David Allen - OpsMgr MVP

System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 RC Released

David Allen MVP — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:04:00 GMT

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM) is a comprehensive management solution for the virtualized data center, enabling increased physical server utilization, centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure, and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by the administrator, delegated administrator, and authorized end users. The following significant new features are included in VMM 2008 R2 Release Candidate:

Windows Server 2008 R2 RC Hyper-V host management
Enhanced migration including Live and SAN migration in and out of clusters
Multiple VMs per LUN using Clustered share volumes
Hot add of VM storage
Quick Storage Migration and much more!

Available now on Connect. http://connect.microsoft.com

Creating DPM PowerShell Tasks in Operations Manager

Articles - Podcasts powered by Odiogo — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Performing general administrative DPM tasks can be quite time consuming so why not get Operations Manager to do them for you. As with most new products coming out of Microsoft, any administrative task (and generally a lot more) can be scripted in PowerShell which can allow for tasks to be easily actioned remotely and much more efficiently. Taking this one step futher though, you can create tasks and rules in Operations Manager that use these scripts to give you one central point of administration.

As an example I will use the PowerShell script written by Kapil Malhotra which automatically grows your replica and shadow copy volume sizes (http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2007/07/10/cli-grow-your-replica-and-shadow-copy-volume-sizes-automatically.aspx). Basically this script will grow the replica volume by 5GB if it has breached a threshold of 500MB and grow the shadow copy volume by 5GB if it has breached a threshold of 1GB. Now, you can simply run this script on your DPM server to prevent the risk of not protecting your data but this still can be quite an administrative overhead to manage. This is particularly true if you have multiple DPM servers, the number of DPM servers in your environment is likely to grow and if you want to make a change to the script that applies to all the servers. This is where Operations Manager comes in.

With Operations Manager up and running with agents deployed to all DPM servers and with the latest Data Protection Manager management pack installed, all your DPM servers should be discovered. And, all the discovered DPM servers will be objects in the DPM Server class which can be used to target rules and tasks at. With that in mind, I'll finally get to how to create a DPM task in Operations Manager.

First of all, this is all based on Operations Manager 2007 R2. With some changes you can make this work on Operations Manager SP1 but that is not covered here.

1. Build the PowerShell script to perform the DPM task you require. In this case, as stated above, I am using a pre-written PS script from the MS Ctrl-P blog which you can download here.

2. Add these two lines to the top of the script. The first line enables Operations Manager to pass the DPM server name to the script and the second line loads the DPM PowerShell snapin.

3. Remove the line $dpmservername = &"hostname". Click here for the download of the ammended script.

4. Open the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Authoring Console. Click File, New..., select Empty Management Pack and enter a Management Pack Identity (I have used DPMTask). Click Next.

5. Enter a Management Pack display name and optional description, then click Create.

6. Once the MP has been created, click File, Management Pack Properties. In the Properties window that opens, select the References tab, the click Add Reference.... Navigate to and select the DPM management pack file (Microsoft.Windows.SystemCenterDPM). Click OK when the reference has been successfully added as the image below.

7. Select the Health Model pane, expand Tasks in the Health Model tree and select Agent Tasks.

8. Right click in the Agent Tasks pane on the right and select New, Custom Task.... Enter a unique identifier for the new task and click OK (I have used DPMTask.AutoGrow).

9. When the task window opens, enter a display name and select the target Microsoft.Windows.SystemCenterDPM.DPMServer.

10. Click on the Configuration tab and click the link, Browse for a type.... Select the Microsoft.Windows.PowerShellWriteAction and enter a module ID. Click OK.

11. Now back on the Configuration tab, click Edit....

Between the ScriptName tags, enter a name for the script (autogrow.ps1).
- <ScriptName>autogrow.ps1</ScriptName>
Between the ScriptBody tags, paste in the PowerShell script.
- <ScriptBody>powershell script</ScriptBody>
After the </ScriptBody> task, enter the following:
- <Parameters>
- <Parameter>
- <Name>DPMServer</Name>
- <Value></Value>
- </Parameter>
- </Parameters>
Between the TimeoutSeconds tags, enter a larger value like 6000.
- <TimeoutSeconds>6000</TimeoutSeconds>

Save the file and close.

12. Click the Value field next the >>Value parameter and select (Host=WindowsServer), Principal Name (Windows Computer).

This is done to make sure the correct DPM server name is passed so the script runs on the selected server.

13. Click OK.

That's it done, the DPM task has been created. Now you can either save the new management pack and import it into Operations Manager or you can select Tools, Export MP to Management Group... from within the Authoring Console.

Once imported, select the Monitoring pane and expand Data Protection Manager 2007. Click the DPM Server State view and select one of the DPM servers and in the Actions pane you will see your new Auto Grow task.

Click Auto Grow and run task. Once the task has completed it will output the results.

How awesome is that ?!?!

I know this migh look a bit long winded but when you do it once, you will will see that it is actually quite simple.

Enjoy.

David ...
Click here to play

QFE Required for Windows Server 2008 Cluster Support - Released

David Allen MVP — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:53:28 GMT

Overview
This QFE addresses the issues that caused problems detecting Exchange clusters and the other WMI issues that were experienced when using the latest Cluster MP which was released back in April.

Cause
"Private properties on a cluster resource, group, or any other cluster object can be queried and set by using multiple methods. This includes the Cluster API and the Cluster WMI provider. Creating a private property on a cluster object by using the Cluster API does not have restrictions on the characters in the name. However, when you create a private property name that contains any unsupported characters on the object, any attempts to query the Cluster WMI provider fail."

Hot fix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/958807

MP Catalogue: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/cc539535.aspx

Looking at OpsMgr R2 - Managing X-Plat

David Allen MVP — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:45:00 GMT

Another great new feature in OpsMgr R2 is the ability to manage Unix, Linux, HP UX and IBM AIX servers. What is paricularly great about this feature is that once a X-Plat server has been discovered it is available as an object within OpsMgr as a Windows server is which enables you to add X-Plat servers to your existing distributed applications.

In OpsMgr SP1 you could have downloaded the X-Plat Extensions Beta to monitor X-Plat but this required a seperate discovery and agent installation method. Within R2, you can now discover X-Plat servers as easily as you discover Windows servers. Here are a small video to give you a taster for how easy this is.

http://wmug.co.uk/media/p/1825.aspx

As stated above, once X-Plat servers have been discovered you can manage them just as you would a Windows server. Objects will be created for the server, processor, logical disk etc etc which you can add to your distributed applications to enable you to monitor all components of your service.

And moving forward you can create new monitors, rules and tasks etc just as you would for Windows providing you have some knowledge of the X-Plat product you are working with as all management pack objects are stored in XML management packs just as with Windows.

If you have X-Plat in your environment, I strongly recommend you give Operations Manager 2007 R2 a go.

Here are the non-Windows operating systems currently supported in OpsMgr R2 RTM:

HP-UX 11i v2 and v3 (PA-RISC and IA64)

Sun Solaris 8 and 9 (SPARC) and Solaris 10 (SPARC and x86)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (x86) and 5 (x86/x64) Server

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (x64) Server

Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86) and 10 SP1 (x86/x64)

Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x64)

IBM AIX 5L V5.3 and V6.1 (PowerPC)

OpsMgr R2 Deployment & Upgrade

David Allen MVP — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:43:42 GMT

If you want to know the supported upgrade paths to Operations Manager R2, check out this blog post by Rob Kuehfus. It confirms the biggest question I am being asked at the moment and that is whether you can upgrade from R2 Eval to R2 Select; yes you can.

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/05/29/what-s-new-in-r2-deployment-and-upgrade.aspx

High Memory Usage by VDS.exe on DPM Server

Articles - Podcasts powered by Odiogo — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Is VDS.exe eating loads of memory on your DPM servers? If so, the first thing you should do is apply MS hotfix 958387. This hotfix resolves a memory leak in the Virtual Disk Service which should clear the problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958387

David ...
Click here to play

DPM High CPU Usage

Articles - Podcasts powered by Odiogo — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:24:00 GMT

Visiting a number of customers recently I have noticed that many were experiencing abnormally high CPU usage on their DPM servers. All the servers were well spec'd and easily had the resources to deal with the load put on them, but still there was extremely high CPU usage being experienced. It was particularly bad when performing any kind of administration using the DPM console on the affected server.

After performing a number of investigative tasks which didn't help me diagnose the problem, I found that SQL was patched to SP2 on the servers experiencing this issue. As I had very little else to try I applied SP3 to SQL and after a reboot, the server was running like a charm. I then advised my other customers to try this and it has worked in resolving their high CPU usage in every case.

So bottom line, apply SP3 to your DPM SQL installation, it will potentially save you a lot of head scratching.

David ...
Click here to play

WMUG EVENT - 18/06/09 - Cardinal Place, London

David Allen MVP — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:35:02 GMT

I am delighted to be able to announce our next meeting on Thursday 18th June at Microsoft’s office in Cardinal Place London where this time we'll be kicking off with an in-depth look at Windows 7, courtesy of Viral Tarpara and Andrew Driver from Microsoft.

After some refreshments, Johan Arwidmark (a fellow MVP) will be presenting highlights from three of his ConfigMgr / MDT sessions from this year’s MMS.

Coupled with SWAG give always, networking opportunities, etc. this promises to be a great evening and best of all everything is FREE.

To register simply use the following links so we know how many are coming so everyone gets fed and watered:

http://www.wmug.eventbrite.com/

Look forward to seeing you there.

Fwd: New MS Forums for OpsMgr

David Allen MVP — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:20:57 GMT

Check out the all new forums for Operations Manager at Microsoft where you'll be able to trade knowledge with OpsMgr customers, MVPs, other experts and the MS product team.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

Get posting there now as the old NNTP based newsgroup will be stopped in the near future.

Operations Manager 2007 R2 goes RTM

David Allen MVP — Sat, 23 May 2009 23:20:56 GMT

I know most of you are probably already aware that System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is now available for download but just in case you missed it, here's the download link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=93ddf25b-1ef0-4851-81b0-5fb9a2f76181#tm

And, here's is a quick overview:

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 delivers end-to-end service management of applications and IT services running across your datacenter fabric, providing you greater and control and insight into the health and performance your Microsoft, UNIX and Linux servers, and the workloads running on them. With Operations Manager 2007 R2 you can reduce the cost of managing your datacenter, and assure delivery of IT services to expected and agreed levels.

Feature Bullet Summary:

End-to-End Datacenter Service Management: System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 helps improve datacenter service performance by improving resolution time through best practice driven alerting, service level monitoring, and reporting.
Best of Breed for Windows and Beyond: Extending low cost Windows management to the complete datacenter environment, Operations Manager 2007 R2 provides a single pane of glass across operating systems, hypervisors, network, storage, and Microsoft, UNIX and Linux applications.
Increased Efficiency and Control: With automation of routine and redundant tasks, Operations Manager 2007 R2 provides intelligent monitoring and the ability to automate action to help increase efficiency and enable greater control of your IT environment.

SystemCenterCentral

David Allen MVP — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:47:00 GMT

The site to visit for “Everything System Center” has launched, SystemCenterCentral.com.

SystemCenterCentral.com has been founded by three System Center community members; Pete Zerger, Rory McCaw and Maarten Goet. SystemCenterCentral.com is a community initiative that will combine a number of existing internet properties under a single community site and strive to become the leading community landing page for all System Center technologies.

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

Microsoft and Quest Software are supporting SystemCenterCentral.com as Gold Sponsors and will be active participants in this new online community.

If you are not going to MMS but still want to check out this new System Center community site go to www.systemcentercentral.com now and join!

Local Data Source Protection

Articles - Podcasts powered by Odiogo — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 08:52:05 GMT

Since the release of DPM SP1 it has been possible to perform local data source protection. This means that the DPM server can protect its own file services and virtualization hosting. By default, however, this functionality is not enabled...(read more)

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Release Candidate - Now Available

David Allen MVP — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:44:20 GMT

System Center Operations Manger 2007 R2 Release Candidate is now available on connect!

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Release Candidate

Operations Manager 2007 R2 introduces key new and enhanced functionality, including:

Enhanced application performance and availability across heterogeneous platforms

·         Delivers monitoring across Windows, Linux and Unix servers–all through a single console
·         Extends end to end monitoring of distributed applications to any workload running on Windows, Unix and Linux platforms
·         Maximize availability of virtual workloads with integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008

Improved management of applications in the data center

·         Delivers on the scale requirements of URL monitoring of your business
·         Meet agreed service levels with enhanced reporting showing application performance and availability
·         More efficient problem identification and action to resolve issues

Increased speed of access to information and functionality to drive management

· Faster load times for views and results
· Improved and simplified management pack authoring experience

For those who are evaluating the Beta release, this Release Candidate offers a number of enhancements over the Operations Manager R2 Beta, including:

·         New Power Management MP template (Monitored system must be Windows Server 2008 R2 or Win7)
·         Updated branding across all User Interfaces
·         Improved trace configuration tools on the CD to help support issues escalated to Customer Support (where applicable)
·      Improved Run As Account Distribution Configuration
·      Ability to run inline tasks for non-Microsoft servers
·         Support for upgrade from Beta deployments to the Release Candidate
·         New and updated documentation, including the Usage Guide, Design Guide, Deployment Guide, Upgrade Guide, Security Guide and Operations Guide

In addition to the build, MS are providing the Release Notes as well as other key documentation including:

· Operations Manager 2007 Supported Configurations

· Operations Manager 2007 R2 RC Design Guide

· Operations Manager 2007 R2 RC Deployment Guide

· Reporting Deployment and Usage Troubleshooting

· Operations Manager 2007 R2 RC Upgrade Guide

· Operations Manager 2007 R2 RC Security Guide

· Operations Manager 2007 R2 RC Operations Guide

· Operations Manager 2007 R2 RC Usage Guide

· Operations Manager Management Pack Guide for Operations Manager 2007 R2

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Release Candidate Release Notes

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Release Candidate Documentation

The Service Level Dashboard 2.0 Beta for Operations Manager 2007 R2, available here:

Service Level Dashboard v2 Beta for Operations Manager 2007 R2

Problem with the IIS Modules QFE (957123) for IIS7 Monitoring

David Allen MVP — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:38:00 GMT

If you downloaded this QFE for IIS7 monitoring, you will want to take a look at this post from the Operations Manager team at Microsoft, NOW.

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

The download has now been pulled and will be made available again when sorted.

Dynamically Exclude Page File Drives from being Monitored

David Allen MVP — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

In the world of standard server builds, it is quite common now to have a dedicated drive just for the system page file. Usually this drive is partitioned to be just big enough to store the pagefile which means under normal monitoring it will constantly be in alarm.

Create a new group, give it a name and select a management pack then select Dynamic Members. Click Create/Edit Rules and create the following query: ( Object is Windows Server 2008 Logical Disk AND ( Device ID Equals O: ) AND True ) . Obviously change the object to Windows Server 2000 or 2003 Logical Disk as required and change the value of the device ID for the relevant drive letter.

Once the query is in place, create the group. To confirm your new group has populated with the correct objects, right click your new group and select View Members.

Hopefully your group will be populated with all your page file logical disk objects which means the group can now be used to override the logical disk free space monitors. Populating the group dynamically also means that as servers are added and removed from your management group, the drive objects in the group will be automatically updated.

As usual, I hope this is helpful.