Microsoft reaches a significant milestone for customers and partners with the release of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization feature included in select versions of Windows Server 2008. Those who have already deployed the x64 versions of Windows Server 2008 can receive Hyper-V from
Windows Update beginning July 8, while new customers and partners can
download Hyper-V later today (12:00 pm PT). The Windows Virtualization team will be counting down the days to download from Windows Update, so be sure to visit the
Windows Virtualization Team blog to see daily spotlights on specific features and benefits of Hyper-V technology, as well as to read about customer stories and see postings from guests.
Since the beta release of Hyper-V in February, more than 250 customers have participated in Hyper-V’s early adoption program. Microsoft’s own deployment and results with Hyper-V is showcased today in Rob Emanuel’s guest blog and video on the
Windows Server Division blog, specifically on customers using Hyper-V and partner benefits, visit the
Microsoft PressPass site.
Also, check out the new Hyper-V videos on TechNet Edge:
TechNet Edge Interview: Hyper-V Overview with Mike Neil
TechNet Edge Interview: Hyper-V Program managers interview Part 1
TechNet Edge Interview: Hyper-V Program managers interview Part 2
Other Resources:
Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit
Virtualization Solution Accelerators
System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Operations Manager, Internet Information Services, Selecting the Right NAP Architecture
We are pleased to announce the introduction our new Infrastructure Planning and Design guides (IPD). We have added System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Operations Manager as the first guides in our series for System Center. We added the new Internet Information Services Guide to our Windows Server 2008 offerings and finally, we've released Selecting the Right NAP Architecture.
All of our released guides can be found in the
download center.
Infrastructure Planning and Design streamlines the planning process by:
- Defining the technical decision flow through the planning process.
- Listing the decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
To enable the end-user recovery in DPM 2007 on a Windows 2008 Server you should click on the recovery tab and then under actions (on the left hand side) click on “Configure end-user recovery…” link. This will launch a wizard to extend the 2008 schema so that end users can recover files. However due to security changes in Windows 2008 Server you will get an error - "Active Directory Could Not be Found" from running this on the DPM server.(
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We continue our "OpsMgr Answer This" series with a discussion on the new class-based architecture in Operations Manager 2007.
To focus the topic on specific questions, we looked at the following areas:
* When I select to override a rule or monitor, I can select to target all objects of a class, or all objects in a group. If I have a choice of either (because the objects I am interested in are included in both one or more classes and one or more groups), which should I select?
You would select class. By default, discoveries are targeted at a class; therefore as new objects are added, they will inherit the override. This can be accomplished with groups but discovery will take longer as group membership needs to be calculated also.
* When I am authoring a management pack, and I want to pre-define how overrides are targeted, is there a performance or feature difference in selecting either classes or groups?
Again, you will want to select class. Targeting groups will prevent you from using DAs (distributed applications) properly. Say you have a monitor targeted at a class, you can add this class to a DA and have its health state roll up.
So when should I use groups over classes?
A situation where targeting groups is easier to administer is when you want to leverage the ability to quickly add and exclude objects from a group using the Authoring space of the Operations console. It's not so easy to change the membership of a class.(
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Johan Arwidmark: This is an articlel on how to use WDS to deploy SCCM images without the SCCM PSP Integration
Background info:
When you add the PSP Role for to SCCM, SCCM will control the WDS, making it hard to coexist with for example other boot images, like the Lite Touch boot image from MDT 2008.
But since you can generate winpe 2.0 boot images in SCCM that will deploy images, wouldn't be nice if ýou could use it for PXE booting as well?
The answer is, you can, and I will tell you how shortly.(
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Steve Rachui: Which tool is best to use for authoring? The answer 'it depends' is very applicable here. One key difference that might help you decide - when authoring is done in the Operations Console all changes that are made get applied as they are made - which can cause the RMS to be extremely busy. If you are only making a couple of changes, no big deal. If you are making bulk changes - this quickly becomes a big deal and can impact performance while the RMS keeps up with the authoring work being done.(
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This update bundles the following features: Windows Server 2008 support, SQL Server 2008 support, enhanced support for sharing tape libraries and better tape utilization.
Features Added:
1. Support for backing up virtual machines on clustered Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 hosts
2. Support for sharing tape libraries between multiple DPM servers
3. Better tape utilization of tape capacity by co-locating data from multiple protection groups with similar retention range
4. System state protection for Windows Server 2008
Download the
x86 version here, and the
x64 version here.
Kevin Holman: I am going to be publishing several reports over the next few months, that query the Operational Database instead of the Data warehouse. We will use these reports for getting all sorts of administrative information... which will allow us to get data without having to launch a SQL query analyzer window all the time.(
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Chris Sugdinis: DiscoveryPLUS is a custom discovery tool I created for my own customers a few years back. The tool has its roots in the SMS 2.0 SDK and was originally named NetCrawler. I used to give out the old version as-is but this resulted in requests from customers that I wasn't assigned to and I was stretched a bit too thin as a result. My manager suggested that I limit distribution to my existing customers who continue to find value in using it. Some of my customers are still running SMS 2003 and some have moved to SCCM so I've updated the code to support both versions of SMS.(
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Jeremy D. Pavleck: This is just a refresher course on how to convert an MS Operations Manager 2005 management pack into an OpsMgr 2007 management pack. It’s not tough, but I’m doing it so I figure I might as well document it!(
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Daniel Savage: I was asked recently to help solve a problem whereby a customer had the need to report on the availability of their servers over time. Easy you may think, run the availability report and you are done! (Well this was my first response; turns out they had a much more specific requirement!)
The customer had configured their health models for alerting accordingly and was extremely satisfied from a monitoring perspective, the problem came when they wanted to produce monthly availability figures. The needed to produce not just what health states the servers went through over time as per the health model, but they also just had a need to report on how long the server was simply up over the same period.(
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MOM Team: We are still waiting for a hotfix from the Windows team. Unfortunately this has delayed us being able to support Windows Server 2008 for another month.
The OpsMgr team is working with the Windows team on getting the necessary hotfixes ready for release. Links for these hotfixes will be available on the KB article that will be published end of July. (
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Using notifications such as email, has proven to be somewhat difficult in OpsMgr. I get questions from each and every customer I work with on this topic.... as most people never get these to work as they want, or expect, without fully understanding the object oriented class model of OpsMgr and what that means to Notifications on alerts. Even once this is understood, there are often challenges.
First.... lets make sure we use the correct terms. Alerts are alerts.... a message that is sent to the OpsMgr database with details on something that happened. A Notification is simply a message in email, IM, SMS, etc... that is triggered by an alert.(
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Some enterprises may find that they want to take advantage of both Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SP1) and System Center Operation Manager 2007 in their environment. Each independently have the ability to provision and manage vPro clients (natively from SCCM and through the Intel SCOM MP for SCOM), but is there a way so that both can manage the same vPro clients? YES, there is!
The way it works is that SCCM owns the provisioning (setting up certification, ACL, base configuration) and then both SCCM and SCOM w/ Intel SCOM MP can invoke vPro Use Cases. To get SCCM and SCOM w/ Intel AMT Management Pack to work together with vPro, here are the high level steps(
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Rod Trent: If you’re planning on installing SP1 for ConfigMgr 2007, here’s some tools and resources that may help in your planning, installation, and configuration.
Docs:
Potential Gotchas:
Videos:
Getting Help:
When you apply a hot-fix to a RMS, or Management Server, or Gateway server... a couple things will happen. First... it will update the server itself with whatever the hot-fix is supposed to fix... registry, DLL's, database updates, etc. Next, if the update needs to flow down to all agents... it will place a MSP file in the \AgentManagement directory under the OpsMgr installation directory.
Then, it will put the agents that report to the hot-fixed management server, into pending actions for the update. It will only place the agents reporting to that MS/RMS into pending... not all agents. For this reason - you really should patch ALL your RMS, MS, and GW's first, before approving any agents.
Then, when you "approve" an agent for the update... what it does is actually reinstall the agent, from its management server, then apply any update MSP's that are present, and that are not already installed.(
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This post describes a method for maintaining state across script executions in a SCOM Management Pack. This method is appropriate for holding a small amount of numeric or string information (such as timestamps or high water marks). The approach mimics what was used in MOM 2005, so it may also be useful for scripts that are being migrated forward from MOM 2005.
This approach uses the registry to store state information. This isn’t really all that complex to do in a script, but the added value here is a wrapper class that approximates the ease of use that was provided by the state object in MOM 2005.
You’ll have to use your own judgment regarding the applicability of this to your application. Clearly, the registry is not appropriate for storing large amounts of rapidly changing date. It is safe to use this for a few numbers or strings. (
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Kevin Holman: As more hot-fixes are applied to our OpsMgr 2007 SP1 environments.... how can we know which hot-fixes have been applied to our agents? How can we detect an agent that needs patching but got missed?
In MOM 2005... this was rather simple... in the Admin console, under Agent-managed Computers, there was a column called "version" which incremented the agent version number in most cases.
In OpsMgr... we do not update this field in the Administration tab. So.... how do we examine this now for minor updates?(
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The performance team had a thread discussing IOPS requirement with a customer who had some really good questions so and I thought I would share the thread with you all. For sizing the Operations Manager Database and Data warehouse I would highly recommend trying out SCCP planning tool which will give you a lot of guidance for sizing your DB’s. Below are some questions we answered to customer on IOPS requirements which I think maybe useful to you. Also one of our MVPs wrote a great article on IOPS requirements for OpsMgr based on the research he had done which can be found
here. (
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The Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 management pack is designed to be used for monitoring Exchange 2007 events, collecting Exchange component-specific performance counters in one central location, and for raising alerts for operator intervention as necessary. By detecting, sending alerts, and automatically responding to critical events, this management pack helps indicate, correct, and prevent possible service outages or configuration problems, allowing you to proactively manage Exchange servers and identify issues before they become critical. The management pack monitors and provides alerts for automatic notification of events indicating service outages, performance degradation, health monitoring, and centralized management.
This Management Pack requires Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1.
Download the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007
Pete Zerger: I’d talked in the past about the issues with the Exchange 2003 queue monitoring focused on the fact that the default monitors (shown in figure 1) are 2-state baselining threshold monitors, which, after 7 days of good Exchange performance, raise alerts too quickly when the queue values move from zero (0).
I propose that these should be replaced in most environments with a recurring threshold monitor to provide a more predictable notification pattern in conditions of Exchange queuing.Shown in figure 1 are the queue monitors I have found to be the noisiest of the lot. When you target your view to the Exchange Queue class, you’ll see more than just these – let the alert noise in your environment guide your decisions in disabling any self-tuning monitors in favor of the recurring threshold monitor.(
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Stefan Stranger: Thanks to
Rod Trent I found this tool called OpsMgr Lineage Explorer from Vin DiPippo.
This tool allows you to explore the lineage of OpsMgr MP elements. This tool loads your OpsMgr environment from the database and then allows you to inspect the class types, relationship types, and module types installed. It allows you to expand them to see their lineage (either their parentage for class types and relationship types or in the case of module types, their composition tree down to the underlying native or managed modules).
Download and read more on
source.
Walter Chomak: This new Solution Accelerator addresses IT Service Managers’ need to measure and report the performance and
availability of their critical line-of-business applications using service level agreement (SLA) standards. You can
join here, or if you have already signed up, you can reach the beta program home page
here.
See also:
Service Level Dashboard for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Executive Overview
From the Operations Manager blog by Kerrie Meyler, Cameron Fuller, John Joyner, and Andy Dominey: In Part 1 of this series, we discussed installing a Unix system in Hyper-V (see
here). In this article, we will take our Unix system and integrate it into Operations Manager using Cross-Plat (X-Plat) functionality. Our ultimate goal is to provide an environment with Microsoft virtualization technologies on 64-bit UNIX platforms, which we can then monitor using Operations Manager 2007.
Historically, OpsMgr 2007 has relied upon third party vendors to provide monitoring for non-Microsoft Operating Systems. With the addition of X-Plat, Microsoft can now provide out-of-the-box monitoring for a number of Unix-based Operating Systems. For information about the X-Plat announcement, see Kerrie's write-up at
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27354. To summarize that article, the Microsoft-provided agent running on the Unix system is open source, and integrates seamlessly with the Operations Manager 2007 environment. The X-Plat extensions are currently available at Microsoft’s Connect beta site (
http://connect.microsoft.com). (
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Yusuf Joosub:Numerous discussions and questions after presentations have led me to ponder the title of this post. Namely the request of customers asking “How does Microsoft do it?”. Well, that’s the thing, it’s a philosophy that make sense and begins to become easier once it is put into practice and adhered to. Operations management not just in the Wintel space, but across platforms is big business. We at Microsoft adhere to the concept of the Dynamic Systems Initiative which is a vision for what an agile business should look like (see
here for more). But that is from a technology management perspective, and as you know changing process on a system is easier than changing the habits of an individual.
IT agility to meet the needs of business to become adaptable is a journey. IT needs to continuously improve and not remain stagnant. Everyone in the industry knows that we operate at a dizzying speed; constantly learning and trying to improve our knowledge of the plethora of technologies available. But how do we translate that to a value that business can reap? How do we take what we have learnt and go to business with something that will enable business? We have used IO (see
here for more) to assess your environment and provide guidance and try to underline what needs to change to become better whether it be People, process or even technology. But sometimes this change is not as easily accepted as we would like. People, by nature, are habitual and sometimes change is not a fluid process. (
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The Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) is an attack-surface reduction tool for the Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 operating system. SCW determines the minimum functionality required for a server's role or roles, and disables functionality that is not required. The Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 Windows Server 2008 SCW template supports both new and updated site system definitions and the required services and ports.
Feature Bullet Summary:
The Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 Windows Server 2008 SCW template adds support for the following new site systems:
* Out of Band Service Point
* Asset Intelligence Synchronization Point
The Configuration Manager 2007 SCW template renews support for the following site systems:
* Fallback Status Point (FSP)
* State Migration Point (SMP)
* PXE Service Point (PSP)
* Software Update Point (SUP)
* System Health Validator (SHV)
* Primary Site Server (PSS)
* Secondary Site Server (SSS)
* Server Locator Point (SLP)
* Management Point (MP)
* Reporting Point (RP)
Download Windows Server 2008 Security Configuration Wizard and SC Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 1
Kerrie Meyler: Talking about MOF (or ITIL for that matter) isn't the most exciting topic in the world. But I thought it would be interesting to discuss how Microsoft eats their own dogfood, so to speak, in using MOF with its System Center family. Read on ...
Microsoft touts their Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) as a collection of best practices, principles, and models. The MOF provides direction to achieve reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability of mission-critical production systems, focusing on solutions and services using Microsoft products and technologies.(
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Boris Yanushpolsky: In v1 of module explorer I enumerate code based modules and then populated the tree view with composite module that rely on the code modules. In this version I added another view which instead groups modules by the MP in which the module is defined. This should help in some scenarios where you just want to find a particular module and see its settings and configuration.
One of the core concepts in OpsMgr is modules. There are four modules types in OpsMgr: DataSource, Condition Detection, Probe, and Write Action. When you write any workflow such as rule/monitor/discovery/task/diagnostic/recovery you are using one or more module type that are already defined in system management packs. One of the hard things sometimes is to actually figure out what modules exist and what are their properties. Module Explorer is a small utility that provides some visibility into the library of modules and information about each module.
Download Module Explorer v2
Before you can roll out Windows Server 2003 installations using System Center Configuration Manager 2007 you will have to define a task sequence which executes a normal Windows Server 2003 installation. This installation is then captured to a wim image which can be deployed several times once available.
Using the extra functionality which comes available when you integrate MDT2008 into your SCCM console it's really easy to define the task sequence to build and capture this Windows Server 2003 installation. The wizard takes care of every aspect needed.
When you want to do a build and capture of Windows Server 2003 64-bit edition on a Hyper-V VM you have a challenge, because there is no Windows Server 2003 64-bit driver for the legacy network adapter.
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Microsoft is investigating public reports of a non-security issue that affects environments with System Center Configuration Manager 2007 that deploy updates to Systems Management Services (SMS) 2003 clients. Microsoft is aware of reports from customers who are experiencing this issue.
Upon completion of the investigation, Microsoft will take the appropriate action to resolve the problem within System Center Configuration Manager 2007.(
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Raphael Burri: Operations Manager allows creating monitors based on either SNMP traps received or the data returned from an OID probe poll. Monitors of that type may be created using the OpsMgr Operations Console. David published a step-by-step guide on how to create a simple SNMP probe based monitor. The procedure for SNMP traps is quite similar. Unfortunately the monitors created by the wizards will not work correctly with numeric expressions (Greater than / Less than etc.). The logic will treat any value received from an SNMP network device as string.(
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A really useful feature of Health Explorer in Operations Manager is the ability to force the agent recalculate health of a particular monitor. One the most common uses for this is when you want to confirm that the action that you took actually fixed the problem. If you have implemented your management pack correctly all you need to do is select the unit monitor in health explorer and click on the "Recalculate Health" button.
In order to make this button actually force your monitor to recalculate health state, you must do some extra work in your management pack, or else nothing will happen. This is especially important if you are either creating a new monitor type or creating a script based monitor. Basically when creating a new monitor type or creating a script based monitor, unless you do some extra work "Recalculate Health" will not do much for you and the users of your MP.(
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The patch for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 that allows it to manage Hyper-V RC1 has been released to the
http://connect.microsoft.com site. To install this patch, the VMM machine and the Hyper-V hosts must all be running the RC1 release of Hyper-V, and after you've installed it you won't be able to manage any RC0 Hyper-V machines.
In
this post i already described how to update the boot images supplied in SCCM 2007 (RTM) to the ones supplied with the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) version 1.1. While writing this post Microsoft didn't have any solution yet, but 2 weeks after my initial post MS released KB950782 which details:
How to replace Windows AIK version 1.0 with Windows AIK version 1.1 when you use System Center Configuration Manager 2007. This procedure from Microsoft uses the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Tester tool (wbemtest.exe).
If you also want to use the boot images you've created in a VM under Hyper-V RC0 or RC1 you will notice that you've lost mouse support. The only way to receive mouse support in to integrate the Hyper-V integration components into your Windows PE image. Mike Sterling made
a blogpost on how to do this for the Hyper-V RC1 Integration Components and
posted an update to that post to reflect the Hyper-V RTM Integration Components. For some reason though this procedure didn't work for me when i wanted to implement it. Probably because i didn't had the Windows OEM Preinstallation Kit installed (Windows OPK)
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Steve Rachui: Ever wonder how objects are related to each other in OpsMgr? Certainly would be helpful when targeting to understand which objects relate to Windows Computer, which objects relate to the Computer Role object, etc. Much of the time it's intuitive how items relate but sometimes it isn't. Using the Distributed Application Designer you can see a mapping of how objects relate to each other. From the authoring node right click on Distributed Application Designer, select 'Create a new distributed application'. In the Template box select 'Blank (advanced) and then give the template a name and destination management pack and click OK. From there the designer window will populate - simply click 'Add Component' and a window similar to the following will be displayed. Note that the list of objects in your window will differ as different management pack objects are imported.(
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Tim on his poseidom weblog: I recently had the opportunity to spend some time working with the SCCM R2 Softgrid integration. First off the overall integration is excellent, it adds the powerful SCCM infrastructure to the great Softgrid solution. In the past the ability to scale with Softgrid was extremely limited by the Softgrid infrastructure. The integration with SCCM allows the use of the powerful distribution infrastructure in SCCM in addition to the ability to target computers. It also allows the targeting of workgroup machines which was not included in Softgrid 4.2 (it is included in 4.5).
However with all of this excellent extension of Softgrid there is one low spot. Once the client agent for Softgrid is enabled the policy is delivered via the SCCM policy engine. rather than the Softgrid Desktop Configuration Server. While the SCCM policy engine is very scalable it does lack speed. The Desktop Configuration Server in Softgrid offers virtually instantaneous delivery of applications to users at login. Now depending on how you target the application in a collection this could cause a major delay in software delivery time. For example if you target an AD group that contains users depending on your discovery and collection refresh cycle you could have a several hour delay in software delivery. Obviously if you use the functionality introduced in SMS 2003 SP2 where you can target a group of users via a collection your software delivery speed will be greatly increased. Even with this model you will not have the immediate delivery of a Softgrid application at login like you do with the Softgrid Desktop Configuration Server.
The previously released System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Client Prereq Macro has been tested and is compatible with the Windows Embedded Standard CTP. This macro has been tested for SCCM 2007 RTM, SP1 and R2. Along with the traditional SCCM roles that have been supported on Windows Embedded, SCCM OS Deployment is now supported as well! To test SCCM OSD, add the Sysprep component to your Embedded Image and use a SCCM 2007 version that supports OSD (SP1/R2).(
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Rakesh Malhotra: It's been a couple of weeks since my last post but just wanted folks to know that we're almost ready with a patch that makes SCVMM beta compatible with Hyper-V RC1. We're "dogfooding" it (we're using it ourselves) internally for the next couple of days and barring any showstoppers, we should have a public patch available by Monday. Thanks for hanging in there. I know this is somewhat painful but the change to hyper-V was necessary and ultimately the final release of both products will be better.
Microsoft released the
Security Compliance Management Toolkit for System Center Configuration Manager today.
Built by the Solution Accelerator - Security and Compliance team this toolkit provides the desired configuration manager (DCM) feature 12 new Configuration Packs supporting the various roles of Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP2 along with a great guide to assist with deploying and tailoring the solution for your specific auditing requirements.
This toolkit is a great resource for any customer or partner using System Center Configuration Manager that provides authoritative configuration baselines based on three Microsoft Windows Security Guides. Windows XP Security Guide , Windows Vista Security Guide , Windows Server 2003 Security Guide. (
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Operations Manager Product Team Blog: If you are deploying Ops Mgr on machines in untrusted domains or DMZs (anywhere outside of Kerberos trust), then you are going to need to leverage PKI and set up certificates on your boxes in order for authentication to work. The process of requesting and retrieving the needed certificates can be confusing and painful, often involving a great number of steps. In this post I aim to describe how to use some standard command line tools to get certificates working in Ops Mgr.(
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Victor Sletten: Recently, we've had some questions about how to install a 3rd party GINA as an Install Software step during an OSD Task Sequence. The best solution is to install the GINA in the reference image outside of OSD. However, if this is not possible and the GINA must be installed during the Task Sequence, then a small workaround is required. Frist I'll explain why GINA installations are a special consideration for OSD. Next I'll outline a method which should enable this scenario. (
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The SCAP Conversion Tool for DCM converts Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) files into DCM Configuration Packs and indicates gaps in a log file that can result from the conversion process. Use the Configuration Packs in combination with the desired configuration management (DCM) feature in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to monitor compliance with the SCAP baseline.
Download the SCAP Conversion Tool for Desired Configuration Manager
Chris Scoville has created a
new version of the System Center Content Gadget. This is one of the best tools I’ve been using for OpsMgr and other System Center tools.
Changes:
* New System Center branding in the UI.
* When you select a specific product in the settings/options for the gadget, the UI will now reflect what product you selected.
* Fixed a bug that people with slow internet connections were seeing (the search results pane would not load correctly when there was a slow internet connection). Now, users will see the flyout pane and the words “Loading…” in the search box while the search results are gathered.
* Now, when you click the X to close the results pane, the whole flyout pane will also close.
* When System Center DPM is selected from the settings, the results will contain a tab for DPM 2007 and DPM 2006 on Technet (previously it was just DPM on TechNet with no separate for the versions).
* When “All System Center products” is selected in the settings (the default setting), the following tabs will be available on the results pane:
* TechNet, MSDN, Microsoft.com, Downloads, Videos/Media, Webcasts, Blogs, Forums, Microsoft Learning, and Web. The Web tab allows you to search the entire web.
System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions expand the monitoring capabilities of Operations Manager 2007 for heterogeneous enterprise environments by enabling you to monitor applications and servers that run on Unix and Linux operating systems within the Operations Manager 2007 interface.
A consolidated Operations console displays the health of your Unix and Linux computers, which enables you to respond to alerts and receive solutions and diagnostics for a variety of issues.
Download:
System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions Setup Guide
Boris Yanushpolsky: I finally had a bit of time to work on improving MPViewer so here is a new a version. The main improvement in this version is additional visibility into performance rules and monitors. Now there are two new columns which show you the performance object name and counter name.
For the next version I am hoping to do the same thing for event rules and monitors though its a bit more complicated to do.
Download MPViewer 1.5
Detailed configuration of the Exchange 2003 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007. Creating overrides and common troubleshooting.
If you missed the first part in this article series please read
Managing Exchange 2003 with SCOM 2007 (Part 1)
Raphael Burri: It is relatively simple to monitor the hardware status of your ProLiant servers with Operations Manager. HP has a free management pack (HP ProLiant Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007), that discovers and monitors them. However; if your ProLiant servers happen to have a different OS than Windows installed, it will not not work since the management pack relies on having both HP Management Agent and OpsMgr Agent installed on the servers.
In particular I was looking for a way to include the hardware status of our VMware ESX 3 servers as seamlessly as possible into OpsMgr. The VMware ESX server is running a RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 and HP does provide a specifically adapted Management Agent for it (HP Management Agents for VMware ESX Server). That allows accessing hardware information about the server using SNMP queries.(
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Jason Scheffelmaer has written a good article on how to add a wizard to the SCCM-OSD task sequence which will prompt you on a new computer scenario and provide you the option to choose the installation options of one of the roles defined in the MDT database.
You basically add to files to the MDT package, and modify the customsettings.ini and add a new view in the MDT SQL database. Also a new step in the task sequence must be added.(
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Check out this
new blog on System Center Configuration Manager, it's maintained by Kerrie Meyler, Byron Holt, Rod Trent, and Pete Zerger, in conjunction with their forthcoming book on Configuration Manager: System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Unleashed.
How does using Configuration Manager make your life as a systems administration easier? While our book will cover the features and benefits of Configuration Manager in detail, here's a quick "Top 10" list:
1. The bulk of your department's budget goes towards paying for contractors to perform operating system and software upgrades, rather than paying talented people (like you!) the big bucks to implement the platforms and processes to automate and centralize management of company systems.
2. You realize systems management would be much easier if you had visibility and control of all your systems from a single management console.
3. Your sales team uses laptops that haven't been updated in two years because they NEVER come into the home office.
4. You don't have the internal manpower to apply updates to your systems manually every month.
5. Within a few days of updating your system configurations to meet corporate security requirements, you discover several have already mysteriously "drifted" out of compliance.
6. When you try to install Vista for the Accounting department, you realize Vista can't run on half the computers, because they only have 256 MB of RAM.
7. Keeping your organization compliant with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, or FISMA has become your new full-time job.
8. You spent your last vacation on a trip from desktop to desktop installing Office 2007.
9. Your production environment is so diverse and distributed that you can no longer keep track of which software versions should be installed to which system.
10. By the time you finally finish updating your system standards documentation, everything has changed and you have to start all over again!
Data Protection Manger 2007 relies almost completely on a Consistency Check completing; hereafter referred to as a CC. What is a CC? A CC is a method in which DPM determines that a protected dataset is consistent with the Replica data set.
A CC is broken into three parts:
* (LWC) Lightweight Check
* (HWC) Heavyweight Check
* Fix-up
A consistency check is started after the Initial replica is created; hereafter referred to as an IR. When the IR completes, if the data set has not changed, the set is marked as consistent. Well what happens if the data changes between the time that you start the IR creation and the time that it finishes? The data goes through a CC.
If the data has changed, DPM, via the agents and the Volume filter (DPMFLTR.sys), begins a comparison of the file metadata (file date, file time, etc...) If this does not match, it runs an algorithm against the files and compares the results of the IR and the Protected Data. If they are still different, we invoke a fix-up. The fix-up is a block by block comparison of the IR with the protected dataset.(
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The Microsoft DevDays, held on the 22nd and 23rd of may in the Amsterdam RAI, is an annual event for professional developers. The event showcases the newest Microsoft technologies in various sessions. This year the emphasis of the Microsoft DevDays was on Silverlight ,.NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.
Speaker David Platt held the keynote on: “why Software Sucks”. Interestingly he suggests that software is hardly ever developed with it’s intended users in mind. According to Platt developers wrongly assume that users are equally exited and interested in software development as they are. Also the collection of ‘user experience’ data (as can be found in some Microsoft products) does not yield representative results. Reasons are that users are concerned about their privacy and are not given an incentive to participate, usually only users interested in software development actually sign-up.Platt’s remedy for this problem is varied, but standing out is a framework (developed by himself) to give an insight in user experience. Check it out on his site:
www.knowthyuser.com.
This year special sessions where organized for academic students interested in gaming development. Word class speakers such as Rob Miles and Erik Meijer gave an update on gaming development by using XNA, LINQ and Volta. Gaming demos where given by Canibal Game Studios, TU/e and the University of Uterecht.
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The new architecture of synthetic devices with Hyper-V poses some unique challenges for system administrators. Specifically, how can a system administrator perform maintenance on a Hyper-V host from WinPE? Without the integration components, users are required to move their VHD's around to the IDE controller, which limits the amount of VHD's that can be used at any given point in time. Additionally, legacy network adapters might need to be added to the VM to provide network access.
However, by adding the integration components to a WinPE image, those are no longer concerns.(
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| 30 Jun '08 - 07:40 | kenneth van surksum | 
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