdtAdmin or Secure Vantage Audit Collection Admin Console. For some reason these values are very high in virtualized scenarios that I have seen even if the virtual box has adequate memory and CPU. It could be bad virtual setups and resource allocation or just ACS collectors need a physical box, we have yet to find the proper metrics and design to support a successful virtual setup. To avoid dropping sensitive security data and safeguard the Collector role we recommend physical to our customers. The time spent to tune a virtual setup properly will probably outweigh the cost savings.”

The bottom line? There is no hard limit when virtualizing server roles. Let performance be your guide. When you can no longer allocate resources to maintain optimal performance on your virtualized collector, it may time to make the move to a physical host. We have updated the table in Part 1 to reflect specific recommendations for the ACS Collector role.

Previous Installments in the Virtual Operations Manager Series

In part 2 of the series, we will discuss options and decision criteria when planning your storage infrastructure for virtualizing Operations Manager roles. We’ll also touch on I/O virtualization, which promises to change the way we think about virtualizing SQL today.

——————

About SecureVantage

Formed in November 2005, Secure Vantage Technologies (SVT) focuses on developing technologies in the IT Security Monitoring market for Microsoft System Center products. Secure Vantage firmly believes in providing customers with value adding solutions that improve the fidelity of security monitoring and operations.

Ryan Brennan

Ryan is responsible for the overall technical vision and direction for Secure Vantage Technologies. Ryan brings more than twelve years of solid technology and management experience. Ryan has worked for multiple Fortune 1000 Companies and has experience in System Management, IT & Security Operations, Software Development, Quality Assurance, Systems Administration and Project Management with focus on the industries: banking, energy, technology, software, healthcare. Ryan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

How to convert your Virtual PC images to Hyper-V [Tools]

Pete — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:18:29 +0000

I was looking for a quick way to convert my OpsMgr Virtual PC 2007 VM’s to Hyper-V a few weeks ago. What I found was a free tool called the VMC to Hyper-V Import Tool. The tool essentially allows you to open your VMC file, update paths to drives, add/remove mounted media, resource settings, etc. It then imports the VM into Hyper-V Manager. It made the job pretty easy, allowing me to make the transition in only a few minutes time.

On the negative side, the tool seems a bit buggy, but hey, it’s free. The paths to drives and media must be correct for the convert and import to work. The tool threw some .NET exception errors that required I start over a couple of times, but went away when I updated all drive paths to correct values. Matt definitely deserves some thanks for taking the time to put this together.

Where to get it

You will find a download link for the VMC to Hyper-V Import Tool on MattHij’s blog, as well as detailed features and instructions for use at the URL below:

http://blogs.technet.com/matthts/archive/2008/09/12/vmc-to-hyper-v-import-tool-available.aspx

Update: Critical Hotfixes for OpsMgr and Essentials 2007 SP1, and how to verify you’re up to date

Pete — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:00:20 +0000

Updates (1/31/2009) - A couple of important notes where hotfixes are concerned.

Critical Post-SP1 Hotfixes - Kevin Holman has agreed to keep a list of post-SP1 OpsMgr hotfixes up to date HERE. I agree with his methodology of applying latest hotfixes that supercede previous fixes. This minimizes the time spent applying hotfixes. Rather than duplicate his work, I’ll leave this note in place.
Workaround for hotfix installation issue - As mentioned below, there are some fixes that are not applied correctly, but report they have. While that problem is supposed to be fixed any day now, until then use the workaround to force application HERE.

In doing some cleanup work in a couple of environments where customers are having issues, I have run into a couple of situations where missing post-SP1 hotfixes resulted in serious performance issues. Here are some thoughts on the topic, and some guidance in determining if the fixes were installed successfully.

Of greatest concern is how you are checking to see if the update was applied successfully. I’ve recently had a couple of critical hotfixes report success but then discovered the fix was not really in place. That being said, running a WMI query or checking the Operational DB for a list of installed hotfixes is not always accurate.

A script sample is provided below to help you more accurately retrieve some of the critical DLL files and their versions.

NOTE: Unless otherwise indicated, these notes are applicable to Essentials 2007 as well.

When installing hotfixes, ALWAYS perform the following actions

Always read directions - Some hotfixes update DLL files, and others provide Mgmt Pack updates (as with 951979) that you must import to affect the desired change. Be sure you understand which roles (agent, server, database) require installation of the hotfix.
Always check file versions - For fixes that update .DLL files, we need to actually check the file system and make sure files were actually updated. I have seen more than one environment
Check Pending Management - More than one of the critical post-SP1 fixes applies an update that must be applied to the agent as well. The agents requiring the update will appear in Pending Management for your approval.

Important Post-SP1 Hotfixes

For All Environments

951979 - Problems occur on a management server that is running System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 when certain management packs are installed. Key File Updates: Delivers 4 mgmt packs (installed in the %programfiles%\System Center Hotfix Utility\951979 directory that you must import.
- Comments: This resolves several issues, including that annoying Performance Module cannot… that was introduced with SP1.
954903 - The Monitoringhost.exe process may consume all the CPU resources when a large amount of performance data is created by using a managed data source module in System Center Operations Manager 2007. This MP includes hotfixes 950853 and 951380. Key File Update: Mommodules.dll 6.0.6278.36
- Comments: I’ve seen a SQL cluster in a critical state returned to health with the application of this fix.
956240 - The SQL Server process may consume lots of CPU resources on the server that hosts the Operations Manager 2007 database after you make Operations Manager 2007 configuration changes. Key File Updates: Microsoft.mom.dataaccesslayer.dll 6.0.6278.37956689 - Web Application Template Wizard does not use specified RunAs account for Proxy authentication.Key File Updates: Momnetworkmodules.dll 6.0.6278.41
- Comments: This contains a critical fix for a condition triggered by SNMP discovery that can crash the health service on your RMS or Essentials Server!

If you have Windows 2008 Servers in an OpsMgr Server or Agent Role

954049 - Description of the hotfix rollup package for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 and for System Center Essentials 2007 Service Pack 1: July 25, 2008. Key File Updates: This rollup updates several files. Check the KB for a complete list.

If you have Connected Management Groups (not applicable to Essentials 2007)

956423- Reconnecting a management group with Tiering scenario sets incorrect MG

Key File Update: Microsoft.enterprisemanagement.operationsmanager.dll 6.0.6278.40

Checking for Successful Installation

I think it’s too much work to try and retrieve hotfix info via WMI or from the Operational database, when what we really care about is the file version - which is the only way we REALLY know many of these hotfixes are applied successfully.

File Versions Checklist

Here are the key files you’re looking for, and their version numbers.

Mommodules.dll 6.0.6278.36
Microsoft.mom.dataaccesslayer.dll 6.0.6278.37
Momnetworkmodules.dll 6.0.6278.41
Microsoft.enterprisemanagement.operationsmanager.dll 6.0.6278.40 (in Connected Mgmt Groups only)
954049 rollup - See the KB for a complete list

Script Sample: File Version Retrieval

This script could be easily be dressed up to run as a 2-state monitor to verify critical files are up to the desired revisions. This sample can be saved as a .VBS site and run from a command prompt to retrieve file versions of files listed above. Update the PATH to reflect the installation path of the OpsMgr or Essentials Agent or Server components on the target system.

dim strfiles, filesys, filetxt, getname, PATH

PATH = “c:\program files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\”
strfiles = “Mommodules.dll,Microsoft.mom.dataaccesslayer.dll,Momnetworkmodules.dll,Microsoft.enterprisemanagement.operationsmanager.dll 6.0.6278.40″

Set filesys = CreateObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

ArrayOfValues = Split(strfiles,”,”)

For Each filename In ArrayOfValues
strTargetFile = filesys.GetAbsolutePathName( path & filename )
getname = filesys.GetFileName(strTargetFile)
version = filesys.GetFileVersion(strTargetFile)
WScript.Echo “Name:” & FileName & “, Version:” & version
Next

Updates to the Community Management Pack Catalog for January 2009

Pete — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:29:54 +0000

There have been a couple of nice additions from the Microsoft Premier Field team in the Community Management Pack Catalog for Operations Manager and Essentials 2007. Check these out and see if they fill a gap for you.

Extended Active Directory MP

by Matt Goedtel(MS), this management pack augments the existing Active Directory management pack by monitoring the following specific components and subsystems that Active Directory relies on, which are not captured in the current version, including issues with site boundaries, time synchronization and FRS-related issues

Group Population from CMDB

by Kevin Holman (MS), this management pack using a SQL database as the CMDB source for populating OpsMgr groups, instead of AD.

Additional Community Resources for OpsMgr and Essentials 2007

While you’re at it, have a look at the entire list of Community MPs and Tools

OpsMgr Community MP Catalog - http://www.systemcenterforum.org/mps
OpsMgr Community Toolbox - http://www.systemcenterforum.org/tools

Update: File System MP v6.0.2.0 for OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and R2 (sealed and unsealed)

Pete — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:25:27 +0000

An updated version of the File System Management Pack is now available. All download locations have been updated to serve up the latest release. Be sure to consult the updated MP User Guide, which is included with the download, and just keeps getting better. Many thanks go to Jaime Correia to his aggressive update schedule in response to user feedback.

Where to get it

Download links in the Community Management Pack Catalog.

Updates and fixes in release 6.0.2.0:

Changed the primary keys for the Folder and File Class
Discovery has been remade from scratch for Folder and File
Resolved the “space” bug, for the discoveries for Folder and File, it can now discover discover them with spaces in between.
Monitors where also updated to resolve this problem
Added more descriptions
Added for the Folder and File discovery windows events to tell the user what is being discovered.
User Guide updated with tips for Overrides.

Virtual Operations Manager: Part 1 - Should I Virtualize?

Pete — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:59:54 +0000

This is the first installment of our Virtual Operations Manager series mentioned previously. I expect this post will spark discussion (and potentially debate), all of which is welcome. Leave your feedback as a comment on this post.

Virtualization offers a number of potential benefits, such as reduced power consumption, hardware expense and licensing expense through server consolidation. Snapshot technologies make rolling back changes easier than on a physical server. Clustering options offer flexible options for high availability and disaster recovery scenarios as well. Virtualization is everywhere, and it’s only natural that Operations Manager 2007 architects and administrators would be curious know about the possibilities and best practices for virtualizing OpsMgr 2007 server roles in their production environments.

In our first installment, we’re going to examine what is supported versus what is recommended. In short we’ll answer the questions “Which OpsMgr roles can I virtualize?” versus “Which OpsMgr roles should I virtualize?” I’ll be sure to cite official Microsoft sources whenever possible so you have materials to make your case to management when arguing in favor of virtualization for your OpsMgr environment.

NOTE: In this series, we will limit our discussions to Hyper-V and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.x. There will be a later architecture installment in which we cover platform-specific pros and cons of Hyper-v and VMware platforms.

Supported for Virtualization Versus Recommended for Virtualization

All Operations Manager roles are supported on Microsoft enterprise virtualization platforms (Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Hyper-V officially - more on VMware in a moment), but this does not mean that all should be. Let’s have a look at each of the OpsMgr roles and examine which are good candidates for virtualization.

IMPORTANT: See the OpsMgr Performance and Scalability Whitepaper and for detailed hardware sizing info, and provide CPU, memory and disk in equivalent quantities to virtual machines hosting these roles.

Role	Supported	Recommendation
Root Management Server	Yes	Not Recommended. This role uses large amounts of memory and CPU. Should only be virtualized in smaller environments (<500 servers). I’ve seen the RMS virtualized in smaller environments, but memory and processor demands (which can reach multi-proc servers with 12GB RAM in large deployments) make virtualization a challenge in high scale scenarios.
Management Server	Yes	Recommended. Since resource requirements are light (4GB RAM max), this role can be easily virtualized. Most important resources for this role are memory and CPU.
Gateway Server	Yes	Recommended. Since resource requirements are light (about 2GB RAM in most cases), this role can be easily virtualized. Most important resources for this role are memory and CPU.
Operational DB	Yes	Not Recommended. This role uses large amounts of CPU, Memory and Disk I/O. Should only be virtualized in smaller environments (<500 servers).
Data Warehouse	Yes	Not Recommended. This role uses large amounts of CPU, Memory and Disk I/O. Should only be virtualized in smaller environments (<500 servers).
Web Console*	Yes	Conditionally Recommended (unofficial) There are no official sizing guidelines for a dedicated server hosting the Web Console today, but we’ve virtualized this role successfully in several environments. This leaves more resources on the RMS for cocnsole connections and other core RMS functions. CPU and memory are important, but in large and busy environments, the IIS log writes will generate some disk I/O, so make sure you keep an eye on the disk subsystem.Start with 2GB RAM and equivalent of dual core CPU allocated to the VM. Scale up as usage levels demand.
Reporting Role*	Yes	Conditionally Recommended (unofficial) Moving SQL Reporting Services off of the RMS can eliminate competition for resources and provide SRS with dedicated resources, resulting in a better reporting experience. HOWEVER, the Operations Console communicates directly with this role, so failure to provide adequate resources can affect the console experience.Start with 2GB RAM and equivalent of dual core CPU allocated to the VM. Scale up as usage levels demand.
Management Server hosting ACS Collector role	Yes	Usually Not Recommended. The primary scenarios where this role is successfully virtualized are for either the DR/Failover Collector (a feature added in OpsMgr SP1), or in scenarios where high scalability is not necessary. Such scenarios would inlude satellite offices or perimeter networks with a small number of hosts.Let performance dictate when a move from virtual to physical is required.

Table 1 - Virtualization Support and Recommendations for OpsMgr Server Roles

*I see and hear of these two roles most often being separated (and sometimes virtualized) in very large environnments. I do not suspect most environments will see the need to do this. Because these roles can affect the user experience, it’s important to get it right if you do choose to virtualize.

Resource Requirements and the Virtualization Decision

To expand a bit on the recommendations above, whether it is practical to virtualize comes down to resource requirements, performance and scalability. Gateways and secondary management servers (SMS) can be easily virtualized because their resource requirements are generally more modest when compared to the RMS. Gateways and Secondary Management Servers are also easier to virtualize because these roles do not scale up, they scale out. I’ll clarify what I mean here with an example.

Example:

In an OpsMgr implementation for an environment with 1,000 - 3,000 servers, consider the following sizing requirements as described in the OpsMgr Performance and Scalability Whitepaper.

Secondary management servers (secondary meaning “not the RMS”) will have a max of about 4GB RAM and a 2-way processor configuration. When a maximum of 2,000 agents are reporting to a single management server, you must add additional management servers to share the additional load.
A Gateway in comparison will have 2GB RAM and a 2-way processor configuration. When a maximum of 800 agents are reporting to a single Gateway, you must add additional management servers to share the additional load.

By comparison, in a 1000-3000 agent environment, the RMS sizing recommendations are 12GB RAM 64-bit quad processor and 4-drive RAID 10! This is because the RMS handles several important roles not shared by other management servers. For example, the RMS is responsible for Operations Console connections, state calculation, and notification.

In the case of the RMS we cannot scale out (add additional servers), and the RMS is going to aggressively make use of these resources (especially RAM) - they will not sit idle. With the resource requirements, the virtualization host would have to be quite large to provide this level of dedicated resources.

The bottom line is this: If you have to scale up and high performance is a high priority, you should probably go physical.

Common Mistakes / Considerations

Overcommitting Memory Resources on the Host- Not committing enough CPU and memory to a server role is a common source of poor performance. You need simply follow the resource requirements listed in the Performance and Scalability Whitepaper regardless of whether the server is virtual or physical. On the VMware platform, this means being careful to not overcommit memory. This is really a more of an issue on VMware, which offers advanced memory management (transparent memory page sharing and memory ballooning) allowing you to achieve greater VM density (higher VM counts) on a single host, but at a potential cost of performance. This type of memory management is not possible in Hyper-V today. I don’t want this to sound like I’m knocking VMware, because this is a great feature when used appropriately.

The moral of the story is, be very sure to dedicate the required CPU and memory resources to OpsMgr server roles, especially when virtualizing the RMS role, as it needs both in substantial quantities. If you place the RMS (or any MS, for that matter) on an overcommitted host, you are asking for trouble.

Failing to plan for availability - If you put multiple management and / or gateway servers on the same host, when the host goes down, you lose all those server roles. If you virtualize multiple server roles, spread them across multiple VM hosts and host clusters when possible.

Inadequate Storage Infrastructure - VMs generally reside on shared storage, whether local direct-attached (DAS), SAN or iSCSI. When placed on the same shared array, VMs compete for disk I/O. Be sure to plan for adequate disk I/O, just as you would with a physical server.

Virtualizing SQL Server (any version)

While there are potential hardware, power and SQL licensing savings in virtualizing SQL Server, SQL is not a good candidate for virtualization in scenarios that require high throughput. In addition to the CPU and memory intensive nature of SQL Server, the most significant hurdle is the disk subsystem.

You will most likely use the native virtual storage technique that comes with the virtual server software. This means that the hard drive that the virtual machine sees is actually a single file stored on the host machine’s hard drive. You could opt for SAN or iSCSI storage to provide greater (and easily expandable) disk I/O, but even this fails to address performance in one respect. In a virtual environment, your I/O is going to pass through an additional virtual layer. In Hyper-V this is a virtual device driver in the root partition, or in VMware, a device driver in the hypervisor itself. This results in lower throughput to the disk subsystem.

For the official Microsoft party line on virtualizing SQL Server, see Using SQL Server in a Virtual Environment.

Platform Support

While Hyper-V is Micrsoft’s preferred platform for virtualizing Windows, VMware has gained a degree of official support through the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). For more information, visit the SVVP website. I would estimate that more than 95% of the OpsMgr environments I see virtualized today reside in a VMware environment, so it definitely works.

Making the Case for Virtualization

There are several good resources out there you can use to make your case for virtualizing OpsMgr

The OpsMgr 2007 Infrastructure Planning and Design Solution Acceletor includes recommendations around virtualization. This is officially supported guidance.
Satya Vel (aka DeploymentMan) has a post on the Operations Manager Team Blog where he discusses support for the RMS, MS, Gateway and SQL in particular and his personal recommendations.
As mentioned previously, always consult the OpsMgr Performance and Scalability Whiteaper for hardware sizing requirements. VMs should be allocated equivalent resources required by their physical counterparts!

Conclusion

Hopefully this provides some food for thought and the basis for useful community discussion. Next in our series we will tackle an interesting topic…..storage options and considerations for your virtual OpsMgr infrastructure.

Please leave your feedback as a comment on this post.

Audio / Video from the January 2009 System Center Virtual User Group Meeting

Pete — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 07:03:07 +0000

As promised, the raw video feed is available for download and the timestamps for the beginning of each presentation posted so you can find them easily. Download link at the SCVUG site at the URL below.

http://www.systemcenterusergroup.com/files/folders/meetingnotes/entry329.aspx

Below are the starting times in the video for each speaker so you can fast forward to whatever you like.

1:05 - Savision Live Maps v3 Demo (Dennis Rietvink)
51:46 - Custom Scripting and Script Debugging in OpsMgr 2007 (Pete Zerger)
1:19:45 - Top MS Support Issues for Operations Manager 2007 (Steve Rachui)

Thanks again to everyone who took time to present and to attend!

Update: File System MP v6.0.1.86 for OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and R2 (sealed and unsealed)

Pete — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:17:22 +0000

Where to get it

Download links in the Community Management Pack Catalog.

Updates and fixes in release 6.0.1.86:

Added more properties to the FileShare Class
Fixed to problem with the references (now you can import the sealed and unsealed version to opsmgr 2007 sp1)
FileShare discovery is now disabled by default (giving more flexibility you can choose the computer to discover the shares within)
Added new performance rule for the size of a folder (this rule is under the folder object, it only shows the size of the folder not the subfolders size)
A few tweaks on scripts
User Guide updated with Tips and Best Practices

Recent Operations Manager 2007 KBs (week ending 1/23/2009)

Pete — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:42:19 +0000

A couple of recently published Operations Manager 2007 KB articles. This makes 7 or more this month.

956172 The CcmExec.exe process crashes on a Windows 2000-based computer if both a System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 agent and a System Center Configuration Manager 2007 client are installed on this computer
958253 When you try to view the Patch List property, the list of Operations Manager agent hotfixes may be truncated on System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 systems
954090 Objects that are displayed in a performance view are not scoped to the specified group when they are viewed in the Web Console of Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1
957562 How to configure the Operations Manager Connector Framework to use Security Sockets Layer (SSL) functionality in System Center Operations Manager 2007

Tools: Enable or disable all subscriptions in OpsMgr 2007

Pete — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:09:08 +0000

If you’re not inclined to use Powershell scripts, here’s a standalone GUI tool that will enable or disable all notification subscriptions. The tool will automatically re-enable all subscriptions using “Send notifications for alerts Generated after the subscription is enabled”. The tool has been dubbed simply the Subscription Tool by it’s creator, Tim McFadden.

This is a bit tricky to handle with Powershell, as the enable-notificationsubscription does not offer this option. It takes a

Where to get it

Links to the Subscription Tool and related source code can be found in the OpsMgr Community Toolbox.

Great work Tim!

Powershell Tip: Automate periodic testing of connector availability in OpsMgr 2007

Pete — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:51:15 +0000

A while back, I received an email request from an admin using our Notifcation Test MP to trigger alerts not only to test end-to-end notification, but to test alert forwarding through the Engyro TEC connector. Without getting into verbose detail, the Notification Test MP implements a task named “Notification Test” that is targeted to the Health Service Class. It logs an event which generates a critical alert, which triggers notification. (Read more about the MP HERE).

But our admin wanted to kick things up a notch. His request in this case was very straightforward:

“How can I run the ‘Notification Test’ task every few hours on a schedule to periodically test my Engyro TEC connector?”

His idea was that this would serve as sort of a ‘connector heartbeat’ of sorts. Interesting solution for sure. At a more basic level, the request is simply “how does one execute a task on demand or on a schedule?”. Not surprisingly, Powershell comes to the rescue here. We can use a simple Powershell script to call the “Notification Test” task.

How to make it happen

Here’s a quick study on how to call an agent task from Powershell and specify the computer on which you’d like it to run.

Save the sample script below to a file with a .ps1 extension.
Update the following variables at the top of the script:
- Be sure to change the name of the RMS assigned to the $rootMS variable.
- If it’s not the “Notification Test” task you’re interested in running, simply change the name of thename assigned to the $taskName variable.
- Finally, specify the name of the computer on which the task should run in the $mycomputer variable.
Using the Task Scheduler in Windows, schedule the script to run at the desired interval.

#———-begin sample script————-

$rootMS = “myrms.contoso.com”

$taskName = “Notification Test”

$mycomputer = “mycomputer.contoso.com”

#Initialize the OpsMgr Provider

add-pssnapin “Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client”;

set-location “OperationsManagerMonitoring::”;

#set Management Group context to the provided RMS

new-managementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:$rootMS;

set-location $rootMS;

#Change to the All Computers Group

cd Microsoft.SystemCenter.AllComputersGroup

#Change to the path of the computer where you want to run the task (this task is targeted to the computer)

cd $mycomputer

#Create a variable to hold the task you want to start.

$task = Get-Task | where {$_.DisplayName -eq “$taskName”}

#The Start-Task Cmdlet will block until the task it is complete unless you start asynchronously

Start-Task -Task: $task -Asynchronous

#———-end sample script————-

If this calls to mind any ideas or questions, please leave them as a comment on this post.

OpsMgr 2 Minute Tune-up: Tuning notes for the Windows Server 2000/3/8 OS Management Pack

Scott Weisler — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:00:54 +0000

This version of the Windows Base OS MP (v6.0.6321.5 released in 10/2008) includes the addition of the Windows 2008 MP. Here are some at-a-glance suggestions of items you’ll want to take a look into, as they stand out. If you haven’t read 4 Tips for Proactive MP Tuning yet, have a look at that before you dive in.

Comments are enabled, so feel free to add comments on any of your experiences with this MP.

Analysis Tools

I use the MP Viewer and the MP Authoring Console to analyze management packs. You’ll find the 100% of what I’ve mentioned below using those tools and the management pack guide included in the directory where you extracted the MP. We recommend using MP Viewer to export the MP to Excel format for review.

Storing Overrides

Step 1 is always to create an unsealed MP just for storing the overrides you create while tuning this management pack. I like to name the override MPs “Overrides - ” so my overrides MPs are contiguous in the MP drop down in the console UI.

Run As Accounts and Profiles

There are no Run As Accounts/Profiles associated with this MP. As long as the agent action account is LocalSystem, there should be no problems.

Agentless Monitoring

Agentless monitoring is supported, but review the MP Guide (included in the MP download msi) for details.

Disabled Object Discoveries

The following discoveries are disabled by default. You may want to enable one of more of the following based on use in your environment.

Physical Disks - For servers with local storage, enabling this discovery will allow the performance collection rules targeted to the Physical Disk classes to gather important performance data for local storage.
Disk Partitions - I do not see any monitoring value added by enabling this discovery
Individual CPUs – This can be of interest, primarily in environments where you have SQL (or other applications) configured to use processor affinity. Enabling this discovery will allow the 5 or so rules and monitors targeted at this class to collect performance data and monitor CPU performance on a per-CPU basis.
Network Adapters (Enabled and Disabled) – Since the discovery for “enabled network adapters” is on by default, no need to touch this one.

Disabled Rules

The following rules are disabled by default. There are a few things of value here.

Global Service Monitoring - Some of the more generic service monitoring rules are disabled by default, which is a change from MOM 2005. I find I generally want to know anytime a service terminates abnormally or a service fails to start. Without this, you’ll only get service outage notifications if an MP is installed that contains a monitor targeted to the affected service.

To correct this, enable the following rules for the Windows OS classes present in your environment:

A service or driver failed to start
A service terminated unexpectedly

Figure 1 - Service Monitoring Rules in the Windows Server OS Management Pack

Other Disabled Rules - Other disabled rules are performance and event collection rules targeted at less frequently used CPU and memory counters, and share configuration events. You may or may not find useful - review and make your own judgements based on whether you typically require the performance or event data they collect.

Disabled Monitors

The following monitors are disabled by default.

Average Disk Per Second Read (Physical and Logical Disk)
Average Disk Per Second Write (Physical and Logical Disk)
Network Adapter Connection Health

The frequency on the disk counters is every 60 seconds, so this could potentially add a lot of data to the data warehouse.

Unit Monitors with “Generates Alert” Parameter Disabled

The following unit monitors are enabled, but their Generates Alert parameter is set to False. This means you’ll see a change in health state for a monitor, but you’ll never get an alert unless you override this parameter. This parameter is overridable on all monitors. I mention these mainly because it may confuse users when looking in the Health Explorer see the red bang for a monitored object but no related alert.

Only a couple rules fit this category, and all target individual CPU monitoring. The Total CPU monitors targeted at the Windows OS classes alert you to overall CPU performance. See comments above on “Processor Affinity“.

CPU DPC Time Percentage
CPU Percentage Interrupt Time
CPU Percentage Utilization

Noisy or “Tuning Required”

I can’t think of any noisy monitors off the top of my head, but I can think of at least one that alway requires tuning to each environment.

Logical Disk Free Space – Both the frequency of the check and how the thresholds are configured should be considered.

Threshold - This monitor has both “% free” and “MB free” settings for System and non-System Drives. You need to be aware that the alerts all only raised when all criteria have been met.

The MP Guide states “Error and Warning health states are based on both percentage of free space and on an absolute value, designated in megabytes (MB), of free space”. Translation: If you have threshold set to 10% Free Space and 1MB free space, the alert comes when both thresholds have been breached! If you’re not careful, this could mean you do not get alerts as quickly as you might expect.

Frequency - The default frequency is once every 60 minutes. You may have drives where this is not frequent enough, so do give this some thought.

When tuning, frequently users want to tune for groups of logical disks based on drive letter. You can create dynamic groups to meet this need. See Dynamic Groups based on multiple criteria for how to configure dynamic groups of logical disks based on drive letter.

Management Pack Guide

As always, be sure to read the Management Pack Guide that comes in the MP download. You can find the MP guide in the folder where you extracted the MP or online in the following locations

Operating Systems and Technologies: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc540358(TechNet.10).aspx
Server Products: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc540357(TechNet.10).aspx

Hopefully this has provided some insight into some of the areas of the Windows Server MP that need to be tuned out-of-the-box. Please leave questions as a comment to this post.

OpsMgr 2 Minute Tune-up: OpsMgr 2007 tips in 2 minutes or less [blog series]

Pete — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:00:46 +0000

In this series, some of the guys are going to help me out with a how-to series targeted at Operations Manager 2007 tuning tips that can be digested in just a minute or two.

Areas we’ll focus on will include:

Management Pack Configuration Tips
Optimizing Console Performance
Automation Tips (Powershell)
Console Tweaks and Tuning

Look for posts in this series to start later this week.

OpsMgr: Two options for bulk manaual reset of monitor state [tools]

Pete — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:10:45 +0000

I see Tim Helton published command line tool (and his source code) that allows for resetting the health state of multiple monitors at once. He’s dubbed his tool the greenmachine. Nice work Tim. Marketing aside, I’ve referred to this one as the Bulk Monitor State Reset (greenmachine) on the official Operations Manager 2007 Toolbox page.

I wanted to point out the product team guru Marius Sutara just last week published a bulk monitor reset for groups of objects, but his solution is integrated into the Operations console GUI. It is called the Restart Monitoring Tool.

A word of warning. This type of bulk operation can be resource intensive, especially in large environments. Wield these types of tools with care. I know Marius is working on his tool even now to make it more efficient.

Hats off to Tim and Marius for their efforts.

System Center Virtual User Group Meeting #4 Jan 22nd

Pete — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:36:57 +0000

The next System Center Virtual User group meeting #4 will be January 22nd 12 noon central time. We’ve had several requests for custom scripting in OpsMgr, so it’s on the agenda for this session.

Registration

We have an excellent line up for this meeting so join us by registering here.

Presenter Topic

Scott Moss Introductions 12:00 - 12:05

Dennis Rietvink Savision Maps v3 12:05 - 12:40

Pete Zerger Custom Scripting in OpsMgr 2007 12:45 - 1:20

Steve Rachui Top OpsMgr support Issues 1:25 - 1:50

Pete Zerger Closing - open for questions 1:50 - 2:00

Presenter Bios and International Dial in Numbers

Dennis Rietvink is founding director of Savision, a Microsoft System Center Alliance partner specializing in visualization add-ons for System Center products. He brings years of enterprise systems and application management experience from large IT service companies.

Pete Zerger is a consulting partner with AKOS Technology Services. Pete has ten years of experience in the IT industry, and he focuses on design and deployment of enterprise operations management, directory services, and messaging solutions. Pete holds an MCSE for Messaging, an MCTS for SQL Server 2005, and he is a Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Operations Manager.

Steve Rachui (Microsoft) - Steve Rachui is a Manageability Support Escalation Engineer in the Product Support Services group at Microsoft. He has supported SMS since version 1.2. Steve can be reached via his supportability blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/steverac/.

International Dial-in Numbers (Audio)

Below is a list of International dial-in numbers if you’re located outside the U.S.

International Toll-Free Dial-In Number(s):
The International Toll-Free numbers listed below are subject to
change. Before each conference, refer back to this page for the most
current information. If a Service Access Code (SAC Code) is listed
next to the ITFS Number, it must be entered after dialing the number
in order for the call to be connected. Always distribute your
International Dial-In Number listed above as a backup for ITFS
service.
Argentina Dial-In #: 08003330638
Australia Dial-In #: 1800635431
Austria Dial-In #: 0800296683
Bahamas Dial-In #: 18002054786
Belarus Dial-In #: 8800114<(Code 5135)>
Belgium Dial-In #: 080074015
Brazil Dial-In #: 08008916314
Bulgaria Dial-In #: 008001100186
Chile Dial-In #: 12300206935
China North Dial-In #: 108007140758
China S (China Telecom) Dial-In #: 108001400733
Colombia Dial-In #: 018009198731
Costa Rica Dial-In #: 08000150433
Croatia (Hrvatska) Dial-In #: 0800222626
Cyprus Dial-In #: 80094957
Czech Republic Dial-In #: 800142131
Denmark Dial-In #: 80887944
Dominican Republic Dial-In #: 18887518396
El Salvador Dial-In #: 8006378
Finland Dial-In #: 0800110016<(Code 5129)>
France Dial-In #: 0800907956
Germany Dial-In #: 08001814622
Greece Dial-In #: 0080016122039951
Hong Kong Dial-In #: 800903850
Hungary Dial-In #: 0680012007
Iceland Dial-In #: 8008251
India Dial-In #: 0008001006188
Indonesia Dial-In #: 0018030177852
Ireland Dial-In #: 1800685010
Israel Dial-In #: 1809245952
Italy Dial-In #: 800780338
Jamaica Dial-In #: 18002050329
Japan Dial-In #: 00531160456
Kenya Dial-In #: 0800220115<(Code 5141)>
Korea (South) Dial-In #: 00308131720
Latvia Dial-In #: 80002128
Lithuania Dial-In #: 880030330
Luxembourg Dial-In #: 80024725
Malaysia Dial-In #: 1800812937
Mexico Dial-In #: 0018663875515
Monaco Dial-In #: 80093358
Netherlands Dial-In #: 08000226486
New Zealand Dial-In #: 0800654460
Nicaragua Dial-In #: 18000551<(Code 5140)>
Norway Dial-In #: 80013909
Panama Dial-In #: 0018002018146
Peru Dial-In #: 080053335
Poland Dial-In #: 008001114571
Portugal Dial-In #: 800819458
Romania Dial-In #: 018005030<(Code 5141)>
Russian Federation Dial-In #: 81080025921012
Singapore Dial-In #: 8001011807
Slovak Republic Dial-In #: 0800042140
South Africa Dial-In #: 0800994920
Spain Dial-In #: 900931577
Sweden Dial-In #: 020798280
Switzerland Dial-In #: 0800562835
Taiwan Dial-In #: 00801126665
Thailand Dial-In #: 0018001562039946
Trinidad and Tobago Dial-In #: 18002039153
Ukraine Dial-In #: 8100180<(Code 5137)>
United Kingdom Dial-In #: 08082348431
Uruguay Dial-In #: 00040190042
Venezuela Dial-In #: 08001005968
Local Dial-In Numbers Dial-In #:
Sydney Dial-In #: 282239790
Graz Dial-In #: 0316918064
Linz Dial-In #: 0732915071
Vienna Dial-In #: 019281036
Antwerp Dial-In #: 034000307
Brussels Dial-In #: 024006724
Copenhagen Dial-In #: 032714401
Lyon Dial-In #: 0426031128
Marseille Dial-In #: 0486060055
Paris Dial-In #: 0176707553
Toulouse Dial-In #: 0567804133
Berlin Dial-In #: 030726167387
Frankfurt Dial-In #: 06922224724
Hamburg Dial-In #: 040809020727
Munich Dial-In #: 089244432927
Hong Kong Dial-In #: 030114574
Dublin Dial-In #: 012475202
Milan Dial-In #: 0236019659
Rome Dial-In #: 0645217090
Tokyo Dial-In #: 0357675586
Seoul Dial-In #: 0234837052
Amsterdam Dial-In #: 0207075538
Rotterdam Dial-In #: 0107147060
Lisbon Dial-In #: 01211201019
Singapore Dial-In #: 66221009
Barcelona Dial-In #: 0934923264
Madrid Dial-In #: 914142509
Stockholm Dial-In #: 0856619362
Geneva Dial-In #: 0225803289
Zurich Dial-In #: 0445801752
London Dial-In #: 02031070273

Virtual Operations Manager: End-to-End Virtualization for OpsMgr 2007 [blog series]

Pete — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:42:07 +0000

Questions about when and how to virtualize server roles in Operations Manager 2007 is something that comes up more-and-more all the time. Certainly there is some guidance for this already in the product documentation (like the OpsMgr IPD Solution Accelerator), and on the product team blog and other blogs. But nowhere do you see thorough best practices guidance at the nuts-and-bolts level when virtualizing Operations Manager 2007 on Hyper-V or VMware VI3.x platforms.

Something to Talk About

I wanted to start tonight by setting the stage. In this series, my colleagues and I are going to provide end-to-end insight into when and how to make the most of virtualization with OpsMgr in the lab and in production in areas such as:

Planning
- When and Where to Virtualize
Virtualization Architecture
- Storage
- Networking
- High Availability
Management
- Automation (scripting, templates, etc)
- Patch Management
- Tuning and Optimization for Hyper-V / VMware
- Monitoring!

Scott Weisler, a VMware virtualization guru and storage geek has some advice on storage, networking and tuning that are not to be missed. We’ll also show you some cool technology along the way, and reconcile some terms and concepts between the Hyper-V and VI3 platforms.

Virtualization In the Lab

In order to talk about this, I needed to put together a lab with the requisite components. I wanted to show you some key scenarios, including SC Virtual Machine Manager 2008 managing a heterogeneous environment (Hyper-V / VMware), OpsMgr integration with SCVMM (PRO). I’ve also thrown in a cool component at the storage later you’re going to like - iSCSI storage.

With the native iSCSI iniator on Windows 2008, you’ll find it’s easy to convert your old lab hardware into a WIndows 2003 iSCSI storage array. In my case, I used StarWind PRO (a reasonably-priced third party iSCSI software solution). You’ll notice in this case I traded Windows 2003 for CentOS 5.2 as the iSCSI host, just so we could works some OpsMgr R2 cross-platform into the mix!

Figure 1- My System Center Virtual Lab

What’s Next

Now that the stage is set, let me set at least some of the agenda

In part 1, we’ll start by answering the question Should I virtualize?.
In part 2, we’ll talk about storage, including DAS, NAS,iSCSI, SAN and a bit on storage virtualization.
In part 3, we’ll move on to a discussion of Virtualization Architecture (Hyper-V vs VMware)

Have a virtualization scenario you’d like to talk about? Leave your question as a comment to this post.

Recent Operations Manager 2007 KBs (1/8 - 1/14/2009)

Pete — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:58:30 +0000

A couple of recent Operations Manager 2007 KB articles popped up in my RSS today:

957566 The installation rolls back when you try to install a secondary management server in a management group on which a Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Reporting server has been installed
961725 DBCreateWizard.exe fails with an Exception when run on a 64-bit OS
951528 The Product Knowledge tab is empty when you open the properties for a rule in System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1

Two Methods for AD Group Discovery in Operations Manager 2007

Pete — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:21:22 +0000

There are now two good samples floating about that incorporate discovery of Active Directory group membership into a management pack.

I noticed that Steve Rachui has posted a unsealed MP that allows discovery of AD Security Group membership for agent systems so that this information could be used to build these override targets. You can download Steve’s MP HERE.

You may or may not be aware of an entry from the System Center Solutions Contest - The AD Group-to-Class MP submitted by MVP Anders Bengtsson. This management pack allows security groups in Active Directory to be used to discover classes in Operations Manager 2007. For example if you already have your servers divied into security groups in Active Directory you can use populate classes from those groups and use the same in Operations Manager 2007 for targeting. You can download Anders solution HERE.

PowerShell Challenge 2009—Challenge #1 - Modifying Discovery Frequency with Powershell

Marco Shaw — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:44:00 +0000

I wrote a blog post late in December 2008 (HERE) where I challenged anyone to come up with a Operations Manager scenario that I wasn’t able to automate using PowerShell. I’m going to start calling this series “PowerShell Challenge 2009” (with the same tag so the posts can be located easily).

I offered a first prize of $100USD in Microsoft products, and $50USD to 2nd and 3rd place.
It didn’t take long for Tim McFadden (http://www.scom2k7.com/) to come up with a good challenge for me:
“…I recently noticed earlier this week while looking at an OPS Mgr trace. When you create a new service monitor using the Server Monitor Management Pack Template the template sets the Discovery frequency to 1 minute. We have over 250 services that we monitor. Discovering 250 every minute on 600+ servers creates a lot of unneeded load. Can you create a Powershell script to change the discovery frequency of all of these services? The services are store in different management packs based upon application name. I would prefer to just change the frequency directly being that they are unsealed, rather than create overrides…”
I first double-checked the OpsMgr SDK documentation and couldn’t find any classes that looked like they would help me out. I figured these values would all be available via the XML used in the Management Pack.

The Solution

This is what I came up with for a solution:

# Create a variable where the XML files will be saved to.

$exportDir=“c:\some_dir”

# This will be the new frequency value.

$newFrequency=“240″

“Exporting unsealed MPs”

# Export all unsealed MPs.

get-managementpack|where{!($_.sealed)}|export-managementpack -path $exportDir

“Looping through each exported MP”

# Loop through all the exported MPs.

foreach($mp in dir $exportDir){

# Set some variables

$changed=$false # Used if the MPs XML was changed.

$i=0 # Used to count the number of changes in the XML.

“Loading MP: “+$mp.name.replace(“.xml”,$null)

$xml=[xml](get-content $mp.fullname)

# Xpath query to get the nodes where the frequency value is stored.

# Had to split this up because I couldn’t seem to figure out a single Xpath query

# I could use in either Xpath 1.0 or 2.0.

# We look for 2 different ID values because of differences between the RTM and SP1 syntax.

“Checking frequency values”

$xml.selectnodes(“/ManagementPack/Monitoring/Discoveries/Discovery”)|where{

($_.ID -like “UINameSpace*WindowsService.DiscoveryRule”) -or ($_.ID -like “ServiceStateProbePage*”)

}|foreach{

$_.selectnodes(“DataSource/Frequency”)

}|foreach{

if($_.get_InnerText() -eq 60){$_.set_InnerText($newFrequency);$changed=$true;$i++}

}

if($changed){

“ XML for MP has changed: There are “+$i+” change/changes”

“ Creating a backup of the original MP (adding .bkp to filename)”

copy-item $mp.fullname ($mp.fullname+“.bkp”)

“ Saving the new XML to a file”

$xml.save($mp.fullname)

“ Loading the new XML file”

install-managementpack $mp.fullname

}

“Done”

Output

Which will output something like in the PowerShell console when run:

Loading MP: Microsoft.SystemCenter.Notifications.Internal

Checking frequency values

Loading MP: Microsoft.SystemCenter.OperationsManager.DefaultUser

Checking frequency values

XML for MP has changed: There are 5 change/changes

Creating a backup of the original MP (adding .bkp to filename)

Saving the new XML to a file

Loading the new XML file

Done

So there you have it, my first challenge, and I was able to solve it. I’m looking forward to having more challenges sent my way.

I think I will extend the challenge until the Summer…

Marco Shaw - http://marcoshaw.blogspot.com

Update: File System MP v6.0.1.62 for OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and R2 (sealed and unsealed)

Pete — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:50:49 +0000

An updated version of the File System Management Pack is now available. All download locations have been updated to serve up the latest release. Be sure to consult the updated MP User Guide, which is included with the download, and just keeps getting better. Many thanks go to Jaime Correia to his aggressive update schedule in response to user feedback.

Updates and fixes in release 6.0.1.62 :

Correction of the folder discovery (now works ok with the recursive query)
Correction of the file discovery (it discovers all the files within a folder only, not a recursive query), i’ve done this to prevent large quantities of data to the DB.
Correction of the task of File Share Permissions (now displays the share permissions instead of the NTFS ones)
Added new task for the folder class to display the NTFS permissions.
Rule for the folder object “File Count Performance” is now disabled by default, you have to create an override to use it (was creating a big overhead in
the folder discovery process).
Rule for the File Share object “File Share Performance” - This rule only collects performance data and it’s displayed on the view File Share Performance which is in the File Share.
Some tweaks in scripts changed language from Portuguese to English.
Some tweaks on Alert descriptions to change some words from Portuguese to English.

Up-to-date lists of community tools and MP downloads for Operations Manager and Essentials 2007 can be found on our /tools and /mps pages here at System Center Forum.

Another tasty addition to the Operations Manager 2007 Community Toolbox

Pete — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:37:13 +0000

It seems like only yesterday I was talking about the latest tools extending and augmenting OpsMgr functionality…actually, it was only yesterday. Marius Restart Monitoring Tool is, in the words of Napolean Dynamite, “flippin sweet!”, but I digress. I have something new to tell you about today that’s yet another great addition to the OpsMgr Community Toolbox.

The latest tool comes from a community pal of mine, Stefan Koell (of code4award.net fame). We were talking over dinner a few weeks ago about what’s Stefan’s been up to, and I said “brother, you need to share this stuff!”. Well, he’s done it. I thought he’d be next week getting it published, but today he’s released v1 of LogSmith for Operations Manager. LogSmith connects to your RMS and allows you to filter and sort events in the Operations Manager Event Log with ease - very nice for slicing and dicing the log quickly in large environments.

LogSmith for Operations Manager

Feedback

As Stefan mentions on the homepage for this utility, it’s a first draft. It’s working well in my SP1 lab, but having some trouble in R2. Let’s give him some feedback so he can make this tool better and safer for production environments.

Awesome work Stefan!

New and Updated Tools for Operations Manager 2007 Admin and Testing

Pete — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:16:19 +0000

I’ve updated the Community Tools page (systemcenterforum.org/tools) a couple of times in the last few weeks with some new and recently updated tools. I expect a couple more next week actually, but here are the recent adds.

New today is the creation of OpsMgr product team guru Marius Sutura called the Restart Monitoring Tool. Marius has created an Operations console integrated method for resetting health monitors for groups of monitored objects to effectively restart monitoring on demand. I have not loaded this on Essentials yet, but assume it should work given they share the same SDK. I expect this one will be very popular!

A few days ago I added version 2 of the SNMP Device Simulator from Jalasoft. This GUI tool allows you to run multiple “synthetic” network devices you can then discover through the network device discovery in the Add Monitoring Wizard. This is really a sweet add for lab testing.I am a big fan of this one as well.

Finally, one I discovered a two or three months ago is the OpsMgr Cleanup Tool from Walter Chomak of the MS Premier Field ranks. If you’ve ever had trouble removing an OpsMgr install so you could start fresh, this is a brilliant add. As our friends across the pond would say, “Works a treat”!.

As with all community tools, no guarantees! Test in the lab before you take them to a live environment.

TIP:Identifying Gray (uncommunicative agents) in OpsMgr directly from the OpsDB

Pete — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:00:43 +0000

Source: MS Newsgroups (AdamZ)

I posted a tip a few months ago about where to see which agents are not communicating with their management server (CLICK HERE) within the Operations Console. These appear as the checkmark icon that has turned gray (indicating agent is not longer communicating).

AdamZ thought that was a bit to involved, and instead offered up this query to retreive this data from the OperationsManager database. (Gave this a quick test, and seems to be accurate in my lab).

SELECT ManagedEntityGenericView.DisplayName,
ManagedEntityGenericView.AvailabilityLastModified
FROM ManagedEntityGenericView INNER JOIN
ManagedTypeView ON
ManagedEntityGenericView.MonitoringClassId = ManagedTypeView.Id WHERE (ManagedEntityGenericView.IsAvailable = ‘false’) AND
(ManagedTypeView.Name = ‘Microsoft.SystemCenter.Agent’)
ORDER BY ManagedEntityGenericView.AvailabilityLastModified

I’d be interested to know how you deal with this issue in your environment. Add your thoughts as a comment to this post.

Recent Operations Manager 2007 KBs (1/1 - 1/7/2009)

Pete — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:58:31 +0000

My RSS shows a couple of recent Operations Manager 2007 KB articles:

957566 The installation rolls back when you try to install a secondary management server in a management group on which a Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Reporting server has been installed

and

961725 DBCreateWizard.exe fails with an Exception when run on a 64-bit OS

Tip: How to automate daily discovery and agent installation in OpsMgr and Essentials

Pete — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:53:42 +0000

By request, here’s a rundown on the process in both products…

In the days of MOM 2005, there was a daily process to discover computers and deployment the MOM agent. This was configurable, but allowed MOM administrators to put discovery on auto-pilot, so to speak. How this works in current versions today depends on whether you are using Operations Manager 2007 or Essentials 2007. In this post, I’ll briefly discuss how this process works, and how you can control its behavior.

Operations Manager 2007

Scheduled computer discovery and agent deployment is no longer a core features in Operations Manager 2007. The new Active Directory Integration feature is more or less a replacement for this. This leads to a problem if you do not have an agent embedded in your OS image, or if you have not otherwise configured an automated method (like ConfigMgr software deployment or AD Group Policy) to push the OpsMgr agent to new computers in the Active Directory.

However, through the OpsMgr Command Shell, we can work around this limitation by performing computer discovery and agent deployment on a schedule. I have already discussed this process and provided a fully functioning Powershell script in the following article:

Scheduled DIscovery and Agent Deployment in Large Environments for OpsMgr 2007

http://www.systemcenterforum.org/news/scheduled-discovery-and-agent-deployment-in-large-and-complex-environments/

Essentials 2007

Scheduled computer discovery and agent deployment is controlled by a rule in System Center Essentials. It can be configured in the Feature Configuration Wizard when you first configure Essentials. However, it can also be configured and tuned by overriding the rule directly. The rule is targeted to the Root Management Server object class (Essentials is the RMS) and the rule name is Scheduled Agent Discovery and Installation. Simply enabling this rule (setting Enabled=true) will turn on a daily run of computer discovery and agent deployment.

However, the default values may not be what you want. If you look at the overridable parameters in this rule, you will see you can control the interval and time of day at which the process is carried out. This can be done through two additional

IntervalSeconds - Controls how often the rule runs. This is 86400 seconds (1 day) by default.
SyncTime - Controls the time of day during which the rule runs. This is 1am by default. If computers are not running overnight, you may want to adjust this value so agent installation can be carried out successfully.

Adjust these overrides to control how often and at what time of day computer discovery and agent installation occur. However, be use caution when changing these values, particularly how often discovery is carried out. There is generally not cause to lower this below the one day default.

Error Reporting

In both the OpsMgr Powershell scenario and the Essentials Scheduled Discovery and Install rule, you will find an alert is raised if agent deployment fails. If you check the Pending Management node of the Administration space in the Operations or Essentials console, you will also see the computers for which installation has failed.

Please leave questions as a comment on this post.

OpsMgr Powershell TIP: Desktop Shortcut for Enabling Group Maintenance Mode

Pete — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 08:20:39 +0000

Ever wished you had a desktop shortcut you could use to put groups in and out of maintenance mode whenever you needed to? I think simple prompts for input make a script more convenient than having to type out parameters names and values.

This is something I wanted for my lab, so I set out to update an existing OpsMgr maintenance mode script to meet the following criteria

Launch from a desktop shortcut
Prompt the user for the display name of the group to put into OR remove from maintenance mode
Prompt for number of hours maintenance mode should be set
When needed data is supplied, put computer, health service and health service watcher into maintenance mode.

In this article, I’ll show you how convert a maintenance mode script with parameters to a script you can launch with a desktop shortcut that will prompt you for the input. I’ll be working with a solid group maintenance mode script from Boris that you can get HERE.

I’ll provide a download link for our modified copy at the end of this article as well.

HOW TO CONVERT POWERSHELL SCRIPT PARAMETERS INTO PROMPTS FOR INPUT

Step 1: It starts with a couple of syntax changes. We take the cmd line parameters accepted by the script (contained in line 1 shown below:

param($groupName,$hours,$rmsServerName,$startMM)

and change it to the syntax you see below, which uses the read-host cmdlet to collect user input. Make sure to replace the FQDN with that of your Root Managemnet Server.

#Set name of RMS server

$rmsServerName = “nocms01.noc.systemcenterforum.org”

#Prompt user for input

$groupName = read-host -prompt “Enter Group Name:”

$hours = read-host -prompt “Enter Number of hours in maintenance mode:”

$startMM = read-host -prompt ‘Starting maint mode? Enter true to start, false to stop’

Step 2: Save script to a folder on local machine. Any machine with the Operations Console and OpsMgr Command Shell installed will do.

In this example, I’ll save the script to c:\scripts\groupMM.ps1

Step 3: Create a Desktop Shortcut for the script. Right click on your Windows Desktop and select New –> Shortut. Enter the following in the “Type the location of file” textbox

%SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe C:\scripts\groupMM.ps1

Click Next and Finish to create the shortcut.

Step 4: One more tweak for usability. While the script is ready to run at this point, I’ve used the start-sleep cmdlet with the -s (second) parameter to specify a 3 second pause after the script sets maintenance mode. This gives you time to read the result of the script.

Download Location

Original Group Maintenance Mode Script

http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/attachment/8034871.ashx

Updated Group Maintenance Mode Script with User Prompt

http://www.systemcenterforum.org/downloads/opsmgr-group-maintenance-mode-with-prompt-for-input/

If you dwonload this script, all you need to do is set your RMS name, save the script and create the shortcut.

Configuring SCVMM 2008 PRO Integration with Essentials 2007

Pete — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:19:40 +0000

While the steps for how to enable Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) integration between Operations Manager 2007 (OpsMgr) and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) are well-documented at this point, I’d yet to find anyone who had attempted to enable PRO between System Center Essentials 2007 (SCE) and SCVMM. It seemed to me that since the SCE server is the Root Mgmt Server, in theory this should work just as it does in OpsMgr.

So a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d give this a try and share my results.

As it turns out, the process was successful just as expected with no really unexpected issues. I’ve noted a couple of hurdles to be aware of that will make your journey a bit faster. These suggestions are equally applicable to OpsMgr 2007.

INSTRUCTIONS:

The instructions I followed were those documented by Alan Goodman of the SCVMM team at the following URL: http://blogs.technet.com/rakeshm/archive/2008/08/22/configuring-scvmm-2008-s-pro-feature-with-ops-manager.aspx

These are now posted on TechNet in almost exactly the same format, but without the screenshots.

ITEMS OF NOTE:

Make sure you put the WIndows 2008 hotfixes required for OpsMgr / Essentials support on your SCVMM server. You have to load the Essentials / OpsMgr console (and ultimately an agent) on this server, so you’ll need these fixes in place. That’s documented in this KB - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954049
Make sure your SCE server’s action account has local admin rights on the SCVMM server.
Don’t bother looking for the SCVMM 2008 MPs - they are included on the SCVMM media and imported automatically when you run the installer from the SCVMM media
Remember when adding the SCE ReportServer URL that it is a named instance if you installed SCE with included SQL Express instance, so your URL will be http://sceserver/reportserver$SCE

The most disappointing point right now is that as of the time of this article, no reports exist in the SCVMM MPs. I have some interesting details to share about PRO Integration delivered in the SCVMM MPs, but I’ll save that for a later post.

Powershell in SCVMM 2008: Retrieving SCVMM Cmdlets

Pete — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:10:21 +0000

I’ve been working with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM) quite a bit, and wanted to share some tips around optimization and automation, as well as some SCVMM / VMware VI3 comparisons, especially where Powershell is concerned. Today, I wanted to start off with some interesting background and an SCVMM Powershell tip I think you’ll find handy.

The SCVMM Admin console is layered on the SCVMM Powershell cmdlets, and every task you performed in the GUI has a Powershell equivalent. using the “View Script” control in the SCVMM GUI, you can actually perform the task in the interface and then view the underlying script.

Fig 1 - View Script control in SCVMM 2008 Console

When you run the New Virtual Machine Wizard, the last screen of the wizard has the “View Script”. Clicking this script exposes the Powershell script that will perform the task according to your specifications selected by you in the wizard. A few tweaks and you have a reusable script for next time.

Retrieving a List of SCVMM Cmdlets

If you want to venture out and write some scripts on your own, your first step will likely be to retrieve a list of the SCVMM-specific cmdlets. So how do we do this? Well, I googled a bit, and found articles that involved multiple wildcard searches with get-command to retrieve partial lists (SCVMM does not have an equivalent to get-operationsmanagercommand).

However, I did a bit of looking with get-help, and found the answer. If you run get-command with the -PSSnapin parameter, you can pass the name of the snapin and returned to the screen will be a list of all cmdlets contained in the specified snapin. to retrieve a list of SCVMM cmdlets, perform the following steps:

Launch the SCVMM Powershell shortcut from the Start Menu
Run the get-command cmdlet with the -PSSnapin parameter as shown below - microsoft.systemcenter.virtualmachinemanager is the name of the Powershell snapin for SCVMM.

Get-Command -PSSnapIn “microsoft.systemcenter.virtualmachineManager” | write-host

The output is a list of approximately 160 SCVMM Powershell cmdlets:

Add-LibraryServer
Add-LibraryShare
Add-Patch
Add-VirtualizationManager
Add-VMHost
Add-VMHostCluster
Add-VMHostNetworkAdapter
Associate-VMHost
Backup-VMMServer
Compress-VirtualDiskDrive
Convert-VirtualDiskDrive
Copy-HardDisk
Copy-VMDK
DisableUndoDisk-VM
DiscardSavedState-VM
Discover-Cluster
Discover-Computer
Discover-LibraryShare
Dismiss-PROTip
Expand-VirtualDiskDrive
Get-Certificate
Get-CPUType
Get-DependentLibraryObject
Get-DirectoryChildItem
Get-GuestOSProfile
Get-HardwareProfile
Get-ISO
Get-Job
Get-LibraryRating
Get-LibraryServer
Get-LibraryShare
Get-MachineConfig
Get-NetworkLocation
Get-OperatingSystem
Get-PROTip
Get-Script
Get-SshPublicKey
Get-Step
Get-Template
Get-VirtualCOMPort
Get-VirtualDiskDrive
Get-VirtualDVDDrive
Get-VirtualFloppyDisk
Get-VirtualFloppyDrive
Get-VirtualHardDisk
Get-VirtualizationManager
Get-VirtualNetwork
Get-VirtualNetworkAdapter
Get-VirtualSCSIAdapter
Get-VM
Get-VMCheckpoint
Get-VMHost
Get-VMHostCluster
Get-VMHostDisk
Get-VMHostGroup
Get-VMHostNetworkAdapter
Get-VMHostRating
Get-VMHostVolume
Get-VMMManagedComputer
Get-VMMServer
Get-VMMUserRole
Get-VMPerformance
Get-VMwareResourcePool
Get-VMXMachineConfig
Invoke-PROTip
Merge-VMCheckpoint
Move-VirtualHardDisk
Move-VM
Move-VMHost
Move-VMHostCluster
Move-VMHostGroup
New-GuestOSProfile
New-HardwareProfile
New-MachineConfig
New-P2V
New-PhysicalAddress
New-Template
New-V2V
New-VirtualDiskDrive
New-VirtualDVDDrive
New-VirtualNetwork
New-VirtualNetworkAdapter
New-VirtualSCSIAdapter
New-VM
New-VMCheckpoint
New-VMHostGroup
New-VMMUserRole
New-VMRCCertificateRequest
New-VMXMachineConfig
Reassociate-VMMManagedCompute
Refresh-LibraryShare
Refresh-VirtualizationManager
Refresh-VM
Refresh-VMHost
Refresh-VMHostCluster
Register-VM
Remove-GuestOSProfile
Remove-HardwareProfile
Remove-ISO
Remove-LibraryServer
Remove-LibraryShare
Remove-MachineConfig
Remove-Script
Remove-Template
Remove-VirtualDiskDrive
Remove-VirtualDVDDrive
Remove-VirtualFloppyDisk
Remove-VirtualHardDisk
Remove-VirtualizationManager
Remove-VirtualNetwork
Remove-VirtualNetworkAdapter
Remove-VirtualSCSIAdapter
Remove-VM
Remove-VMCheckpoint
Remove-VMHost
Remove-VMHostCluster
Remove-VMHostGroup
Remove-VMHostNetworkAdapter
Remove-VMMUserRole
Remove-VMXMachineConfig
Repair-VM
Restart-Job
Restore-VMCheckpoint
Resume-VM
SaveState-VM
Set-GuestOSProfile
Set-HardwareProfile
Set-ISO
Set-LibraryServer
Set-LibraryShare
Set-PROTip
Set-Script
Set-Template
Set-VirtualCOMPort
Set-VirtualDiskDrive
Set-VirtualDVDDrive
Set-VirtualFloppyDisk
Set-VirtualFloppyDrive
Set-VirtualHardDisk
Set-VirtualizationManager
Set-VirtualNetwork
Set-VirtualNetworkAdapter
Set-VirtualSCSIAdapter
Set-VM
Set-VMCheckpoint
Set-VMHost
Set-VMHostCluster
Set-VMHostGroup
Set-VMHostNetworkAdapter
Set-VMHostVolume
Set-VMMServer
Set-VMMUserRole
Shutdown-VM
Start-VM
Stop-Job
Stop-VM
Store-VM
Suspend-VM
Update-VMHost
Update-VMMManagedComputer

4 tools in the SecureVantage ACS Resource Kit worth checking out

Pete — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 18:18:32 +0000

SecureVantage is a company I am fond of because of their many contributions of time and resources to the OpsMgr community. I recently took a look at version 1.1 of the SecureVantage ACS Resource Kit, and noticed a couple of tools that just about everyone could use…in some cases even if you do not have Audit Collection Services installed. Below is a quick look at some of the highlights of what I found.

1. Windows 2000/2003/2008/Vista Security Event with Legacy Equivalents

This spreadsheet is a copy of the Microsoft Security Event Reference for Windows 2008/Vista with the legacy event equivalents for Windows 2000/2003 included. Pretty handy even if you are not an ACS customer. (I have actually been using this one for several months since they originally posted it).

Fig 1 - Windows Security Event Ref with Legacy Event Column

2. Updated ACS Database and Disk Calculator Resource Calculator

SecureVantage have added to the ACS Database and Disk Calculator Resource Calculator I wrote a few months ago by adding additional worksheets, the most notable containing an ACS ROI Calculator for the SecureVantage archival component. This is a must-have tool when planning your ACS implementation, along with the guidance and sample Events per Second script in the OpsMgr Performance and Scalability Whitepaper.

Fig 2 - New worksheets in the ACS Disk and Database Calculator

3. Security Event Creation Scripts

There are more than two dozen sample VBscripts that can be used to affect changes that will trigger security events. Useful tools for testing your security rules even if you’re performing security auditing without ACS.

4. ACS Noise Filter HTML Application

When run on an ACS Collector, this GUI tool actually applies the appropriate noise filter query automatically. Since applying the right noise filter has been shown to reduce ACS database size by as much as 30%, this is another definitely worth taking a look at. It is accompanied by the well known ACS Noise Filter Guide written by SecureVantage several months ago.

WHERE TO GET IT

That’s a taste of what you’ll find in the kit. You can find a download link to the SecureVantage ACS Resource Kit on our community /tools page.

Essentials 2007 Tip: Process and tools to better search and identify errors in WindowsUpdate.log file

Pete — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:34:55 +0000

When software or update deployment fails in Essentials 2007, or you have an agent reporting a “Not Yet Contacted” state, you are dealing with an issue related to the Automatic Updates Client on the managed computer and/or WSUS component of the Essentials server. The Automatic Updates Client logs a record of its activities to the WindowsUpdate.log file in the c:\windows directory.

Locating and interpreting error messages in the WindowsUpdate.log file is a bit unfamiliar and confusing to most Essentials admins, at least the first time around. Here are a some tips and tools for parsing the log and identifying errors quickly.

How to Read the WindowsUpdate.log

The following are some recommendations to bear in mind when examining the WindowsUpdate.log for failures.

1. Search the log from the bottom up. That way you are searching through the most recent entries first.

2. Search on the words “WARNING” and “FATAL”. Then find the error code near those words. The error code will be in the format 0×00000000, where the rightmost eight digits are the error code.

3. Look up the error code on the Microsoft TechNet Support website for a list of associated KB articles.

If this yields no results, use Windows Live Search, or search the Essentials Managed Forums directly for answers. Many error codes will have been encountered by other users in the community, and their causes and resolutions will be well-documented.

Tools and resources related to parsing / interpreting WindowsUpdate.log

How to read the Windowsupdate.log file

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/902093

Comprehensive List of WSUS Error Codes (from Eric Brodish, Microsoft)

http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/archive/windows_update_codes.htm

Tools for Parsing WindowsUpdate.log

You can use the free Logparser command line utility from Microsoft to parse WindowsUpdate.log for errors. Tips for how to query WindowsUpdate.log with Logparser HERE. It allows you to run SQL-like queries, as shown below.

LogParser “SELECT date, time, PID, TID, component, text FROM windowsupdate.log WHERE text like ‘FATAL%” -i:TSV -iHeaderFile:.\wu.hdr -headerRow:off

You can also lookup WSUS error codes using the WSUS Error Code Lookup Tool, which is an HTML app that reads a spreadsheet containing the error codes

AD Integration and the Default MP…the rest of the story

Pete — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:00:36 +0000

I saw a post from Ian this weekend mentioning that configuring AD Integration results in a rule being created in the Default MP. We actually have some details around this documented in our recently updated AD Integration Guide, so I wanted to call out the relevant information.

Then rule is created as a result of the Agent Failover configuration in the management server properties in the Administration space. Here’s an excerpt on the topic from page 7 of the AD Integration Guide:

The Agent Failover configuration procedure creates a rule, stored in the Default Management Pack, which is scheduled to run on an hourly basis. The rule creates and populates a number of AD security groups. The membership of these security groups will include all machines, based on auto agent assignment settings, which should connect to the management server. The SCP name is the management server’s NetBIOS name with the suffix “_SCP”.
The rule also creates 2 security groups with the name of the management server’s NetBIOS name, the
first one with the suffix “_PrimarySG_” and the second one “_SecondarySG_ number>”

And that’s not all…

When you configure AD integration for untrusted and child domains, you will need to configure RunAs accounts for those domains (as the RMS machine account won’t have permissions in those domains). RMS performs AD querying and writing with a user account (Domain user rights are sufficient for this account). As you may know, it is not normally recommended to save customizations in SCOM to the Default Management Pack. However, RunAs Profiles used for AD integration can only be used when they are defined there. Read about how to configure AD Integration in child and untrusted domains on page 11.

As Ian mentioned, this info is relevant to OpsMgr 2007 with SP1…no guarantee we won’t see changes in R2.

If you’re curious about the finer points of configuring AD Integration in multi-domain environments, LDAP query samples for configuring agent failover, and troubleshooting information, see the updated AD Integration Guide at http://systemcenterforum.org/wp-content/uploads/ADIntegration_final.pdf.

KB Articles for OpsMgr 2007 - Dec 1 - Dec 20th, 2008

Scott Weisler — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:38:29 +0000

Dec 20th, 2008 - A handful of KB articles related to Operations Manager 2007 have been released this month.

Management Pack Updates Dec 1 - Dec 20th, 2008

Pete — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 03:26:35 +0000

Dec 20, 2008 - Our Management Pack Catalog RSS feed shows a few MP updates since the first of the month.

Windows Server 2008 Group Policy

December 19 - Windows Server 2003/2008 Group Policy Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 monitors the health, availability, and performance of the Microsoft group policy client component of Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

Windows DNS Server 2000/2003/2008

December 19 - The Windows Server DNS 2000/2003/2008 Management Pack includes monitors, rules, views, tasks and knowledge for the monitoring of your DNS infrastructure. By not only proactively monitoring servers but also DNS zones, DNS global zones and DNS domains, small problems can be detected and corrected before outages occur. The version for German, French, and Japanese releases is 6.0.5000.0.
(German, French, Japanese)

System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 SP1

December 15 - This Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager Service Pack 1 (MDM SP1) 2008 Management Pack provides proactive monitoring of your Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 SP1 environment.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

December 08 - This management pack includes scripts and rules to effectively monitor Exchange 2007 and report on performance, availability, and reliability of its server roles. Release version for Japanese: 6.0.5000.0
(Japanese)

SQL Server MP for OpsMgr 2007

December 03 - The SQL Server Management Pack provides the capabilities for Operations Manager 2007 to discover SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 installations and components and to monitor them, primarily from the perspective of availability and performance. The availability and performance monitoring is done using a combination of scripts and native Operations Manager capabilities.

HPC Server 2008

December 02 - The Windows HPC Server 2008 Management Pack provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of Windows HPC Server 2008 for a cluster environment.

TIP: Moving WSUS update content directory on your Essentials 2007 server

Pete — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:51:23 +0000

Here’s a good question that came up recently:

Q: How can I move the WSUS content directory to another drive on my Essentials 2007 server?

A: You can use the wsusutil.exe tool to make it. The tool is in %programfiles%\update services\tools on SCE server. The syntax is the following:

Wsusutil.exe movecontent g:\new_sce

If you need to move the folders, but not the content, you can add the –skipcopy switch.

Incidentally, wsusmove.log is the logfile for the operation

PowerShell one-liner for Christmas…and a challenge for the new year

Marco Shaw — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:09:31 +0000

How about a PowerShell 1-liner to determine if a particular system is a virtual machine?

>get-monitoringclass|where{$_.displayname -eq “Windows Server”}| `

get-monitoringobject|where{$_.displayname -eq “Oxford.contoso.com”}| `

get-monitoringobjectproperty|where{$_.displayname -eq “Virtual Machine”}|foreach{$_.value}

True PowerShell can be pretty intimidating, especially when you might come across a long command like the one above. Well, PowerShell is here to stay, and that has been confirmed by its inclusion in OpsMgr 2007 R2.

So, here’s a challenge for 2009 for you… Come up with the best challenge by asking me to write a script to automate something for you…

For the best challenge (received before March 1^st, 2009), I’ll give you at least $100US worth of Microsoft related products (not for resale and legit). I may even consider sending $50US worth of products to 2^nd place and even 3^rd…

Go ahead… Do you think you can challenge me?

(Pete Zerger has already asked for something in PowerShell, which I’ve struggled with for a few weeks so far. I believe it is a difference with how C# and PowerShell handle generic classes, but I’m still trying…)

Have a challenge for me? Leave your challenge as a comment on this post.

Command Shell Reference: Set-ProxyAgent

Pete — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:18:54 +0000

This cmdlet sets the proxy agent for SNMP-enabled devices or computer objects being monitored through a proxy. Syntax and links to detailed sample scripts are shown below.

For a complete list of Operations Manager Command Shell samples and examples as they are published, see the Operations Manager 2007 Command Shell Online Reference at http://www.systemcenterforum.org/commandshell

SYNTAX

Set-ProxyAgent [-ProxyAgent] [-Device] [-WhatIf] [-Confirm] []

Set-ProxyAgent [-ProxyAgent] [-Computer] [-WhatIf] [-Confirm] []

Example:

C:\PS>$computer = get-remotelymanagedcomputer | where-object {$_.Name -eq ‘contoso1.fabrikam.net’}

$agent = get-agent | where {$_.Name -eq ‘contoso2.fabrikam.net’}

set-proxyagent -proxyagent $agent -computer $computer

This command begins by using Get-RemotelyManagedComputer and Where-Object to retrieve an object that represents contoso1.fabrikam.net. It stores the result in the $computer variable. It then uses Get-Agent to retrieve an object that represents contoso2.fabrikam.net and stores the result in the $agent variable. Last, it uses Set-ProxyAgent to set contoso2 as a proxy agent for contoso1.

Sample Scripts:

Sample scripts and MPs that use the set-proxyagent cmdlet.

Savision Live Maps v3 Release Announcement for OpsMgr 2007

Pete — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:50:35 +0000

Dec 18th, 2008 - Savision announced the Live Maps v3 is live. Neat product (details below) - check it out at www.savision.com

We are proud to announce the release of Live Maps v3 for Operations Manager 2007. This version opens many new doors to all the data collected by System Center Operations Manager 2007.
Business process availability monitoring or web enabled executive dashboards? Network topologies or live application diagrams? Live Maps v3 in combination with System Center Operations Manager 2007 brings you all that and more!

Key New Features:

Network and application topology maps
Business process maps
Executive dashboards
All maps are dynamic and change-aware
Network-link monitoring on any map
Wizard and template based map creation

Key Enhancements:

Enhanced scalability of the Web and Authoring console
Changed architecture for health state roll-up

Who Should You Do Next?

Request an evaluation or NFR key
Watch the new scenario based training videos
Build some new v3 maps and impress your customers!
If you are interested in a personal demo just send us an email.
We wish a you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Free Virtualization eLearning and ebooks

Pete — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:00:02 +0000

Check out this seriously good free learning material on virtualization technologies. I posted these free e-learning courses a few weeks ago, which still seem to be free. I’ve also come across 3 free virtualization e-books (one from MS Press) you need to have a look at.

Free Virtualization eLearning

Free virtualization e-learning collection

Take Microsoft E-Learning Collection 6333: Exploring Microsoft Virtualization Technologies for free! Collection 6333 includes the following:

Free Virtualization ebooks

Virtualization for Dummies
Virtualization Solutions from the Desktop to the Datacenter (MS Press)
Definitive Guide to Virtual Platform Management (Realtime)

Improvements and Value-adds in the Veaam MP for VMware 4.0

Pete — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:30:22 +0000

The purchase of nWorks by Veaam was exciting for the same reasons as the absorption of eXc into Quest: when a small innovator becomes part of a much larger (and likely better capitalized) company, the gurus can focus on what they do best.

That being said, we see the first harvest of the fruits from this change in the version 4.0 of the Veaam MP for VMware (ESX). And one really good thing stands out that I have been wishing for, for some time now - Hardware Monitoring. They are doing this with CIM/SMASH, which incidentally VMware has published a programming guide for. Add to this additonal performance counter collections and an expanded set of Data Warehouse reports, and you have a good product that should arguably be even better.

nWorks delivered the most comprehensive (albeit also the most expensive) monitoring ESX solution for OpsMgr 2007,and that doesn’t seem to have changed. The architecture was easy to understand and configure; a collector role talks to the SDK Web Service on the Virtual Center Server, collects data and publishes it to the local Operations Manager agent.

I know the team actually polls customers for feedback, and I have had a couple of good long conversations about areas for improvement. I’ll be looking at the object classes in the MP for accessibility (previously all were marked ‘internal’), as well as the SYSLOG messages to see if those have been translated into plain English.

But for my money, the hardware monitoring will be golden. This fills a pretty significant gap in monitoring ESX hosts with Operations Manager and Essentials 2007.

Have a look at the features and architecture of Veaam 4.0 on the Veaam website at

https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk25pubs/cim_smash_pg.pdf

OpsMgr Managment Pack Catalog RSS Feed from System Center Forum

Pete — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:04:56 +0000

While Microsoft now has a web service for MP updates, I am also an RSS fan. Below is the URL to the promised Management Pack Catalog RSS for OpsMgr and Essentials.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SystemCenterManagementPackCatalog

I expect MS will do something along these lines in the R2 timeframe, but this will fill the gap in the interim.

Powershell: Updating Proxy Agent for Multiple SNMP-enabled Devices (part 2)

Pete — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:48:04 +0000

In part 1, we demonstrated how to update the proxy agent for a group of managed SNMP-enabled devices. The difficulty in using the solution presented is part 1 is in using the get-agent cmdlet to retrieve the potential proxy agent to pass to set-proxyagent, which only returns agents; no management servers are presented. Using the get-managementserver cmdlet in it’s place results in a failure because it does not return the right object to pass to set-proxyagent.

If I want to use a management server as the proxy for multiple network devices, the script below will allow you to submit a wildcard filter based on device IP address to update the proxy agent for all SNMP-enabled devices matching the filter, and assign a managment server as the proxy agent.

Thanks to Marco Shaw for a critical assist in working out the code to allow passing wildcard for the -deviceName parameter.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE

Cut-and-paste the script below into Notepad, and save as updateproxyagentMS.ps1. Script should run from any computer with OpsMgr Console and Powershell installed.This script will load the OpsMgr Powershell snap-in and connect to your Management Group.

SYNTAX

The script accepts the following 3 required parameters. Run with no parameters to view syntax help.

-rootMS: FQDN of the root management server for the target management group.
Ex: ‘RootManagementServer.fqdn.local’

-proxyAgent: Management Server that will serve as the proxy agent
Ex: ‘ms1.contoso.com’

-deviceName: IP address or IP wildcard range.
Ex: ‘192.168.1*’

SAMPLE SCRIPT

Here is the sample script. You should be able to cut-and-paste this one with no worries about line wrap.

#———–Begin Sample Script————–

param($rootMS,$proxyAgent,$deviceName)

#Echo syntax if -rootMS parameter is NULL
     if ($rootMS -eq $null) {

        Write-Host ""
        Write-Host "-rootMS: FQDN of the root management server for the target management group.";
        Write-Host "Ex: RootManagementServer.fqdn.local";
        Write-Host ""
        Write-Host "-proxyAgent: Agent-managed computer that will serve as the proxy agent";
        Write-Host "Ex: ‘dc.contoso.com";
        Write-Host ""
        Write-Host "-deviceName: IP address or IP wildcard range.”;
        Write-Host "Ex: ‘192.168.1*’”;
        Write-Host ""
 exit;
     }

#connect to mgmt group
$ServerName=$rootMS
add-pssnapin  Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client ;
set-location  OperationsManagerMonitoring:: ;
new-managementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:$serverName;
set-location $ServerName;

$mg=new-managementgroupconnection $rootMS
$mgname=$mg.managementgroup
$admin=$mgname.getadministration()

#Retrieve management server that will serve as proxy agent
$crit=new-object microsoft.enterprisemanagement.administration.managementservercriteria("Name = '$proxyAgent'")
$server=$admin.getmanagementservers($crit)[0]

#Retrieve all our monitored network devices
$netdevices=$admin.getallremotelymanageddevices()

#Sets the proxy of all network devices to the specified proxy server
$coll= new-object "system.collections.generic.list``1[[Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Administration.RemotelyManagedDevice, Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager, Version=6.0.4900.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]"

for($i=0;$i -lt $netdevices.count;$i++){
  if($netdevices[$i].ipaddress -like "$deviceName"){$coll.add($netdevices[$i])}
}

$new_netdevices= new-object "System.Collections.ObjectModel.ReadOnlyCollection``1[[Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Administration.RemotelyManagedDevice, Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager, Version=6.0.4900.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]" (,$coll)

$admin.setproxyagent($new_netdevices,$server)

#———–End Sample Script————–

Conclusion

Hope you find this one useful. Please submit feedback as a comment on this post.

Xandros Bridgeways Management Packs for OpsMgr 2007

Pete — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:41:35 +0000

BridgeWays Management Packs provide seamless end-to-end management of business critical applications by extending them to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager on Windows and non Microsoft platforms. Extending Operations Manager to these applications enables organizations to leverage the same best of breed approach applying service and health models to the applications that run the business all from a single console. BridgeWays Management Packs support a wide range of mission-critical open source and proprietary services on Windows, Linux, and UNIX.

The site shows a number of applications for which Xandros intend to deliver managment packs, including VMware, PostgresSQL, Apache Tomcat, JBOSS, Oracle, IBM Websphere, MySQL, Apache, PostFix, DB2, Blackberry.

Learn more at http://www.bridgeways.ca/products.php

SNMP Series: Part 4 - Configuring OpsMgr 2007 as an SNMP Trap Receiver

Pete — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:07:53 +0000

This article is going to address another question I get pretty frequently in the community and the classroom:

How do I configure Operations Manager or Essentials 2007 as an SNMP Trap Receiver?

The configuration steps are not really well documented, so this can take some trial-and-error in practice. In this post, we will configure Operations Manager 2007 as an SNMP Trap Receiver, discover SNMP-enabled network devices, and configure a alert-generating SNMP-trap-based rule to raise alerts when traps are received from network devices.

This questions sometimes takes other forms like “Why is OpsMgr ignoring the SNMP traps from my network devices?”. At the end of the day, trap-based SNMP monitoring in OpsMgr can be configured in 4 steps:

Configure OpsMgr as an SNMP Trap Receiver
Configure your SNMP-enabled device to communicate with the OpsMgr Mgmt Server
Configure one or more Event-based Trap Rules or Monitors
Discover your SNMP-enabled Network Devices in OpsMgr

The following are the detailed steps in configuring a rudimentary SNMP-trap based monitoring scenario to collect all traps sent from monitored devices.

Configure OpsMgr as an SNMP Trap Receiver

Install the SNMP Service

In the Control Panel, select Add Remove Programs
Click on Add/Remove Windows Components
Scroll down and select Management and Monitoring Tools, click Details.
Click on the checkboxes for Simple Network Management Protocol and WMI SNMP Provider and click OK.
Click Next and click Finish.

Configure the SNMP Service

Close Add or Remove Programs.
Click Start, Run, type services.msc, and then click Enter.
Scroll down and select SNMP Service. Right click the service and select Properties.

Select the Security tab.
Check the Send Authentication Traps checkbox. In the Accepted Community Names list, type “public” and click the Add to list button. Rights should be set to READ CREATE.
Select the Accept SNMP packets from these hosts radio button. Use the add button to add the IP addreesses of the managed devices that will forward SNMP traps to the OpsMgr server. Alternatively, you could select the Accept SNMP packets from any host option.
Restart the SNMP Service.

IMPORTANT: SNMP community strings are case sensitive!

Configure your SNMP-enabled device to communicate with the OpsMgr Mgmt Server

This process will vary for each device. However, the common thread here is that the device must be configured to accept SNMP requests from teh Mgmt Server (and proxy agent, if you designated one for device availability monitoring). You must also configure the device to use the same SNMP community string you configured in the Accepted community names in the SNMP Service properties on your OpsMgr server.

Configure one or more Alert-generating SNMP-Trap-based Rules

Create a unsealed management pack to store your SNMP-based monitoring rules.
In the Operations console, start the Create Rule Wizard.
On the Select a Rule Type page, do the following:
Expand Alert Generating Rules –> Event Based –> SNMP Trap (Alert).
Select your unsealed management pack from the list. Click Next.
On the Rule Name and Description page, do the following:
Type the Rule name, such as Default Trap Alert Collection Rule. Optionally, type a Description for the rule.
Click Select, select View all targets, click a target, such as SNMP Network Device, and then click OK.

Leave Rule is enabled selected to have the rule take affect at the completion of the wizard, or clear the check box to enable the rule at a later time, and then click Next.
On the Configure the trap OIDs to collect page, leave Use discovery community string selected.
Click to place the cursor in the Object Identifier Properties section and type the object identifier (OID) of each property of the network devices that you want to monitor, or select All Traps to monitor all targeted objects of the community, and then click Next.

For this example, simply select All Traps, which will raise an alert for any trap received from an SNMP-enabled device you have discovered with the Add Monitoring Wizard.

On the Configure Alerts page, set the properties of the alert, for example:
Type the Name for the alert, such as Routers Traps Alert.
Optionally, type the Alert description. You can also click the (…) button and select Target and Data variables to include in the description, such as IP Address.
Select a Priority from the list, such as High.
Select a Severity from the list, such as Error.
Optionally, click Custom alert fields and type values, or click the (…) button and insert variables in the custom fields, and then click OK.
Optionally, click Alert suppression, and then select one or more Fields of the alert. Alert suppression is useful when there are multiple alerts for the same issue.
Click Create.

Discover your SNMP-enabled Network Devices in OpsMgr

Network device discovery works differently than server, discovery. You can find a detailed explanation of the behind-the-scenes processes HERE.

In the Administration space, right click and launch the Discovery Wizard.
On the Auto or Advanced page, select Advanced discovery.
In the Computer & Device Types list, select Network Devices.
In the Management Server list, select the Management Server you will use to discover objects. Click Next.
On the Discovery Method page, enter the Start and End of the IP address range that you want to scan.
Type the SNMP community of the objects that you want to manage.
Click Discover to display the Discovery Progress page.

DIscovery for even a single device will run for a couple of minutes by default. If you specify an IP range, it will take a little longer.

On the Select Objects to Manage page, select the devices desired for management.
Click Change, and then click the desired computerto serve as the proxy agent for the devices selected for monitoring.
The proxy agent can be any agent-managed computer or Mgmt Server. (SNMP should be installed on this computer)
On the Summary page, click Finish. The objects will display in the Network Devices node of the Operations Console Administration space.

At this point, SNMP-enabled device availability monitoring will start automatically, as described HERE. Any traps received from the target devices will be raised as alerts in the Operations console.

Conclusion

This is a rudimentary, but hopefully adequately detailed walkthrough. If you have any questions or feedback, simply post them as a comment to this article.

Microsoft Technet Managed Forums have moved

Pete — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:50:20 +0000

The MIcrosoft Technet managed forums are moving to the new platform. Forums are locked down for a few hours during the move.

Here are the URLs to get you to the new locations

List of Forums by Category

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/categories/

System Center Essentials

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenter/

System Center Configuration Manager

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/configurationmanager/

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/virtualmachinemanager/

Microsoft Management Summit 2009 Registration is Live

Pete — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:35:38 +0000

The Microsoft Management Summit 2009 is now live. The conference will be held in Las Vegas, NV again this year. Register at the URL below.

http://www.mms-2009.com/public/registrationoverview.aspx

Configuring Exchange 2007 Monitoring in OpsMgr and Essentials 2007

Pete — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:43:04 +0000

While I frequently read the articles at MSExchange.org for their Exchange 2003/2007 tips, occassionally the authors do post some good how-to’s related to Operations Manager 2007. Exchange Rui Silva has a nice series started on how to configure Exchange 2007 monitgoring Operations Manager 2007. Essentials 2007 users, this applies to you as well.

He has two parts published thus far - links below.

Deploying OpsMgr in Highly Available and Distributed Enterprise Environments (download)

Pete — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:42:35 +0000

OpsMgr MVP Andy Dominey has finally compiled his thoughts on considerations and best practices for designing a highly available Operations Manager 2007 enterprise infrastructure into a whitepaper to share with the community. I was pleased to hear Andy was ready to document some of his hard won expertise deploying OpsMgr in large enterprises, and I happily agreed to serve as tech editor.

Andy’s guide would be a good companion when evaluating design decision criteria in the OpsMgr 2007 Infrastructure Planning and Design Solution Accelerator.

WHERE TO GET IT

You can download Andy’s “Deploying OpsMgr in Highly Available and Distributed Enterprise Environments” guide by clicking HERE.

Workaround for OpsMgr and Essentials 2007 Hotfix Installation Problem

Pete — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:39:42 +0000

Dec 9th, 2008 - Just received an update from the OpsMgr product team with a report that this issue should be resolved in the January time frame. I’ll update this post when the issue is resolved. Until then, this is your workaround.

Dec 8th, 2008 - After blogging about Operations Manager 2007 hotfixes reporting they are installed even when they are not, I’ve had a few requests for the workaround. I’d been pointing folks to a newgroups post where the workaround was briefly explained. I wanted to summarize here, and mention that the product team is aware of the issue, so no doubt it will be addressed as soon as they are able. Until that point, here is the workaround.

NOTE: I have personally seen the problem with 951526 (resolves a critical SNMP discovery-related issue) and at least one of the QFE’s that supercedes it, but don’t really know the scope of which hotfixes may be affected. I suggest you check .dll versions after every hotfix install to ensure it was installed successfully.

Note to Essentials 2007 Users: Since many OpsMgr hotfixes apply to SCE, this is applicable to you as well.

TIP: If you install a hotfix that replaces .dlls and don’t see your push-installed agents under ”Pending Actions” waiting for an update, that is often indicative that the hotfix didn’t install. However, always check your dlls as mentioned below.

THE WORKAROUND

Here’s the workaround as explained to me and posted in the newsgroups.

1. Open HKCR\Installer\Products\DF6E5EFF035E66C49971553D96AA0E4D\Patches
2. ***IMPORTANT*** Backup this key (patches) by exporting it using REGEDT32.
3. Once backed up, delete the REG_SZ GUIDS
4. Open the “Patches” REG_MULTI_SZ key, delete all guids from there. Only an empty Patches multi string value should remain
5. Re-run the hotfix installation, which should now install sucessfully.
6. Check the .dll versions mentioned in the KB to ensure a successful installation.
7. Import the backed up registry key.
8. Make sure to approve any agents that appear under Pending Management in the Administration space.

I do not have an RTM-to-SP1 upgraded environment to test the information below, but wanted to mention the following:

NOTE: If you are running a OpsMgr management group that was originally installed as RTM, then upgraded to SP1 - you might need to leave the following guids in place in the registry when attempting to use this workaround:

727B3A3ADCF2D1945BFF1FD34105570A (this references MOM2007QFEPreSP1.msp)
8CABA70B215243145A51419A9073262F (this references MOM2007SP1.msp)

Hope this helps. Please post your experiences here as comments on this post, so the community may benefit from your experience.

Powershell: Updating Proxy Agent for Multiple SNMP-enabled Devices (part 1)

Pete — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:04:56 +0000

As explained in part 3 of the SNMP in OpsMgr / Essentials series (still in progress), we explained that SNMP-enabled devices can be monitored from any management server OR agent-managed computer. The question we answer today is:

“How do I change the proxy agent for some or all of my network enabled devices?”

If I want to use an agent-managed computer as the proxy for multiple network devices, the script below will allow you to submit a wildcard filter based on device IP address to update the proxy agent for all SNMP-enabled devices matching the filter. Check back for the next installment in which we demonstrate how to specify a management server as the proxy agent for multiple devices.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE

Cut-and-paste the script below into Notepad, and save as updateproxyagent.ps1. Script should run from any computer with OpsMgr Console and Powershell installed.

SYNTAX

The script accepts the following 3 required parameters. Run with no parameters to view syntax help.

-rootMS: FQDN of the root management server for the target management group.
Ex: ‘RootManagementServer.fqdn.local’

-proxyAgent: Agent that will serve as the proxy agent
Ex: ‘dc.contoso.com’

-deviceName: IP address or IP wildcard range.
Ex: ‘192.168.1*’

SAMPLE SCRIPT

Here is the sample script. You should be able to cut-and-paste this one with no worries about line wrap.

#———–Begin Sample Script————–

param($rootMS,$proxyAgent, $deviceName)

#Echo syntax if -rootMS parameter is NULL
     if ($rootMS -eq $null) {

        Write-Host ""
        Write-Host "-rootMS: FQDN of the root management server for the target management group.";
        Write-Host "Ex: RootManagementServer.fqdn.local";
        Write-Host ""
        Write-Host "-proxyAgent: Agent-managed computer that will serve as the proxy agent";
        Write-Host "Ex: ‘dc.contoso.com";
        Write-Host ""
        Write-Host "-deviceName: IP address or IP wildcard range.”;
        Write-Host "Ex: ‘192.168.1*’”;
        Write-Host ""
 exit;
     }

#connect to mgmt group
$ServerName=$rootMS
add-pssnapin  Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client ;
set-location  OperationsManagerMonitoring:: ;
new-managementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:$serverName;
set-location $ServerName;

#Retrieve all our monitored network devices
$netDevices = get-remotelymanageddevice | where-object {$_.Name -like $deviceName}

#Retrieve agent that will serve as proxy agent
$proxy = get-agent | Where-Object {$_.PrincipalName -like $proxyAgent }

#Sets the proxy of all network devices to the specified proxy server
Set-ProxyAgent -ProxyAgent $proxy -Device $netDevices

#———–End Sample Script————–

Conclusion

Hopefully some of you will find this one useful. Check back soon when we’ll look at how to assign a management server as a proxy agent for multiple SNMP-enabled devices using Powershell.

Please submit feedback as a comment on this post.

Enterprise Active Directory Integration In-Depth for OpsMgr 2007

Pete — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:44:59 +0000

In the 3rd update to our AD Integration Guide for Operations Manager 2007, we are joined by Raphael Burri in updating the guide to include extensive guidance for deploying Active Directory in large and complex environments, including:

Deployment details for remote domains
Extensive LDAP query samples and syntax
Troubleshooting information
Tips and tricks for a successful implementation

Get the update at the URL below:
http://systemcenterforum.org/wp-content/uploads/ADIntegration_final.pdf

Thanks again to Raphael for working with us to deliver what I think you’ll find is the most extensive implementation guidance available for AD integration in OpsMgr 2007.

Feedback is always welcome via our Contact Page