Gordon McKenna - System Center Operations Manager MVP - Inframon Ltd

Fight The War On Cost with Inframon and Microsoft System Center - November 5th - Churchill War Rooms, London

GordoDaMom — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:17:00 GMT

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Event details

Location

Churchill War Rooms

Clive Steps

King Charles Street

London SW1A 2AQ

Date

Friday, November 5th 2010

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About the event

The War On Cost 2010 is a very exclusive Microsoft System Center focused event taking place in the Cabinet War Rooms in London, an historic underground complex that housed a British government command centre thoughout the Second World War.

Speakers

Ryan O'Hara - Microsoft Corporation

Senior Director, System Center Product Management

Andrew Conway - Microsoft Corporation

Senior Director, Identity and Security Business Group

Jeff Wettlaufer - Microsoft Corporation

Senior Technical Product Manager System Center

Daniel Savage - Microsoft Corporation

Senior Program Manager Lead System Center

Justin Incarnato - Microsoft Corporation

Senior Program Manager System Center

Jason Buffington - Microsoft Corpration

Senior Technical Product Manager System Center

Adam Hall - Microsoft Corporation

Senior Technical Product Manager Management and Security

Sean Christensen - Microsoft Corporation

Senior Technical Product Manager System Center

Greg Charman - Microsoft UK

Opalis Technology Specialist

Gordon McKenna - Inframon Ltd

CEO - MVP System Center

Sean Roberts - Inframon Ltd

CFO - System Center BI Specialist

Simon Skinner - Inframon Ltd

Technical Architect - MVP System Center

Want to know more about the speakers?

Agenda

8:30 - 9:00 : Registration

9:00 - 9:30 : Inframon Keynote

Gordon McKenna - Introduction

9:30 - 10:30 : Room 1 - Microsoft Keynote

Ryan Ohara: Datacenter To The Cloud

10:30 - 10:50: Break

10:50 - 11:50 : Room1 - Microsoft Keynote

Andrew Conway : Desktop and Security Convergence

Room 2 - Breakout

Sean Roberts\Simon Skinner: System Center Private Cloud Story with Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

11:50 - 12:50 : Room 1 - Breakout

Justin Incarnato\Daniel Savage - System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and V.next

Room 2 - Breakout

Odyssey Software\Bridegways: Third Party System Center Extensions

12:50 - 13:50 : Lunch

13:50 - 14:50 : Room 1 - Breakout

Jeff Wettlaufer - System Center Configuration Manager V.next Highlights

Room 2 - Breakout

Sean Christensen - Service Manager 2010 The Better Together Story

14:50 - 15:10 : Break

15:10 - 16:10 : Room 1 - Breakout

Jason Buffington - Intelligent Application Protection with Data Protection Manager 2010

Room 2 - Breakout

Adam Hall\Greg Charman - IT Process Automation with Opalis

About Inframon

Inframon Ltd is a UK based consultancy company that specialises in helping IT organisations plan, implement and customize Microsoft System Center based solutions to deliver tangible value to their clients.

Operations Manager 2007 Advanced Architecture for Service Providers - Part 1

GordoDaMom — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:23:00 GMT

I wanted to share with everyone a few of my experiences with working in the Service Provider space with Operations Manager 2007 in a series of blog posts, starting with part 1 on advanced architecture, I hope you find it useful:

Operations Manager 2007 introduces a number of key features for supporting large scale,multi tenant environments, with the two main features being the Gateway Server Role for adding smaller un-managed customer environments to an existing Service Provider Management Group and the Connected Management Group Scenario for multi-tiering existing customer Management Groups to a Service Provider Management Group.

Gateway Server Role Scenario

The Gateway Server role allows the Discovery Wizard in Operations Manager to discover target computers in workgroups, across one-way trusted and untrusted domains, and provides communication between the target computer and the Management Server. The security requirements of Operations Manager 2007 also bring PKI into a prominent role in many environments where it is has previously been underutilised or non-existent.

There are two primary goals for the gateway server:

1. Minimize the number of points of traffic between two secured environments, (for example, a Customer and Service Provider network)

2. Maximize the use of Kerberos based authentication when it is available, because the TCO associated with Kerberos is lower than with certificates.

Operations Manager introduces a more secure communication model than in its previous versions in that mutual authentication is now required by default between an agent and a management server, as well as between Gateway Servers and Management Servers.

Mutual authentication can be achieved via Kerberos in trusted scenarios where all machines are in the same Active Directory domain or in a domain with a two-way trust relationship. However, in cases where machines outside the trusted environment must be monitored, Kerberos authentication is not possible. In these cases, Operations Manager 2007 can utilize x.509 certificates for mutual authentication in a variety of scenarios. Certificates can be deployed to any Windows operating system that supports an Operations Manager 2007 agent.

The Gateway facilitates communication between the target agent-managed computers and a Management Server, easing management in un-trusted and distributed environments. It may be easiest to think of a Gateway as a management server that simply relays information received from agents to another management server. In real terms a gateway is effectively a management server without direct database access. When you approve a gateway, it appears as a management server in the Operations Console.

To ensure high availability, the Gateway Server on the customer site can be implemented with a secondary gateway to allow agents to failover in the event of the primary gateway becoming un-available also a gateway can be configured for failover to both a primary and secondary management server on the service provider side, allowing Gateway communication to continue in the event of a Management Server failure. The Gateway Server also does not require membership in an Active Directory domain, so it is perfect for the typical service provider scenario where quite often a customer site is separated from the Service Provider by some kind of security boundary. Alternatively, agent-managed computers can be configured to communicate directly to a management server while authenticating via certificates, this is suitable where you have a very small number of agents or where implementation of a Gateway Server is not possible.

Common Deployment Scenario for Multi Tenant Environments.

Gateway with Agent-managed Member Servers

In this scenario, monitoring of a remote, un-trusted AD domain is desired. All servers desired for management in the remote domain are members of the same AD domain as the Gateway Server. There is no trust relationship between the two domains. In this scenario, certificate authentication will be required only between the management server and gateway server, as no trust relationship exists. Agent-managed computers in the remote AD domain will be authenticated via Kerberos for communication with the Gateway Server. Thus, certificates must be secured for both the Management Server and Gateway Server in the remote domain.

Gateway with Agent-managed Workgroup Servers

In this scenario, monitoring of a remote, un-trusted AD domain is desired. Some servers desired for management by the Gateway Server are members of a workgroup. In this scenario, certificate authentication will be required not only between the management server and gateway server, but also between the Gateway Server and agent-managed computers.

Agent-managed Workgroup Servers - Gateway in Workgroup

In this scenario, monitoring of a remote, DMZ or workgroup environment is desired. An additional requirement to minimize the number of points of communication between the isolated environment and the Management Server exists, making deployment of a Gateway Server an appropriate choice. In this scenario, certificate authentication will be required not only between the management server and gateway server, but also between the Gateway Server and agent-managed computers.

While there is no programmed limit for the number of agents that can be managed within a single Management Group, information from live environments has established certain limits. Performance has been shown to degrade beyond 6,000 agents, so you should always plan for one Management Group for every 6,000 agents.

The official supported limit for the number of agents that can communicate to a gateway server is 1,500.

Connected Management Groups Scenario

This deployment scenario is comprised of multiple management groups, each of which can be of the single or multiple server configurations type. This deployment scenario is exceptionally flexible and is mostly used to provide monitoring, alerting, and reporting services in complex environments.

This is extremely useful in the service provider scenario as it allows the connection to multiple instances of a Management Group that may exist on customer sites providing a "single pane of glass" for viewing critical alert data.

Connecting management groups offers these additional services:

Consolidated monitoring and alerting for greater than 6,000 agents
Consolidated monitoring across trust boundaries

Operations Manager 2007 Server Roles

This configuration supports all Operations Manager server roles and makes use of the Operations Manager Connector Framework to enable bidirectional communication between the connected groups and local groups.

Common Uses

This deployment scenario can be used when the service provider requirement is to link to a complete Operations Manager Management Group on a customer site to allow a consolidated view of all monitored activity and consolidated management of that data.

There is no official limit on the number of Management Groups that you can connect to in this scenario.

High Level Architecture for Mixed Multi-Tenant Environment

In the case of many large service providers quite often the environment would be a mix of both connected and non-connected management groups, therefore a tiered architecture would be suitable.

This may consist of a master Management Group (or Local Management Group) which would host a roll up of alerts from all connected management groups and second management group which would be the collection point for all data from non-connected Management Groups.

Data Warehouse collection at the Master Management Group level would consist of purely Alert and Discovery Data and this would be the primary connection point for other Management Tools or any Ticketing System, this would also provide a high-level, global data collection point for customer facing scorecarding and reporting.

Any customer owned Management Groups would connect directly to this tier via the Microsoft Connector Framework (MCF), with performance and inventory data being collected locally on their sites.

A Second Management Group would be implemented as a connection point for any non-Management Group sites which would have local Gateway Servers for relaying data from local agents, this Management Group would also be connected to the Master Management Group via the MCF. This second tier would have Data Warehouse Collection Capabilities for Performance Metrics and Inventory Data and would provide a second data collection point for customer facing scorecarding and reporting.

The following diagram shows an example of how this architecture may look:

Connecting to other Management or Helpdesk Ticketing Systems

The Operations Manager 2007 R2 release saw the introductions of a number of free Interoperability connectors, these include HP Openview, Tivoli TEC, Remedy Helpdesk and a universal connector.

With the recent acquisition of Opalis Integration Center by Microsoft a number of other connection options have been added to the product such as Omnibus Netcool and HP Service Center.

Microsoft also has a close collaboration with EMC around the SMARTS network management toolset, which includes the purchase of some of the EMC SMARTS IP for addition to the next version of the product. This collaboration has led to a recent release of a a bidirectional adapter package from Microsoft called the EMC Smarts Connector for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. The adapter will let Operations Manager users view Smarts topology and root-cause reports using their own interfaces. Smarts will also be able to suck in data from Operations Manager.

Operations Manager also comes with an extensive SNMP Trap collection feature allowing you to receive traps from any SNMP enabled system as well as being able to probe other systems ( via SNMP) for information.

Management Escalation

Operations Manager 2007 has a very extensive and flexible subscription based notification system which supports output to SMTP enabled mail systems, Microsoft Office or Live Communication Server (for delivery of messages to Office Communicator clients), GSM for SMS Text Messaging integration via a suitable GSM enabled device, as well as any command line supported medium.

This subscription mechanism supports a very granular and targeted alert stream, allowing you to alert down to a single object or alert over a variety of parameters (such as time raised, severity, business priority etc.).

Operations Manager also supports Alert Ageing which allows you to put a time expiry on un-answered alerts meaning that you can escalate them to higher tiers of Management or too other Operators.

Hardware Support for All Platforms

Microsoft has full support for Operations manager 2007 from most of the large Hardware Vendors such as HP, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and IBM. Each of these vendors provide a full Operations Manager 2007 management Pack which typically integrates with the local hardware agent and contains Vendor specific knowledge in alerts generated.

Role based administration

Operations Manager 2007 can monitor many different types of applications in the enterprise and these applications can be administered by multiple teams. As the Operations Manager administrator, you can limit access to each team so they access only their monitoring data. Role-based security allows you to grant access to monitoring data, tools, and actions on a team-by-team basis.

Except for the Administrator role, you can add Active Directory security groups or individual accounts to any of these predefined roles. You can add Active Directory security groups only to the Administrator role.

Adding users or groups to a role mean that those individuals will be able to exercise the given role privileges across the scoped objects (including any inherited objects).

Operations Manager also allows you to create custom roles based on the Operator, Read-Only Operator, Author, and Advanced Operator profiles. When you create the role, you can further narrow the scope of groups, tasks, and views that the role can access. For example, you can create a role entitled "Exchange Operator" and narrow the scope to only Exchange-related groups, views, and tasks. User accounts assigned to this role will only be able to run Operator-level actions on Exchange-related objects.

Measuring and Displaying Customer Service Levels

One of the most challenging aspects of providing a managed service to a customer is being able to visualise the value of the service you are providing back to the customer in a format that can be consumed and understood by any level of the business.

Operations Manager 2007 delivers the ability to define an IT service (or distributed application) by selecting the components that together deliver that IT service, along with their inter-relationships. For example, a web service may comprise of the web server, application pools, a database, and the servers that each are hosted on. By monitoring a defined number of characteristics of each of those components, Operations Manager is able to determine both the health and performance of each component through 3 states:

Healthy, indicating that the component being monitored is operating within expected parameters.
Warning, indicating a performance or health threshold has been exceeded, and that while the component is operating, attention is required to prevent service disruption or restore performance.
Critical, indicating that the component being monitored has entered an unhealthy state that requires immediate attention, and that the availability and performance of that component are compromised.

This feature is one of the most powerful features of Operations Manager as it gives the ability to be able to group together all of the components that make up a service and in the event of an outage very quick root cause analysis of the source of an outage of performance problem can be identified by simply clicking on a problem path button.

This is also extremely useful to the service provider as it gives him the ability provide metrics back to the customer on the core services that he is being paid to manage through Operations Manager 2007 R2's in built Service Level Reporting capability.

The Service Level Reporting capability in Operations Manager 2007 R2 (also called "service level objectives" or SLOs) leverages this same functionality maintained in the Distributed Application concept to determine both availability and performance metrics for monitored IT services. It does this by calculating the overall time that the components that comprise that IT service remain in a particular state to arrive at the following metrics:

Availability, calculated as the time the components that comprise the service are in a healthy or warming state. Only a critical state counts against the availability metric, since even if it is in a warning state the IT service is seen as being accessible by end users, (e.g., a web service may take a long time to respond, but it does eventually deliver a web page).
Performance, calculated as the time the components that comprise the IT services are in a healthy state. Both warning and critical states count against the performance metric, (e.g., if a database transaction is expected to complete in less than 300ms, and the actual transaction takes 2 seconds, then this will be seen as a performance impact).

Once you have defined your Distributed Applications and Service Level Objectives you can use the in-built Service Level Report to display the results or can display the data in a much more effective format using the Service Level Dashboard.

The Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager R2 is a free download from the Microsoft Solution Accelerator team which is an application built on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. It is designed to work with an existing Operations Manager 2007 R2 infrastructure configured to monitor business-critical applications. The dashboard evaluates an application or group over a time period that the administrator selects during setup, determines whether it met the defined service level commitment, and displays summarized data about the service levels.

In Operations Manager 2007 R2, you define your service goals. The Service Level Dashboard evaluates each SLO over the defined dashboard time period and determines if it met the goal during that period. The dashboard displays each SLO and identifies its states, based on defined service level targets.

The following diagram illustrates, at a high-level, the process flow that occurs within the Service Level Dashboard environment:

The Service Level Dashboard integrates with the Operations Manager Data Warehouse database and displays service level metrics on the Windows SharePoint Services interface. All the customized and personalized data associated with the Web Parts of the Service Level Dashboard is stored in the Windows SharePoint Services Content database.

The dashboard can summarize the current status and health of all defined SLOs against an application or group of objects. Key measures used to evaluate various aspects of the health of defined SLOs include such information as service level metrics, mean time to repair (MTTR), mean time between failures (MTBF), and service level trends.

As this Dashboard can be used in SharePoint or WSS, it can easily be imported into a public facing portal for on-line consumption by the customer.

Custom SLA Scorecarding

As the needs of the Service Provider often varies from some of the functionality that is provided from Operations Managers "out-of-the-box" availability and SLA Reporting, there is often a need to publish key data collected from Operations Manager in executive level dashboards and scorecards to give customers a "10,000" feet view of their environment so they understand the value the service provider is bringing in managing their infrastructure also key performance metrics can be presented allowing IT stakeholders within those businesses to make key decisions without the complication of having to run their own reporting infrastructure.

This extra level of reporting can easily be provided through extending Operations Managers reporting capability to utilise some of the new, native SQL 2008 reporting capabilities.

By using some of the new reporting controls now in SQL 2008, very effective, customer ready scorecards can be created which can easily be tied to an individual customer by using a combination of

Gordon McKenna - System Center Operations Manager MVP

Technical References:

Gateway Server and Certifcate-based Authorization Scenarios in Operations Manager 2007: http://www.systemcentercentral.com/Downloads/DownloadsDetails/tabid/144/IndexID/7885/Default.aspx

Tracking Service Levels with Operations Manager 2007 R2: http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/B/4/9B4829DC-55A5-46E7-9C9A-91B49EBB6320/SC_OpsMgr2007_R2-ServiceLevelMonitoring.pdf

Service Level Dashboard for System Center Operations Manager 2007: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd630553.aspx

New Operations Manager R2 Management Pack Released To The Catalogue

GordoDaMom — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:39:00 GMT

A really great update to the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Management Pack has been released to the catalogue.

I have been at the MVP summit and had the opportunity to look at this MP up close and personal courtesy of the MP's owner and OpsMgr PM Cory Delamarter.

The MP has a number of fantastic new additions including the ability to accurately view agent processor time, detect agent architecture mismatches and agent versions and some extremely improved Knowledge base information.

Cory has really set the bar high with this new MP, and Dan Rogers who is spearheading the new internal MP efforts at Microsoft is pushing hard to make sure all furture MP's that come from the Product Groups meet up with this great new standard.

Top work fellas and keep up the good work

You can find Corys post here:

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2010/02/19/opsmgr-2007-r2-mp-version-6-1-7599-0-is-released.aspx

And you can download the new MP either directly from your OpsMgr console or alternatively from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=61365290-3c38-4004-b717-e90bb0f6c148&displaylang=en

The System Center Management Pack catalogue moves to PinPoint

GordoDaMom — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:54:00 GMT

Microsoft have moved the Management pack catalogue to the new Pinpoint format:

http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/systemcenter/managementpackcatalog

Its a little confusing at first, but I wanted to give you some tips for finding the MP you want in case you are struggling.

1. Click on the link above, or goto http://www.microsoft.com/opsmgr and click on the "Find Management Packs and Connectors" link half way down the right side of the page.

2. On the right hand side you will see a section entitled "System Center Catalogs by Product", choose the product you want such as "Operations Manager 2007 R2"

3. Finally type in the MP your after such as "Exchange 2010", and youy should find a list of everything that is available for the product i.e. Exchange, Forefront.

To be honest, the new catalogue has been met with mixed feedback from both customers and MVP's and Filip Lazar who has been working on the transition on the System Center product team fielded some early question's on it and had this to say explaining the move:

"Pinpoint is a team within Microsoft that is going to host solutions across numerous product groups. It was introduced at PDC 09, and is the general direction for the catalogs of a lot of products.

So why did we end up using this platform?

Removing the need to manage the old custom MP catalog frees up dev and test resources for the System Center teams. This means that we can focus on our core competency, which is creating a better management products for you and working on MPs.

Web design is Pinpoint's core competence. The team is staffed to improve the site and has a good pipeline. It's this pipeline that will give the catalog a good future. Although I cannot discuss all aspects of this pipeline, you'll see new things appearing such as customer facing MP ratings, which are meant to add value to the community and address requests that we have received in the past.

The new catalog removes Microsoft as a bottleneck and gives you direct control over listing MPs. While we still approve/deny MPs from showing up in the catalog, it a first step in opening up that black box that you encounter once you request an MP be listed, or if you are looking to find a market for MPs you have created.

Pinpoint will offer us a way to start getting parity between what you see in the In-Product Catalog (R2 for now), and the web experience. This is something we're looking to leverage in the next version of the product as well.

The pinpoint change is needed to help us gain the benefits above, but we are aware that functionality has changed drastically, and some tasks can no longer be performed. My goal is to work on improving the experience to make sure that the new site adds value. However, I do want to call out that the part of the site that is a paradigm shift (bing type search versus old excel list type search) which does take some getting used to regardless."

If you have any thoughts on this new site or there is anything that you would like to see different then please let me know and I will pass your feedback along.

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 1 has released to the download center!

GordoDaMom — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:51:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announce the ENU release of R2 CU1 to the download center. The download center link is now live and the KB article should be published very shortly.

Please note the announcement below regarding the realease of the first cumulative hotfix update for Operations Manager 2007 R2, this is a rollup of all hotfixes to date for the R2 platform, a must for anyone runningt this version.....

"The release is of high importance to a number of customers, internal and external partners, especially Exchange 2010 customers eagerly awaiting the release in support of the 2010 management pack. This release also rounds off our Windows Server 2008 R2 support story (KB974722) nicely.

A big THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to our first Cumulative Update release."

External Resources

Download link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05d30779-2ddc-48dc-aa91-a23167ee2cad

CU1 KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974144

Exchange Server 2010 MP dependency on CU1 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee758051.aspx

Presenting at TechReady

GordoDaMom — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:48:00 GMT

I have had a brief week back in the UK after my Keynote presentation with Alison Watson at the Worldwide Partner Conference and now I fly out to Redmond for my second visit of the year (this is getting a bit of a regular thing), this time to take part in one of Microsoft's biggest internal events TechReady.

For those who don’t know, TechReady is a semi-annual, 5-day internal technical conference for Microsoft employees from all over the globe who attend presentations by the various product groups about all the upcoming releases for the year. They also receive training on all of the currently released Microsoft products. The senior executives will also often present at TechReady, outlining their visions for the future, and taking questions from employees.

I actually have the very great honor of being the first OpsMgr MVP ever to present at this event (this is usually just internal speakers), and I will be repeating the two sessions that I did at MMS:

Data Center Management with System Center: Real World Scenarios

Running and Maintaining the Microsoft System Center Suite on Hyper-V

I am extremely excited about both visiting the mother ship once more, spending some more extremely useful time with the PG and in presenting to an internal Microsoft audience, which I am sure will be quite different to the normal WMUG or TechEd\MMS audiences.

Cool New extended MPs from Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft IT and OpsMgr Product team

GordoDaMom — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:41:00 GMT

Check out the new extended MPs from Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft IT and OpsMgr Product team here: (not officially supported by MS):

http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2009/07/newly-released-mps-by-opsmanjam.html

Here’s a summary of what’s been added to each that I extracted from the included docs:

Extended Server 2003 IIS
Microsoft Extended Windows Server Internet Information Services 2003 Management Pack.

The Microsoft Extended Windows Server Internet Information Services 2003 Management Pack includes additional rules and knowledge for monitoring IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 operating system.

The rules in the Management Packs for IIS 2003 provide enable Operations Manager 2007 to monitor the following IIS object types:

· IIS Server Role

· IIS Web Sites

Extended Windows Server OS
Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack.

What's New

The following features are new in this release of the Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack:

· Monitors for the demotion of a domain controller to a Windows member server and executes a cleanup script to remove the replication monitor objects in the directory service

· Includes two Tasks to remotely shutdown and reboot of a domain controller from within the Operations Console

· Includes three new alerts to notify when a Windows Server reboots from a bugcheck, performs a clean reboot, or a dirty shutdown was detected.

Extended ADMP
Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack.

What’s New in Version 6.0.6278.2

The following new features are new in this release of the Extended Active Directory Management Pack:

Monitor the Active Directory Management Pack helper object (OOMADS) to verify it is installed and working correctly.
Monitor the FSMO role transfer between domain controllers.

What's New in Version 6.0.6278.1

The following features are new in this release of the Extended Active Directory Management Pack:

· Monitor the Windows Time Service (W32Time) for time synchronization issues with authoritative time source

· Monitor for clients not authenticating against a local domain controller, indicating site boundaries are not properly defined or scoped.

· Monitor for expensive or inefficient LDAP queries performed against a DC

· Monitor for FRS related events that affect the health and availability of the SYSVOL shared directory and its replication on a domain controller

· Monitor for specific performance characteristics of a domain controller with respect to Free System Page Table Entries and Database Name Cache hit rate

· Includes two Tasks to remotely shutdown and reboot a domain controller from within the Operations Console

SCCM OSD for OpsMgr 2007
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 OS Deployment Management Pack.

July, 2009

Updated discovery rule to target a more appropriate class. No modifications have been made to this management pack or deployment guide.

Presenting at the keynote with Alison Watson at the Worldwide Partner Conference

GordoDaMom — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:03:00 GMT

Well, I am currently in New Orleans at the Worldwide Partner Conference.

It is the first time I have attended this event as a partner, although this is one of the biggest events that Microsoft hold and I believe is the biggest partner conference in the world with an estaimated 6,000 partners in attendance.

The main and most exciting reason that I am here though is that I am actually taking part in the main Keynote this morning with Alison Watson, the Corporate VP of Worldwide Partners.

I have been selected along with three other partners around the world to represent not only the UK but Microsoft System Center from a service partner perspective which I have to say I feel very honoured and humbled by.

I will be talking about not only some of my customer enagements, but also some of the partner to partner stuff that I do for Microsoft around System Center.

Anyway, you can catch me here live, broadcast in stunning HD in about two hours time (dont worry if you miss it it will be hosted up ther for a while)

http://www.digitalwpc.com/

There is going to be some pretty major announcements too around my presentation so it will be well worth tuning in to find out whats in store.

So I am off to do some last minute nail biting before I get on stage, so I am going to tell myself to break a leg.....

AEM wizard never finishes in OpsMgr R2

GordoDaMom — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:12:00 GMT

Hey Folks,

I wanted to give you a heads up on an issue I ran into today with OpsMgr R2 and AEM.

I have been setting up OpsMgr today as part of a Client Monitoring project for a large customer, the engineer I am working with is not a domain admin but is a local admin on the OpsMgr boxes. After installing the DB's using the dbcreate wizard ( the customer did not want any unnecessary registry keys on the SQL box) and then the rest of the OpsMgr components, we went on to configure AEM by running the AEM wizard from a management server in administration, we went through all of the steps however when we clicked to create the share, the console just sat there and never completed.

When I looked under the covers, all of the shares were set up along with the user groups, but the wizard just never came to an end, more alarmingly though, when I cancelled the wizard and shut down the console , the Microsoft.MOM.UI.Console.exe process still remained running, and in fact after going through this process several more times I was left with multiple Microsoft.MOM.UI.Console.exe processes running despite not even having a console physically running. I took from this that whatever was happening to the AEM wizard was actually hanging the console process but without actually crashing the console.

Getting to the root cause of this problem was not easy, as there was nothing in the event logs on the console server or RMS, debug viewer drew a blank, then I came across the following in the SQL database server event log:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSSQLSERVER
Event Category: (2)
Event ID: 28005
Date: xx-xx-xxxx
Time: xx:xx:xx
User: N/A
Computer: BLA
Description:
An exception occurred while enqueueing a message in the target queue. Error: 15404, State: 19. Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user 'DOMAIN\ACCOUNT', error code 0xea.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 65 6d 00 00 10 00 00 00 em......
0008: 08 00 00 00 53 00 43 00 ....x.x.
0010: 4f 00 4d 00 53 00 51 00 x.x.x.x.
0018: 4c 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 x.......
0020: 6d 00 61 00 73 00 74 00 m.a.s.t.
0028: 65 00 72 00 00 00 e.r...

This is commonly the result of having the OpsMgr DBOwner set to the name of the person installing it, which in our case was what we had done as we couldn't wait a day for the proper service accounts to be generated.

So I changed the db owner of the Ops DB to SA using the SQL query "sp_changdbowner sa" (in case you're interested), and hey presto the wizard went through without a problem.

I have had this as an issue with discovering network devices in a number of cases, but this is the first time that I have seen it cause an issue with the AEM Wizard.

Moral of the story here is always log on with your SDK account when creating your DB......

New OpsMgr Cross Plat & Interop Forums

GordoDaMom — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 01:34:00 GMT

Hey Folks,

The OpsMgr Community Team are trying out the forums experience for Cross Platform and Interop for OpsMgr 2007 R2, as a change to the standard newsgroup format.

Please let them know direct what you think about them and how your experience goes.

You can file your direct feedback to our team here:

https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/default.aspx?SiteID=446

System Center Operations Manager Cross Platform Extensions Forum

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=604&SiteID=17

System Center Operations Manager Interop Connectors Forum

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=605&SiteID=17

Gordo

www.inframon.com

Operations Manager R2 Totally Unleashed !

GordoDaMom — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:36:00 GMT

Sorry to steal a title from a very well known OpsMgr book, but I can think of no better way to describe the new R2 beta release of everyones favourite monitoring tool.

I have just returned from the R2 TAP summit for Microsoft's latest revision of Operations Manager and I have to say that this is definietly looking like the release that is firmly going to put the product at the top of the management tree.

Being involved with the product all the way back to it's Sentry days when I was with Mission Critical Software, it has been an absolute delight to watch this platform progress through it's various versions.

I have to admit though that my love affair with this product hit a serious rocky patch with the release of OpsMgr 2007 RTM, and I, like many others of you out there went through some questioning times battling with some of the early issues with the build.

Well I am glad to say, that the product team also felt this pain too, and have had a long and hard look at the way they release their products and after the introduction of some very stringent new engineering criteria have finally produced a platform that is not only rock solid, but is also bristling with new features, new concepts and for once is bursting to get out of the traps.

The R2 beta finally went live on connect on Thursday of last week and I was one of a fortunate group of people who got to test drive it early and WOW what a ride.

The first thing that astounded me was the sheer all round performance of the product, "Yes I did actually say all round performance", being with 2007 since it's early beta, perfromance is a word that I have never used in the same sentence with OpsMgr, but this thing moves like Lewis Hamilton on the last lap of the Brazillian Grand Prix......I started things off by clicking the icon for the Operators Console and then sat back in my chair to wait the customary minute or so for the console to appear and POW ! up it came, with a very slick new looking splash graphic, and it didnt stop there, I can gracefully flick between panes, scroll through mountains of alerts without losing half of my screen and fire up tasks and views instantly without so much as a hesitation. I have to say, back in the day, when I first heard that they were combining all of the consoles from MOM 2005 into a single UI, I thought the cost would have to be a big hit to performance and nothing in RTM led me to believe I was wrong, but I think the guys have squirted some axle grease into the code as it now handles like its on rails.

Next I moved onto the management pack import wizard and if you, like me, go through all the frustration of having to connect to the catalogue to download the latest MP's every time you deploy the product (or for you admins every week), so you can get the latest and greatest additions to your MP family then your far flung prayers have now been answered as we now have a "check catalogue" button, that not only lets you pick your MP's straight from the online MS catalogue but will also check your existing ones for updates, and if this is not enough for you MP catalogue whores out there, then it actually brings them down, unpacks them and automatically deploys them OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU TOM........

Next is something that my very good friend, Oklahoma die hard (damn, by how much did your boys smash the Techs), and all round rock star Justin, has been working on under the covers, a brand new MP Template for process monitoring. Yes, just when you thought you may just never see another MP template again, the team come up with the Mother of all MP templates "The Process Monitor", got to be one of may all time biggest asks from customers, a quick and easy way of smashing the problem of managing those runaway processes. In just a few clicks you can be tracking down those unwanted, runaway, HPOV, CA or BMC agent processes, allowing you to do the only decent thing and terminate those mothers....Seriously though this is a cool little wizard that lets you not only look for and terminate unwanted processes, but lets you limit the number of certain processes starting as well as allowing you to gather information on how a number of processes that form a workload are performing, very, very cool (I know I need to get out more).

Next on my list of stuff to try (and I am getting very excited now), is the new update to the OLEDB MP template....I have to say that I was a left a little bit disapointed by the original rev of this, especially as I saw it fall completely short of products such as SiteScope in terms of functionality, but now we are talking, no more just connecting to a DB for this little tiger, now its full on SQL query time baby ! Just grab your favourite SQL query off those lovable rogues in the SQL DBA team and whallop, instant LOB application DB call simulation (calm down, I said simulation SQL jocks not stimulation). This was so seriously missing and now is there by default so you can not only fire those queries in but you can take results back and pass them to diagnostics, measure performance and availability from different levels (and locations) of your app and best of all you can slam them into into your Service Level Dashboard and show that gorgeous girl in marketing just what a cool and intereseing dude you really are (hey dont knock it till youve tried it boys).....

So next is onto a little new addition to the very sexy web console, da dah ! the all new, web based, "Health Explorer", now isn't this just the feature that you were so missing from this console that stopped you from using it all the time, and whats more its, slick, is launched exactly the same way as it is from the thick client, and makes sure that you never miss that awesome experience of watching your all those red blobs curl out of the tree, letting you know (on a Friday afternoon no doubt) that you have just trashed the company mail server.

Next I dived into reporting to see if the mad Jock Mr Savage has had time to unravel the time old OpsMgr mystery for us of what object goes with what report, and fair play to the haggis eating, wok loving Highlander, hes added an all new object picker for report parameters that allows you to find the right target for customising your report so you can easily work out how to get that Exchange availability report to the boss by 5pm to prove to him that you are not a complete numbwit (shouldnt be spending all your time flashing your new dashboard at the girl in marketing mate).

So as you can imagine I am getting OpsManagered right out by now, thinking to myself, surely there could not be any more surprises, but then I find out that I am merely tapping on the product teams window pane, and guess who is there to open it with a big smiling face and rather large penguin tattoo on his arm, but TechEd Europes Top talker himself (see you do have some mates), and the epitome of smoothness, Mr Barry Earthmover, and boy does he move the earth, not just cross platform monitoring that betters anything on the market today, but fully integrated, seemless, instantly deployable from the console cross platform monitoring. Now guys, I have to state in public, this new feature, extension, limb (whatever befits it) ABSOLUTELY KICKS TOTAL ASS, you click on agent discovery as normal, but instead of the usual boring old windows only discovery you get a screen split into three, Windows, UNIX\Linux and network. Choose the middle one and in less clicks than I have had hot supermodels you have a fully deployed and monitored cross platform agent, and is this experience a good one, the agent is built in Open Source Pegasus, yes thats right Microsoft writing open source code, is that a pig I see above, and the cross plat team have even written the Base O/s MP's for you, and boy are these good, and dare I say better, yes better than some of the existing Windows MP's (I still love ya Tom), as well as a ton of flavours already there and more readied in time for release, I think that this is going to spank some some serious cheek when it hits the street. All we need now is a nice Penguin icon in the computers view and the story is complete, come on boys you know it makes sense...

Other cools things I sampled were th new maintenance mode which actually puts a server into maintenace mode properly before you reboot rather than embarrasing you with a heartbeat failure on startup, a new overrides summary view..... HORAY, no more reching for Boris's toolkit, a brand new Authoring console making it even easier to knock up that Management Pack for contolling your garage door, support for managing upto 1000 URL's (ideal for clicking on your blog to make your stats look impressive to your mates....hey it works for me), new subscribe mechanism for notifications (hey sounds like something of System Center Community, Pete ?) and last but very much not least the integration of something very special to me THE SERVICE LEVEL DASHBOARD (remember the girl from marketing), and not just the inclusion of the report that brought a little sexy back to your OpsMgr installation but the inclusion of a whole new addition to the Authoring experience, the ability to create and define Service Level Objectives on almost anything you monitor in OpsMgr so you can tell you boss that besides being a numbwit you can actually demonstrate 5 9's against his sandwich ordering app.....WHAYYYYYY!

A massive pat on the back to the whole product team from me anyway for a quality code release, delivered on time, with top new features and packed with almost everything I have ever heard from customers thats really needed in the product, keep it coming.................

Gordo Loves R2 x x x

www.inframon.com

Office Communications Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 Is Now Released !

GordoDaMom — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:32:00 GMT

I have to admit that personally this has been one of the most eagerly anticipated Management Pack releases for some time, not only because OCS is probably THE Hottest technologies coming out of Microsoft at the moment but also because the OCS team gained a couple of true Rock stars from the OpsMgr product teams some time ago in Management Pack specialist Peter Schmatz and Reporting legend Thomas Theiner, when I heard that these two guys had defected the first thing I asked them was "when are we going to see a new OCS MP", with these two guys behind it, this MP was always going to be a giant and these boys have not disappointed.

This is a brand new "native" MP, not a converted one from MOM 2005, which you may have expected from the first version and really does use lots of the new features in OpsMgr unlike many of the existing converted ones.

I questioned Thomas earlier this week on this milestone release.......

"What we did is take a working copy of the Wave 13 (OCS 2007 R2) MP and adapt it in our build tree for OCS 2007 RTM.

We got the starting of the type Infrastructures, the new views, way reduced noise, fixed bugs that nobody complained and found before, etc.

The Wave 13 MP will in some weeks contain some reports, will get synthetic transactions (ST) first for IM/Presence, Knowledge, Tasks, Health rollups based on the STs.

With the next generation MP this functionality will be extended to the entire product.

This is a Management Attack - targeted at getting one of the most complex products in Microsoft a breeze for Administrators to manage."

I have to say first impressions on the pack are extremely good, it has a slightly different, more streamlined look and feel in the monitoring pane, giving you a breakdown of each of the complex areas of the product, along with a very straightforward, no nonsense, alert and performance view rather than the normal deluge of State, diagram and dashboard type views.

Under the covers it does not disappoint either with a very accurate class structure and taking full advantage of many of the different monitor type's available in the product, and really does highlight just how seriously the OCS team is taking management of their very exciting and technology leading platform.

In my opinion this is a very credible first version and with much more promised with the R2 version including the all important reporting element (and as Thomas is the ex-reporting PM for MOM\OpsMgr you can bet these will be top draw), this is a good testament to Microsoft's and in particular Tom Mcleery's (head of the OpsMgr Management Pack team) committment to producing top quality Management Packs moving forward.

Test drive it now on your OCS 2007 implementation.....

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A1832431-54B7-4070-9B10-14EFB231FF0C&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

SCCM Planning for Dummys Part 1!

GordoDaMom — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:30:00 GMT

Well although I hate to admit it being an OpsMgr guy, I have actually been getting my head around deployment planning for SCCM as of late as part of my ever expanding System Center role (no sarcastic comments please boys).

And I have to admit I have been finding it very interesting, and as I am a relative dummy when it comes to SCCM I thought I would start blogging about the stuff I am finding out, so you other SCCM dummys out there may possibly pick ups some tips (you never know maybe one of SCCM colleagues on WMUG may start doing the same with OpsMgr).

First of all I have been directed to some very good resources, first one being this guide from the deployment guys on rough sizing guidlines:

http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/archive/2008/05/20/sccm-for-deployment-rough-sizing-guidelines.aspx#comments

Really good read.

Next, unlike OpsMgr which has guides that come in both downloadable word format as well as the readable online format, it appears that most SCCM content is ONLY available online, so I started off (after reading through the fundamentals), with the Configuration Manager Planning and Deployment Overview here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb693806.aspx

I have to say mind that I was a bit dissapointed I couldnt just download this lock stock (somebody point me in the right direction if I am missing the guide in Word format), as I do like to print a copy off to peruse on the train on my way into London.

Point for Microsoft, If you want people to start treating the System Center like a suite then get some consistency on TechNet across the product sets.....

I then began wondering which version I should be focusing on and as R2 is almost upon us I thought that I would concentrate on this version, you can check out supported configurations here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/bb680717.aspx

And finally, I wanted to know whether "out-of-the-stable" R2 would be supporting SQL 2008, and to my dissapointment the answer is no, check out this newsgroup thread here:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?siteid=17&PostID=3732354

I will let you no in my next SCCM post how I got on with the docs,

many thanks to Firdous for the tips

(OpsMgr07) Do Management Server Hotfixes Apply to Gateway Servers?

GordoDaMom — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:24:00 GMT

A question that came up recently from one of my fellow MVP's was whether or not hotfixes destined for Management Servers need to be applied against Gateway Servers and the simple answer is yes.

Here is the official reply from Clive Eastwood OpsMgr Support guru (and fellow Brit) on the OpsMgr product team:

Yes a GWS is treated the same as an MS. Applying an Agent/Server hotfix to a GWS (e.g. applying a MOMModules.dll hotfix) will apply the updates to server DLL’s as well as copying the msp file to the appropriate platform folders of the AgentManagement folder for distribution to managed agents (current and future).

Problems with Dell Management Pack That Are Addressed in New Release

GordoDaMom — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:36:00 GMT

David posted earlier on the release of the new Dell Management Pack, this pack has had a number of issues some which were actually caused by problems in OpsMgr which have now been addressed in a hotfix.

Unfortunately, it is not that obvious in the documentation about some of the things you need to do to take full advantage of this release so I want to point out a really good blog post from Kevin Holman on the product team that talks about some of these things

http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2008/08/11/updated-dell-mp-released-3-1-a01.aspx

Gordon McKenna - System Center Operations Manager MVP - Inframon Ltd

Fight The War On Cost with Inframon and Microsoft System Center - November 5th - Churchill War Rooms, London

Event details

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more info

Our Sponsors

About the event

Speakers

Agenda

About Inframon

Operations Manager 2007 Advanced Architecture for Service Providers - Part 1

New Operations Manager R2 Management Pack Released To The Catalogue

The System Center Management Pack catalogue moves to PinPoint

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 1 has released to the download center!

External Resources

Presenting at TechReady

Cool New extended MPs from Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft IT and OpsMgr Product team

Extended Windows Server OS Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack.

What's New

Extended ADMP Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack.

What’s New in Version 6.0.6278.2

What's New in Version 6.0.6278.1

Presenting at the keynote with Alison Watson at the Worldwide Partner Conference

AEM wizard never finishes in OpsMgr R2

New OpsMgr Cross Plat & Interop Forums

Operations Manager R2 Totally Unleashed !

Office Communications Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 Is Now Released !

SCCM Planning for Dummys Part 1!

(OpsMgr07) Do Management Server Hotfixes Apply to Gateway Servers?

Problems with Dell Management Pack That Are Addressed in New Release

Churchill War
Rooms Website

Microsoft System
Center Website

Extended Windows Server OS
Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack.

Extended ADMP
Extended Windows Server Operating System Management Pack.