Because organizations are increasingly using at least some virtual machines, it’s useful to be able to detect during an OS deployment if a task sequence is running on a physical machine or a virtual machine. It’s also helpful to know if the physical machine is capable of being a virtualization host. That’s where these enhancements to the MDT 2010 gathering process (ZTIGather.wsf) come from. We now gather these additional details(
continue at source)
The newly released
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Beta 2 will help you prepare for your Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 deployments. MDT 2010 is the next version of the Solution Accelerator for operating system and application deployment. New features such as flexible driver management, optimized user interface work flow, and Windows PowerShell will help simplify deployment and make your job easier.
As a member of the Beta review program, you will be asked to provide feedback about the tools that the Solution Accelerator includes. If you are not a member, click
here to join the Beta program. For members, click
here.
Notification balloons seem to be a frequent topic of feedback from customers. There may pop up too often, or only certain users should get them, or the timing isn’t configurable enough.
Lately we’ve had multiple customers asking for a very specific feature. The AdminUI for SCCM provides the ability to disable notification balloons for normal Software Distribution packages, but not for Task Sequences.(
continue at source)
Mike recently posted on how to take an MDT action based on group membership in Active Directory. At the same time, I was working on something quite similar but using a different approach, so I thought I’d blog it here to offer an alternative method to the one Mike describes; I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one to use!
With this solution you can dynamically install applications during a LiteTouch deployment based on the membership of Active Directory groups, this means that each computer deployment can be uniquely customised, without the need for complex scripting or advanced infrastructure. All that is required is this blog post, a group created in Active Directory for every application that will be dynamically installed, and all computer accounts pre-created in the domain and added to the relevant application groups.(
continue at source)
This management pack supports monitoring of Windows Server Hyper-V systems. This includes monitoring coverage of Hyper-V host servers, including critical services and disks, and Hyper-V virtual machines, including virtual components and virtual hardware.
Feature Summary
This management pack provides the following functionality:
* Management of critical Hyper-V services that affect virtual machines and host server functionality
* Management of host server logical disks that affect virtual machine health
* Full representation of virtualization in a single Hyper-V host server, including virtual networks, virtual machines, and guest computers
* Monitoring of virtual machine hardware components that affect availability
Download:
Windows Server Hyper-V Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007
It has come up a few times where someone has requested taking actions in a Task Sequence based on the values of attributes on the computer object for the computer in Active Directory, like the computer’s OU or whether the computer is a member of an Active Directory Group. So I created an MDT User Exit script to set properties based on such attributes.(
continue at source)
Hi everyone, as you may have heard, we are releasing a Solution Accelerator that will attain certification for ConfigMgr as an SCAP-validated tool with FDCC scanning capability. If you or someone you know works in a US government agency – you are aware that those organizations are required to have an SCAP validated tool for ensuring adherence to the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (
FDCC). This project will achieve this certification for ConfigMgr, and its in beta now, ahead of schedule for release.(
continue at source)
Aidan Finn: Microsoft’s big differentiator from the competition is management. Most people have never experienced System Center so they’ve no idea by what I mean by management. They’ve seen things like HP SIM, IBM Director or VMware Virtual Center. For me, those are incomplete point solutions but they’re better than some of the freeware or “cheapware” solutions I’ve seen on some sites. When I say management I mean knowing what is where, how it’s performing, automation of deployment & configuration, backup/recovery from cradle to grave and from hardware to application inclusive of virtualisation. Sounds like science fiction? Nope, it’s a reality for some of us who’ve gone down the System Center route. Even back in the early days, I had this sort of thing running in 2005. Me and my team of 2 others managed 173 worldwide servers and were 3rd line support for the desktops. That included doing all the AD management, PC image builds, patching and software deployment. That sounds like we must’ve worked 24 hours a day? Nope, outside of project/development work, we did around 3 hours a day between us.(
continue at source)
Jeff Gilbert: Every now and then you might see someone asking about an SMS or ConfigMgr client being physically installed at the client computer, but not appearing as installed in the admin console. This invariably results in someone else pointing them to their site maintenance tasks configuration—which is generally the culprit. I was doing some things in my lab today so I figured that I'd post a basic description of the behavior. (
continue at source)
The Operations Manager 2007 Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) Roles and Security Hardening guide can be used to help further protect and harden your Operations Manager 2007 R2 environment in conjunction with the SCW on Windows Server 2008 by closing or disabling unnecessary ports and services reducing the overall attack surface.
Feature Bullet Summary:
The Operations Manager 2007 SCW Roles contain hardening definitions for:
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Server
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Root Management Server
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Agent
It also contains additional hardening option for:
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Audit Collector
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Audit Forwarder
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 SysLog Reader
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Agent Push Install And Repair
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Agentless Exception Monitoring
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 CEIP
* System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connector Framework
For more information and to download the guide visit
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c22c81eb-c6dc-4190-a4c9-2edbf5b528f1
Carol Bailey: I sometimes get questions from customers about values to set for the key sizes and validity periods for the certificates required for native mode and out of band management in Configuration Manager. This has been a tough one for me to answer, because in the main, these values are external to Configuration Manager and they are PKI design questions with advantages and disadvantages for different values. The higher the key size, the more secure the certificate is from attackers, but will require more processing to use. The longer the validity period, the less certificate maintenance required (and potentially some service disruption), but the certificate is more vulnerable to being compromised.(
continue at source)
Steve Thompson: A recent post on the MVP alias got me thinking that others may not know that the standard ConfigMgr 2007 backup task does not back up the SSRS reports. If you have not extended the SSRS reports in any way, then the default SSRS reports can easily be recreated. Simply create a new Site Reporting Services Role.
However, if you have created any custom reports, report models, etc you will need to follow these guidelines.(
continue at source)
Novell next week plans to release yet another tool that is the product of its three-year-old integration agreement with Microsoft, this time a plug-in for Microsoft’s management tools that lets users manage Novell’s Suse Linux.
The tool, which will ship June 19, was produced as part of Novell's involvement with the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab, which opened in 2007.(
continue at source)
Steve Rachui: I was looking for this information recently and had a hard time locating it – probably my poor searching skills! Nevertheless, I found it again so am posting it on my blog so I can always have it close! The information comes from
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb693755.aspx
The following features are not supported when clients are managed on the Internet:
* Software distribution that is targeted to users (either directly or through Microsoft Windows security groups).
* Branch distribution points (a branch distribution point cannot support Internet clients, and clients on the Internet cannot be configured as a branch distribution point).
* Client deployment over the Internet.
* Auto-site assignment.
* Network Access Protection (NAP).
* Wake On LAN.
* Operating system deployment.
* Remote control.
* Out of band management in Configuration Manager 2007 SP1.
* The client ping functionality used with the client status reporting feature in Configuration Manager 2007 R2.
OpsMgr is mainly used to get a grip on you server infrastructure and to optimize performance and availability by using best practice, which knowledge provide in the MP’s, and resolve errors with a head start with the provided knowledge. But the next step into monitoring is getting the most out of your infrastructure and Virtualization is one of these things that can help you get there. (
continue at source)
Steve Rachui: The RMS is responsible for maintaining a master list of agent configurations for the management group. As new information arrives from discoveries that are running on agents, that configuration becomes stale and needs to be updated. You can see this happening in the OpsMgr event log on the RMS – just look for an event 21025 or 21025(
continue at source)
Steve Rachui: Most management packs require discoveries be run to figure out which systems are hosting the objects we wish to monitor with the management pack. Only after the discoveries find our target objects do processes kick in to deliver appropriate monitors/rules so that monitoring begins.
In some cases, discoveries are ‘nested’. What does ‘nested’ mean? Put simply, discoveries that are ‘nested’ are in relation to one another. Generally a broader discovery runs that finds systems hosting the general class of object to be monitored. Based on the results, more specific discoveries run to determine details about the object found by the first discovery run. Before monitoring is fully in place, all of these ‘nested’ discoveries have to run and return data for a system hosting the monitoring object. This approach may take longer to get through the entire discovery process – but the benefit is that rules/monitors are only delivered to systems that specifically have the components of interest.
The System Center Configuration Manager team would like to announce that the following has been released and available for download:
Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2 Beta
This is the official Beta build for Configuration Manager 2007 SP2.
New features:
* Refer to the SP2 Overview article posted on the primary Configuration Manager MSConnect site for all the new features and new supported configurations
* Hotfixes included in SP2 article can be found on the primary Configuration Manager MSConnect page.
* Deployment guides for BranchCache and the new AMT features are available in the download section. .
* The new OpsMgr07 R2 ConfigMgr07 Management Pack can also be downloaded, this supports 64bit OpsMgr client agents.
* Please review the Release Notes before performing any installation and upgrade.
Note: No download links yet, when available i will update this post
Rob Kuehfus: In OM2007R2, we have introduced two new complex deployment scenarios we did not support in OM2007SP1. I am going to take a few minutes here and outline the new scenarios and procedures. (
continue at source)
Since releasing VMM R2 Beta, we’ve been working on an update to R2 and we’re readying a RC version that will ship in early June (VMM TAP customers will get an early preview later this month). In this context, I just wanted to give a headsup on some new features that we’ve added since Beta that’ll show up in the RC release. Most of these features are a result of feedback we got from customers and partners, we do listen to your feedback, so please keep it coming. Without further ado, here are the features(
continue at source)
Rob Kuehfus: Not much has changed when upgrading from Operations Manager 2007 SP1 to R2 or deploying a fresh installation of Operations Manager 2007 R2. However, I do want to take the opportunity to point out few of the changes.(
continue at source)
Marius Satura: Did you ever wonder what is the state of the instance as known to the runtime (health service) monitoring it? Did you believe that some state changes are unaccounted for? Did you see discrepancy in Health Explorer?
I believe many of you may answer yes to one of these questions.
Right now, there really is not a good guidance on how to troubleshoot state change problems, but since OpsMgr 2007 SP1 release, there was a way to at least display states of the monitors targeting the instance as recorded by runtime during state calculation. This led me to creation of the tool returning those states from runtime. It also provides visual comparison against “real” Health Explorer (states are returned from Ops DB) while integrated with OpsMgr console thru console task. This task targets instance of “HealthService” managed entity type. Tool uses Health Explorer like view of monitors for each active instance monitored by specific runtime. Following is a snapshot of the tool executed against my Root Management Server. Please observe that I created view listing all health service instances as well as console task associated with this type and accessible thru “Actions” pane.(
continue at source)
The mechanism for grooming the operational database in SCOM has changed compared to MOM 2005. In MOM 2005 we had a SQL job to handle the grooming – in SCOM 2007 we have a SCOM rule. The rule has a set schedule to run daily at midnight – and there is no built in override to allow this schedule to be changed. In some situations, it's helpful to manually force grooming. This can be done by manually executing the p_partitioningandgrooming stored procedure. This will call a series of other procedures which will grab your groom settings (retention threshold values) from the database and proceed with the groom. (
continue at source)
Two System Center Server Management Suite licensing changes will become effective 1 July, 2009, with the release of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2*:
* · System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise
will be switched from an unlimited operating system environment to a four operating system environment, limited licence with a corresponding 20 per cent price decrease.
* · A new suite offering, Microsoft System Center Server Management Suite Datacenter will be introduced and will include the same products as System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise, but, it will be licensed per processor and will provide for the management of an unlimited number of operating system environments.
(continue at source)
If your organization is affected by the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) mandate, and the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), then this new Beta program will be of interest to you. The FDCC mandate from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requires federal agencies and organizations to configure their computers running Windows Vista® and Windows® XP according to a specific list of settings published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The FDCC mandate also requires these agencies and organizations to document their compliance by scanning the computers they manage using SCAP content published by NIST, and to provide the compliance results in SCAP format.(continue at source)
We’re continuing to extend core MOF content with two new companion guides: Cross Reference ITIL®V3 and MOF 4.0 and Using MOF for ISO/IEC 20000. These guides compare MOF with some of IT’s most widely used service management guidance. They’ll give you:
· An overview of IT Service Management (ITSM) and an introduction to the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF).
· A work plan for attaining ISO/IEC 20000 standards and a practical, tangible way to demonstrate your company will meet certification requirements.
These guides will help you understand the characteristics and alignment of ITIL and MOF and obtain the information required for an informed approach to meeting today’s service management challenges. Additionally, you’ll learn how MOF aligns with and supports commonly used governance guidance and the vital role MOF plays in enabling the integration of GRC capabilities into quality and reliable daily IT operations.
Download— Cross Reference ITIL® V3 and MOF 4.0
Download— Using MOF for ISO/IEC 20000
Download—Planning for Software-plus-Services
Microsoft’s System Center product line consists of a number of products designed around meeting requirements from the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which is an extension and adaptation of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). MOF and ITIL are sets of principles that dictate how organizations frame processes and use best practices for the use of technology in the organization.(continue at source)
At Microsoft Management Summit, HP announced Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center. The first product of its kind, HP Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center delivers the essential infrastructure management capabilities of Insight Control suite directly into the Microsoft System Center environment.
Today, Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center is now available.
HP Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center enables Microsoft System Center customers to deploy, monitor, control, and optimize their HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem platforms directly from Microsoft System Center products. This enhanced visibility into the health of HP servers and server blades enables faster response to server failures, reducing the risk of downtime for both physical and virtual environments. It also reduces deployment and update times and delivers greater control of server power to help IT organizations increase staff productivity and optimize use of power and cooling capacity.
More information on HP ICE-SC is available at www.hp.com/go/ICESystemCenter And check out a video demonstration of HP Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center here.
| 21 Jun '09 - 13:29 | kenneth van surksum | 
no comments | news source ~ Operations Manager Support Team Blog 
