Join experts Kurt Roggen (MVP) and Mike Resseler (MVP) for the Private Cloud Roadshow.
In this half day you will learn more about private cloud infrastructure setup and how you can monitor this. Learn how to create your private clouds and how to deploy standardized applications or services into these clouds. And as a final session you will learn how you can provide automation in your private cloud.
There are 2 options to attend (same content, different location):
25 April 2012 in Brussels
26 April 2012 in Ghent
![clip_image003[1]](http://scug.be/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/mike/clip_5F00_image0031_5F00_34FFEE75.jpg "clip_image003[1]")
This TechNet event is free of charge and Microsoft will be giving away one Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone in each location.
Detailed agenda:
13:00 : 13:30 Welcome & Coffee
13:30 : 14:30 Building your Private Cloud Infrastructure
Learn how to build your Private Cloud infrastructure, by dealing with Fabric Management (Compute/ Hypervisors, Storage, Network), which will serve as the basis for the Private Cloud that you will be creating. We will discuss how to deploy, configure and manage each of these different elements in your datacenter.
14:30 : 14:50 Break
14:50 : 16:30 Creating, Monitoring & Operating your Private Cloud
Learn how to create your private clouds and how to deploy standardized applications or services into these clouds. Learn how to monitor your clouds and how to can handle change requests. All this key area's will be addressed to give you an idea of what is happening in a private cloud after it is up, running, and into production.
16:30 : 16:50 Break
16:50 : 18:00 Automating & Delivering Services in your Private Cloud
Learn how you can provide automation in your private cloud. Discover also how your cloud services can be offered and consumed using different self-service portals and what their differences are.
18:00 : 19:00 Networking & Drinks
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to go to the Nokia Lumia event in Belgium. Since I’m always in for a good event I went there on a Friday evening to check out the launch of the Nokia Lumia 800 in Belgium. About the event itself I can be short. Well organized, lot’s of people, great fun, gaming possibilities, a DJ, some food and drinks and a (short) presentation about the Lumia 800. (Is there anybody out there who knows why they always keep the presentations short? 
). At the end of the evening, we received a Nokia Lumia 800 to test-drive on the condition that we blog our experiences about it. Well, this is it.
Disclaimer: First, I’m not working for Microsoft or Nokia. So all my comments here are purely mine and they are not objective. Second, I’m not considered a consumer user when it comes to smartphones. I use my phone to work with. In fact, I’m not even considered a phone person at all. I don’t like to make a phone call and a good phone call takes less then a minute in my opinion. Because of that, you will two sorts of review here. The first part will handle the experience that my wife and kids had with the phone, and the second part will deal with my experience that I had using the phone for work.
Let’s start with part 1. The morning after the event, I inserted the mini-sim card that we got during the event (a temporary card with some credit and a small data plan on it) and started the phone for the first time. Instead of setting the device up, I gave it to my wife and see how far she could get with it. My wife has never used a smartphone before. She only uses a smartphone when she needs mine to make a call. And with all my devices I had, she always hated the way she needed to find a contact or type an SMS message. I’ve had an iPhone, Androids and my last one was a WP7 LG. None of them could convince here although the LG WP7 came close because she found that a lot easier to find a contact. But it had other issues that she didn’t like. But still… she has a small Nokia phone, that cost less then 50 euro, that isn’t a smartphone, and she still is quicker with the device then I will ever be with any smartphone. The power of buttons you know…
But back to the setup. I was pretty surprised that she managed to setup the device pretty quickly. No issues, she only had some difficulties in the beginning knowing which button did what but reading the manual sorted that out pretty quickly (Yes ladies and gentleman, there are still people that read manuals ). After that, I gave here some random tasks to see if she could manage without me telling her what to do. And surprisingly she managed to download some apps. She got the device on our wireless network, she synced it with my car system, entered new contacts and succeeded in reading my facebook and twitter feeds (mistake number 1: never give your live-id to the wife for testing ). She also set up some email accounts and some more smaller tasks. But this proved to me that the device is pretty easy to use and straightforward. Yes, she had to look from time to time but overall, an easy to use device. Do I say here that my wife is too stupid to use a smartphone? No I don’t, but I know that when she has to do effort for a phone, the phone has lost the battle…
Second mistake I made was giving the device to my children. They are 4 and 5 years old and big fans of my iPad. I wondered if they find it as easy working on the Nokia then they did on the iPad. Besides the fact that the screen was to small in their opinion (okay, they compared a phone against a tablet so maybe not a fair remark but hey, they are 4 and 5 ) they could manage pretty quickly the device. Taking a picture (that would be mistake 3 now that they know how that works…) playing a game, seeing at the pictures, looking through my feeds (luckily they don’t understand English yet…) and even succeeding to check in on foursquare (that one got me really by surprise…). The downside now is that they want to play with it whenever they see it lying on the table…
So for the first part, the conclusion in my opinion is pretty easy. My wife liked the device (her first smartphone device that she liked) and used it and set it up without any problems. It is easy to use in her opinion, the reception on the car worked very well (trust me, it’s not the car kit that’s good, it really depends on the device attached to it…). Making a call was easy and the quality was good (you’ll hear more about that later) and she actually tried to persuade me to give her the phone so that she could get rid of her old Nokia device. (Nice try, but that didn’t work )
About part 2: As I said in the beginning, I’m not a consumer user. I use my phone to make calls (although they have to be as short as possible), texting, tweeting (business…) and reading emails. Responding to emails only when it really is urgent. But I do like to flag al the messages that I need to address when I’m back behind my computer. So just before the test period, I finally managed to go to the store and changed my Sim card into a mini-sim card.
Now for the test period. I’ve tested the device the last 3 weeks where I only was about 2 or 3 days at home. The rest of the time was divided at being at a conference (in my home country but still stayed at hotel), in Munich (Germany) teaching a class and in Seattle (attending the MVP summit). So this means that the phone was tested in different countries, in airports and with little access to 3G. And since my boss won’t like it that I use my 3G in a foreign country (the price is a bit high for that ) I think I have a good test base to see what it is capable off.
Let’s start with the first conference, the one in my home country. Since I had 3G over there, I didn’t really had issues. The phone simply works. Even in a room with 1400+ techies (which means 1400+ smartphones and 1400+ 3G connections on a very small place ) the 3G worked and I was able to phone, text and whatever I need to do. I could access the wireless, get my email messages and so on. No problems detected.
The second part of my journey was to go to Munich to deliver a training. This also means that 3G suddenly has finished working. Now I need to rely on Wireless to get my phone synced with emails and all the other stuff. First the good news. Just by the fact that my email doesn’t get synched anymore automatically and Bluetooth has turned off (I don’t need that when flying / cab / hotel…) the battery life gets stretched hugely. 2 days with my phone was not a problem, even when I was searching for a free Wi-Fi all the time. When you are travelling a lot, the more battery life you can get, the better. Sometimes you just forgot to charge it at night and then this can come in handy. Second was the Wi-Fi. I downloaded an app that put the Wi-Fi icon on my home screen and that proved a killer app. Open the Wi-Fi, see for an open network and off we went. And again, it just works. No technical issues and so on. Oh yeah, and the range was impressive. We noticed (did some comparison with other smartphones such as WP7 phones (non-Nokia), Androids and iPhones) and there was only one Android phone that almost had the same strength in signal or even found the same Wi-Fi networks that I did. So the antenna or whatever is inside the Nokia does a great job.
Last part of my trip was Seattle. This means a different time-zone, no 3G of course and one hell of a week for guys like me… Few things that are important here: Finding Wi-Fi, automatic time-zone change. Good call quality to phone the kids, possibility to text message (calling your boss in the same foreign country is just not a smart idea because of the double foreign cost…).
Again, the phone didn’t let me down. It did everything I need to do without any issue. I found my Wi-Fi's easily (oh yeah, Europe can learn something from the free Wi-Fi hotspots in the US…) the time-zone changed including my calendar that adapted itself (sounds stupid but I saw differently…). I was able to get my emails (over the Wi-Fi of course) send text messages and so on…
Conclusion:
For me, with what I need from a device, this is the companion I need for my work. I’ve had phones that didn’t come close and some that I considered doable. But this one does what it needs to do for me. Making calls (does it really surprise somebody that I need the best quality for this “feature” ), doing text messaging and so on. If I have only one complaint that is the maximum level of sound on the device. When I was in a bar in the evenings (still doing business 
) I didn’t always hear my phone ring. (If somebody knows if this can changed…).
The battery life is pretty good if you take the effort to turn off features that you can’t use in a foreign country anyway. I even succeeded in three days but I had to admin that were 3 days of low usage off the phone.
Getting onto networks proved pretty easy. We even had fun with an iPhone user that didn’t succeed in getting onto a Wi-Fi network while I was already downloading mails and stuff… (Yeah, sometimes laughing with an iPhone can make my day ).
From a consumer vision, I probably can see that the phone misses some features. But in all honesty… if you are looking for a phone for business purposes… you really need to give this device a try.
Cheers,
Mike
It took me a couple of weeks before
Yesterday I was at the Microsoft Belux offices to view the keynote of the Build conference. Build is the conference that replaced the PDC conference of the last years.
Because Microsoft was going to reveil more information about the new Operating System (code-named Windows 8) at Build, and because Microsoft succeeded in not releasing a lot of information in advance, the keynote was a must see. Even the agenda and speaker list was not known until yesterday after the keynote.
There were already a lot of rumours about the new Operating System that Microsoft is going to release (date not yet known aswel but rumours say it could be april 2012) but not much was confirmed.
Many watchers, bloggers and MVP's stated that Microsoft had to create at least an iPad clone to make sure that they stayed relevant in today's IT world. I never agreed with that statement as I still don't believe that the traditional PC (desktop/laptop) will be replaced soon by a tablet or similar. I do however believe that the way we compute is drastically changing. The keyboard and the mouse are still very important, but touch navigation is gaining a lot of importance and devices that are "on" the moment you press the button are also becoming more and more important.
By not releasing much information and making the whole conference bading into some secrecy many persons hopes were high. When the day of the keynote came closer, I thought for a second that we were getting as much excitement as for an Apple conference :-)
After yesterday's keynote, I'm assured that Microsoft has answers to their competetors and their devices. And even more. I figured they were not going to create an iOS clone. They have released windows phone 7 a while ago that is a direct competitor for android and iOS devices but they didn't clone it. Instead, they had the 'guts' to innovate. I know, the story of the windows phone 7 isn't a real success for the moment, but I'm pretty sure that it will be in the near future. For their new OS, they again had the 'guts' to innovate. They completely redesigned the UI and made it (at first sight, and after a few hours of playing) a whole new experience.
I'm not going to go into the details of all the new features here, there are many blogs out there that have already done this. But after playing around a bit with the new OS, after seeing it demoed yesterday, after learning some of the new names ("charms" anyone :-)) and viewing different aspects of the new UI and after reading and seeing the big buzz on the internet I think Microsoft has succeeded in its first achievements.
- Put themselves back on the map as an innovative company
- Prove that they can build something where people look at and say "Hey, that's cool"
- Make the entire world wanting the release version of an OS asap
- Give hardware vendors a sweet. (Imagine how many touch based tablets / laptops / hybrids are going to appear)
- Get Developpers enthousiast about new technology and still make sure that the 'old' technology is supported (yes, silverlight is not dead (yet))
- And they didn't forget about the keyboard and mouse users in this "touch" world.
Does this mean that I think that Microsoft has just invented the best of the best? Nope, it is way to early to make such a statements and I'm pretty sure that after a few days or weeks we will see posts and comments about stuff that people don't like. But that is not relevant for the moment. What counts is that our user experience is going to change a lot in the near future.
The last thing they need to do now is to make sure that it is a fast, reliable Operating System. But that's something we'll see in the future. On the other hand, bugs and issues never stopped the iPad from becoming an extreme popular device :-)
Remember the date: 13/09/2011, because that is the date that Microsoft announced a new era in the computing business and made itself relevant, sexy and cool... once more.
Cheers,
Mike
Microsoft Belux has recently released the “Do you have IT in your DNA” campaign.
Now it is time to play the game!
There is not much you need to do for playing the game…
- Register for the MSDN or Technet Newsletter (Dutch or French) (This will increase your changes to crack the code…)
- Play the game: : www.itinyourdna.Be , www.itinjouwdna.be , www.itdansvotreadn.be
- Share it with your friends and colleagues…
And who knows… You might be winning a great prize.
There are cool prices to win…
5 Microsoft Windows Phone 7 devices
5 Mini Laptops
10 entrance tickets for Microsoft TechDays
10 Microsoft Windows 7 Licenses
10 FNAC coupons with a value of 50 euro
250 books
10 times 2 movie theater tickets.
So join the fun and play @ www.itinyourdna.Be , www.itinjouwdna.be , www.itdansvotreadn.be
Enjoy!
Mike
Microsoft just launched their cloud campaign. If you want to know all about the myths of cloud computing, then make sure you check out following pages:
French landing page: http://technet.microsoft.com/fr-be/ff934854.aspx
Dutch landing page: http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-be/ff934854.aspx
Some myths that are discussed: Job loss, Role of IT changes, Integration, Data control and so on…
Get the facts you need…
Enjoy
Cheers,
Mike
There is a new SCVMM 2008 Hotfix Rollup Package available. Date is 14 September 2010 and it should solve following issues:
Issue 1
Duplicate virtual machines (VMs) may appear in the SCVMM Administrator Console window after a Hyper-V VM in a cluster fails over to another cluster node. Additionally, the status for one of the duplicate VMs is set to
Missing. If you try to remove the missing VM from the SCVMM Administrator Console window, the VM is not removed.
Issue 2
Consider the following scenario:
- You install the Hyper-V role on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2.
- You configure the computer to start from a virtual hard disk.
- The computer is part of a Hyper-V failover cluster. The cluster is configured to use cluster shared volumes.
- You try to create a VM on a cluster shared volume by using SCVMM 2008 R2.
In this scenario, the operation fails together with the 2912 (0x8004232C) error code.
Issue 3
The Virtual Machine Manager service (Vmmservice.exe) crashes if the following conditions are true:
- System Center Operations Manager 2007 integration is enabled.
- A Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) feature-enabled management pack is imported into Operations Manager.
- The PRO settings for a host group are changed on the SCVMM server.
More information: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2308590
Cheers,
Mike
One of my colleagues sent me this interesting KB article that includes all the recommended hotfixes for Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.
Last update is from a few days ago (8-09-10 :-)) so for all of you out there with VMM 2008 R2 running, check it out.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2397711
Cheers,
Mike
Attention all Belgian IT pro, Architects and decision makers…
Microsoft Belux is organizing a whole day event about the cloud.
There will be two tracks, 1 technical / IT Pro track and 1 architect / Decision Maker track.
If you want to know everything about Exchange online, BPOS, System Center Self Service Portal V2, Private Cloud Infrastructure, Windows Azure and SQL azure then this is something for you.
Date: 27 september 2010 in Affligem.
Speakers are Bart Vande Ghinste, Eduardo Kassner, Ilse Van Criekinge, Nigel Cain, Kurt Claeys and Arlindo Alves.
More information: http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-be/ff955852.aspx
Enjoy
Mike
Hey All,
Last week the System Center Essentials 2010 Resource Kit has been published for download. You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=32b2872a-a31d-4db1-abe8-018d91bf3942&displaylang=en
So I downloaded the x64 edition and installed it on my management server.
The installation is pretty straightforward:
After the installation, a new item is created in the start menu called system center essentials 2010 resource kit readme.
So here is what you can expect from the resource kit:
Computer Group Repair Tool
This tool will identify and repair broken relationships between SCE computer groups and WSUS computer groups.
The executable to run is LinkDG.exe and can be found under %programfiles%\System Center Essentials (note: CMD run as administrator!)
Essentials Server Cleanup Tool
When you need to cleanup an old installation after a failure or whatever the reason would be, it used to be pretty annoying to clean-up all ‘leftovers’ of SCE. With this tool, all leftovers will be removed automatically.
%programfiles%\System Center Essentials Resource Kit and SCECleanUp.exe is the tool you can use
Essentials Server Migration Advisor
This tool will help you in migration your essentials install to another server or recover an essentials server from a backup. Note that the location of the tool is not in the readme file (forgotten?) but you can find it under the %programfiles%\System Center Essentials directory and it is called MigrationAdvisor.exe
Maintenance Mode Management Pack
This tool will make it easy for you to create maintenance mode schedules. This can be extremely handy when you restart servers during the weekend or nights for whatever reason.
The name is ScheduleMaintenanceMode.exe and can be found under the %programfiles%\System Center Essentials location.
Published Software Certificate Update Tool
This is a nice one. This tool will remove the existing publishing certificate and recreate the rules for all managed computers. It will also resign all locally published content with this new certificate.
Since I upgraded from SCE 2007 to SCE 2010, and I needed to recreate all my packages that were build in SCE 2007 because they were signed with the old certificate, from before the upgrade, this is the tool I could use immediately.
Find it under %programfiles%\System Center Essentials and UpdatePublisherCert.exe
The first time I had an error
The error stated 2147942403 which I had no idea what it could mean. After some research I found out that in the Essentials console I still had a reference to a package that was already deleted from disk. After removing that one, I succeeded in the job
Setup Log Parser
this tool will provide you with an easier to read format for the installation log files of SCE.
You can find it under %programfiles%\System Center Essentials and SetupLogParser.exe
Enjoy,
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Vacation is started, sun is shining, and everybody is thinking, going or being on holiday.
We take it a little bit more slowly and start thinking about the next few months. For this very reason, Microsoft is releasing a Summer Campaign that can get you up-to-date with the newest trends and technologies.
Below you can find the first topics:
MSDN: Visual Studio 2010 (NL – FR)
Technet: Cloud Computing Strategy (NL – FR)
Architects: Microsoft Cloud Continuum (EN)
On this pages, you can find a lot of information to get you up-to-date with the latest technologies and trends in IT. The information will prepare you for the future.
What I think is pretty cool is that they have divided the information in 3 different levels:
- I only have half an hour of spare time
- I have half a day
- I have a full day
So no matter how much free time you can spend during your holidays, you still will be able to get the information you need.
This will be handy for all the people with summers that are booked full with activities (such as myself :-))
Enjoy the information
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
After a rather long upgrade, a disaster OS upgrade, an easy prerequisites flow and an almost flawless SCE upgrade in the end, I’m happy to say that everything is running again. Next stop will be the upgrade of all the agents, but if I have issues there, I will post them separately.
Before I end this post series, I would like to give my conclusion:
1. Make sure you are prepared. Upgrading an Windows Server 2003 R2 64-bit physical server to Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit wasn’t that easy after all. Even taking everything in consideration, doing the assessments etc… seemed not to reveal possible issues. So be aware and make sure that you have a very good, tested, backup of your server.
2. Never upgrade your OS to 2008 when it is still 2003 server on it. I made the mistake by thinking that I had to do that just because otherwise I couldn’t install the virtualization component. I learned afterwards that you can add that as a separate component. By the way, Microsoft, I also didn’t read that on your upgrade technet page, which can be better anyway because there is not much to find there ;-)
3. Don’t forget to change the config file otherwise you will have issues when he validates your reporting services.
So, if I ever need to do an upgrade again, I will keep my workflow from post two but adapt it so that the upgrade process of SCE 2010 comes first, then the OS upgrade and finally the Virtualization component installation. This will give me much less issues. Second thing I have learned, when your OS upgrade fails, and windows detects it, you can do a rollback to the original state which is pretty cool. And by the way, it actually works because we had to do that 2 times (not that you have a choice at that moment but hey… who’s complaining).
If you only consider the SCE upgrade, you can say that the team did a good job (well at least at first sight) and that I only had one small problem which it told me during the installation wizard so I can’t complain there.
The next post or posts will be about possible issues that I have encountered and the solutions (hopefully) for them. So if I am lucky, I won’t be posting anymore :-) And otherwise
Till then
Cheers,
Mike Resseler
Hey All,
Part 3, the actual upgrade. After a lot of issues with the OS upgrade and the easy part for the prerequisites and “pre-jobs” it is time for the real upgrade.
Before I describe the attempt that actually worked, I should mention that I had also an issue. During the installation wizard, I got this error:
Unable to use HTTP site from the http://servername:80/Reportserver_instancename Internet Information Services (IIS) node. Please select HTTPS binding
This was easily fixed, I had to change the following line in the rsreportserver.config to Value=”0” coming from value=2
I already started to feat that this would become the same as an OS upgrade, but after that, everything went fine, so here is the installation procedure.
Start SetupSCE.exe (for your information, and because of bad experience, I opened a command prompt as administrator and ran SetupSCE.exe from there…)
Choose Install and make sure that you choose Download the latest updates to System Center Essentials 2010 during setup. I advice this because the customer I did this for downloaded the RTM version a day after it appeared on their volume license site and yet it already downloaded an update
So next window says it has detected an existing SCE installation and asked if it wanted to upgrade. Yep, that’s the idea so let’s go for it
Next screen the username, organizaton and serial key.
The Microsoft license agreement. I accept (do we ever have a choice :-))
The installer is now checking for the prerequisites
Now the system wants to know on which database it needs to be installed. It shows me actually two database instances on that server which is normal since I have my running 2005 environment for SCE 2007 and installed an 2008 instance for the upgrade. You can also that the 2005 instance can’t be chosen so I need to work with the 2008 instance. (Not that I ever was planning on trying out the 2005 instance in a production environment but in a test environment I probably would be tempted :-))
Next up, select the reporting instance. Selected the new reporting instance that I installed earlier on so that’s also ok. When you press Next he will start validating that and here I got the error I described above and I think it is rather good that the essentials setup checks already here for possible issues.
The setup asks me for the management account credentials. Since I already have a management account in 2007, I need to use the same one. So remember that if you have forgotten your password :-)
And finally you get the configuration overview and then you can start the installation. Note that you can make changes to your decisions on this page.
Here he is started.
Some time later (it was pretty fast, but takes more time then a new installation as he has to copy the databases from the SQL 2005 to the SQL 2008 instance and so on)
So, I left the checkbox on to open the console to see if everything was running and that seemed no problem.
Next step: Install the virtualization component
So I started the SetupSCE.exe again (yep, again from the command prompt) and choose Install again. Then the next page popped up
So here I choose Add a component
The system shows me Virtualization and Reporting. I already installed reporting so that’s grayed out but I can install the Virtualization Management
No choosing for an instance this time, and also check that it requires 7 GB which is quite a lot
Here he is asking me for the location where (in the future) the templates should be installed. So I choose a directory on a volume and went Next
Review time and install
Finished.
Opened the console and yep, everything running.
The last thing I did was reran over all the prerequisites I had done and changed them again. I re-enabled the subscriptions but did not imported the management packs again but that is for another post.
Next step: My conclusion
Cheers,
Mike Resseler
Hey All, after part 1, here is part 2.
So in the last part, I finally got a working SCE 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2. I know this has nothing to do with System Center Essentials, but it learned me something very valuable. First upgrade SCE 2007 to SCE 2010, and then do the upgrade to windows server 2008 R2 :-). But anyway, I got through and now I looked at all the things I needed to do before starting the upgrade from SCE 2007 to SCE 2010
So here is the flow I’ve used (this includes hw and sw compatibility checks but as said, the flow will need to change for the next time)
Removing incompatible management packs
I removed the the Windows Vista Management pack (Microsoft.Windows.Client.Vista.MP) and checked if KB960569 was applicable for me.
Take backups
Then I opened the SQL 2005 management studio and took backups of the following databases:
- OperationsManager
- OperationsManagerDW
- SUSDB
Backups of the certificates
According to the technet documentation, I also had to take backups from the certificates so I did:
From technet:
· To back up the WSUS code signing certificate, on the taskbar, click Start, and then click Run.
· In the Run dialog box, type mmc, and then click OK.
· In the Console1 window, click File, and then click Add or Remove Snap-ins.
· In the Add or Remove Snap-ins dialog box, click Certificates, and then click Add.
· In the Certificates snap-in dialog box, select Computer account, and then click Next.
· In the Select Computer dialog box, make sure that Local computer: (the computer this console is running on) is selected, and then click Finish.
· In the Add or Remove Snap-ins dialog box, click Close.
· Expand Certificates (Local Computer), expand WSUS, and then click Certificates.
· Right-click WSUS Publishers Self-signed, point to All Tasks, and click Export.
· Complete the Certificate Export Wizard, choosing the option to export the private key, and then save the exported file to a safe location.
· To back up the Certificates folder, go to the System Center Essentials 2007 installation folder (usually C:\Program Files\System Center Essentials 2007) and copy the Certificates folder to a safe location.
Disable subscriptions
I’m not sure why this is necessary, but considering the fact that I already had some serious problems with the upgrade process of the OS, I decided not to take any risk.
I went to the administration node in the Essentials console and disabled all subscriptions.
Last but not least: SQL 2008 WITH SP1
The previous essentials is running on SQL 2005 so I needed to install SQL 2008 with SP1 before I could start the installation. Please note that this is not necessary when you are running SQL 2005 express edition. Then the installer will create an SQL 2008 express edition instance himself.
So I installed SQL 2008 SP1, again according to the Technet article with only the database engine and reporting engine.
So, in the next post, I’ll be doing the actual upgrade.
Now, this part was already much easier :-)
Cheers,
Mike Resseler
Hey All,
The last weeks I had to work on an upgrade from SCE 2007 to SCE 2010. I had a lot of issues with it so I wanted to give them here so that you can avoid them if you need to do that
The situation
SCE 2007 is installed on a windows server 2003 R2 x64 physical box. Because we wanted to use also the VMM part of SCE, we needed to upgrade the server.
So here was the plan I’ve built:
- Do a complete assessment (including MAP) of the server and all the software components. This was not only a SCE box, but also the MDT 2010 box, Lenovo Update box… In other words, a complete management server
- Created the upgrade plan for the server to Windows server 2008 R2
- Created the upgrade plan for SCE 2007 to SCE 2010
On paper, this looked good :-)
After the MAP assessment, we did some firmware upgrades, removed some non compatible software, placed the drivers of the physical server to the latest available, and finally started with the upgrade.
Problem #1:
We started the upgrade, and find out that the Adaptec Storage software needed to be removed…
Huh? We already removed that because we saw that in the MAP assessment. Quick look to Add/Remove programs learned us that it was indeed removed. (Started to doubt about myself here ;-))
After quite some time searching, we discovered that the uninstall left one .dll file in the drivers repository of windows. After manually deleting that driver (actually we renamed it ‘just to be sure’) we could continue with the upgrade.
So we started the upgrade and after the reboot….
Problem #2:
Windows cannot continue because a few drivers are not signed (or something like that). The good thing here is that you can revert if you want, getting back your original system. So after a few tries… one of the colleagues said that he knew a way to fix that. He booted on a winpe cd, went to the c: drive, extracted all the drivers out of a cab file to the windows drivers directory, rebooted, and there you go, everything signed… Well, still don’t know exactly what happened there but hey, I was getting closer to upgrade my SCE.
Problem #3:
SCE console didn’t start anymore. Huh? Let’s check the services and yes, services are not started. Manual start? Nope, stops immediately with errors. So, still no upgrade now because I still needed to do the upgrade pre jobs.
After a long time of searching, I finally found out that doing an inplace upgrade from Server 2003 to Server 2008 with SCE 2007 is actually not supported. Even on the forums I only got answers such as: I reinstalled, recovered etc… Now that wasn’t a plan I liked so I continued to search and suddenly found a clue, where somebody said that there were some dll’s that needed to be “reinstalled” … So here is what I did:
InstallUtil /i Microsoft.Mom.ConfigService.dll
InstallUtil /i Microsoft.Mom.Sdk.ServiceDataLayer.dll
InstallUtil /i Microsoft.Mom.DatabaseWriteModules.dll
InstallUtil /i Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.HealthService.Modules.DataWarehouse.dll
And that worked.
So after a lot of issues, I was ready to do the next step in the plan… Doing the prerequisite tasks… But that’s for next post
Till then
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
First day of MMS is over, it’s now way too early (still suffering from a jetlag after the crazy roadtrip) but I’m very glad I did it because I already saw some great stuff.
Here’s an overview…
Session: Data Warehouse and Reporting in System Center Service Manager 2010
This was an Instructor Led Lab (ILL) which was great to do. In about 1 hour and 15 minutes, we got a nice overview of the data warehouse and reporting capabilities of the product. And I’m not talking about the out-of-the box reports, I’m also talking about creating your own reports through excel or sql report builder. It is clear that they really made a great effort in providing the possibility of creating or customizing your own reports. Very cool.
Session: Conquering the Summit: A Freshmen Orientation
It is my first year here, so I thought this would be a great sessions to see what is happening and what we can do…
The answer: There is way to much and after this session, I even found it more difficult to create my schedule. :-) Luckily for me, I’m here at the summit with some experienced guys and they help me a lot.
Session: : Incident and change management in Service Manager
Again an ILL which failed completely because the virtual images weren’t workable. However, what I did learn was that SCSM is really build to customize it for your needs. Designing a workflow for specific situations isn’t really that hard. It only requires that you have a good workflow in advance :-). I’m not going to discuss a lot about SCSM here, because our fellow SCUG member Kurt can do this much better ;-)
Session: Configuration Manager Dashboard
Heard a lot about it, didn’t see it live in action so I figured, now is my change. I must say, I’m impressed. It’s free, it’s easy and out-of-the box it delivers great reports. If you are using SCCM, just install it and use it. It’s great.
They showed us the configuration manager dashboard for SCCM for internal IT at Microsoft. Pretty impressive figures over there, and great reporting from the dashboard. This is the kind of dashboard that every boss wants from you.
Session: System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 – Advanced Concepts
Another ILL (yep, was very busy yesterday :-)). A little bit disappointed in this one, but that was because I thought the technical level was a bit low. I figured, Advanced Concepts would be more in depth…
Expo and Reception
If you ever want to see 4000 people rush to one booth to get a MyITForum badge (which is an entrance ticket to the MyITForum party) then you have to come to MMS. I didn’t got one (still have a change in some drawing today but what are the changes…) but I couldn’t help looking from a distance and enjoying myself with all those people that were trying to get a badge. It was awesome :-)
The reception itself was good (there was beer… unlimited, just no Belgium beer :-( ) good food and a lot of gadgets to get from the different vendors. (I packed light but I fear I will return heavy :-))
Only downside to yesterday was that it was very difficult to discuss things with the vendors because of the crowd and noise (and maybe also because of the beers :-))
I’m certainly going to stop a few times more over there when it is less crowdy.
Had one great conversation though… Spoke to the authors of the VMM and SCSM documentation. Great people, had interesting stuff to say and are very keen to listen to the users.
Final notes
Buzz of the day, SCE 2010 and DPM 2010 got RTM-ed
And finally check out http://techmet.com/wiki
Till next
Cheers,
Mike
As many of you heard, the ash cloud because of the volcano eruption in Iceland is giving a lot of European travelers to MMS 2010 in Las Vegas problems. Many of us will not make it and others will arrive late.
Thanks to our operations coordinator, I succeeded in finding another flight, but I have to get to Madrid to take that flight. This means that I have a 1600 KM (1050 miles) drive coming up just to get to the airport of Madrid. Luckily, my colleagues Arne Peleman and Kenny Buntinckx (SCCM MVP) will be joining me for the drive. But still, I’m not looking forward to the long drive.
This means that we will be a little more then 48 hours on the road (plain + drive) just to get to Las Vegas. I’ll be a mess when I arrive there.
You might wonder why we are so crazy to do this. Well, the answer is simple… MMS 2010 is THE summit for everyone that has to deal with IT management in all its forms. Whether it is operational, technical, implementation wise or architecting, designing. Also the people who write out the processes are going to have all the information they need over there. All the product teams and MVP’s in the system center suite will be there. It is that moment of the year where we will be discussing the future of management, the newest solutions and the best practices with all the system center specialists from the entire world.
And for that reason, we are doing this crazy trip to Madrid.
And for that reason, it will be terrible that many of the European specialists won’t be there…
So if all goes well, I’ll be Sunday, around midnight Las Vegas time, in my hotel.
So for those who are going to be there… See you then
For those who are not going to make it… I’m really sorry and hope that you can follow as much as possible through webcasts, blogs and so on…
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
In my previous post (link) I described in short what System Center Essentials 2010 is. In this post, we are going to dive a little deeper and compare SCE 2010 with Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager.
While Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager are three different products, with three different consoles, SCE combines them all in one product, one console. But, SCE is built for midsize businesses, meaning that it doesn’t contain all the functionality of it’s three ‘big brothers’. Here’s the comparison
SCE 2010 versus Operations Manager
The table above shows the differences.
- Monitoring of Windows Servers, Clients, Hardware, Software and Services (both)
- The big difference is the way Essentials monitor network devices.
- Management packs with expert knowledge (both)
- As stated previously, Essentials will use the same management packs as Operations Manager so no differences there
- Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) (both)
- Add monitoring wizard (both)
- Reporting (both)
- 1st difference, Essentials doesn’t have a data warehouse. In Operations Manager, you can retrieve data for one year and it works with an operational database and a data warehouse database. Essentials only has one database and contains 40 days of data max.
- Although there are many reports built in in the product, you can’t do authoring. Operations Manager gives you flexibility if you want to create your own reports but essentials doesn’t have that possibility
- Branch Office Monitoring (both)
- As already said, Essentials is a one box solution, so if you are monitoring servers or clients in a branch office, then everything needs to go over the wire, while Operations Manager gives you the flexibility to place gateways, multiple MS servers.
- Role Based Security (only OpsMgr)
- If you want to work with Essentials, you need to be a local admin on the SCE server or a domain admin. End-of-story. Operations Manager gives you the flexibility of working with different roles, where you can give limited access to certain users. SCE doesn’t
- Connector framework (only OpsMgr)
- Operations Manager has a connector framework allowing you to connect the system to other tools (helpdesk systems, other Management Groups…) SCE doesn’t.
- Audit Collection Services (only OpsMgr)
- Operations Manager has something called Audit Collection Services (ACS). With ACS, you have the possibility to do audit tracking on security, and save this to a special database for compliance reasons. SCE doesn’t have this
- Web Console (only OpsMgr)
- Operations Manager gives you a webconsole where you can log on and do almost everything that you can do with the installed console. SCE doesn’t have this. If you want to work with SCE, you need to have access to a console.
- Cross Platform support (only OpsMgr)
- Operations Manager can monitor non-windows environments such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux for example. SCE can’t
SCE 2010 versus Configuration Manager
- Patch Management (Microsoft and Third Party) (both)
- Although the table doesn’t say so, but there is a difference between SCE and SCCM. SCCM has much more flexibility then SCE. But everything that you can deploy as a patch with SCCM can be deployed with SCE.
- Software Distribution (both)
- SCCM is much more flexible and allows you to do advanced packaging. SCE is about deploying MSI and EXE with some parameters but in the end, it is only capable of doing basic software distribution.
- Hardware and Software Inventory (both)
- SCE collects quite a lot but can’t be extended. If you need additional inventory then you can use SCCM that can be extended through the use of MOF files
- Branch office updates and software distribution (both)
- Again, don’t forget that essentials is one box, so software distribution and patches are flying over the wire. Ok, it is using BITS, but still, keep that in mind when choosing a solution. SCCM can work with distribution points remotely
- Operating System Deployment (only ConfigMgr)
- Desired Configuration Management (only ConfigMgr)
- Wake on LAN (only ConfigMgr)
- NAP integration (only ConfigMgr)
SCE 2010 versus Virtual Machine Manager and Hyper-V console
In this table, there is the comparison with Virtual Machine Manager but also with the Hyper-V console
- Templates (Essentials and VMM)
- VM Cloning (Essentials and VMM)
- Candidate Identification (Essentials and VMM)
- Physical to Virtual Conversion (Essentials and VMM)
- Virtual to Virtual Conversion (Essentials and VMM)
- Migration across physical machines (Essentials and VMM)
- Virtualization Reports (Essentials and VMM)
- Monitoring VMs (Essentials and VMM)
- PRO tips (Essentials and VMM)
- Library (Essentials and VMM)
- Provisioning (All three)
- VM Configuration and properties (All three)
- VM State (All three)
- Checkpoints (Snapshots) (All three)
- 64 bit guest OS (All three)
- Hardware Assisted Virtualization (All three)
- Live Thumbnail (All three)
- Synthetic Network Support (All three)
- Import VM (multiple VHD + snapshot (Hyper-V console and VMM)
- Configure advanced network settings (Hyper-V console and VMM)
- Inspect Disk (Hyper-V console and VMM)
- Export VM (Hyper-V console)
- VMWare Management (VMM)
- Self-service console (VMM)
Thoughts
So above is the comparison of SCE with the three tools (OpsMgr, ConfigMgr and Virtual Machine Manager). I don’t want to compare it with the Hyper-V console since this is a management console which is free.
If you have a mid-sized company (meaning around 50 servers or less and 500 desktops or less) you now need to make a decision. Will I go for the SCE solution, that has less features or do I have to go for the full-blown solution with all the three products. The answer to that is (as always) not simple. For each feature that is noted above, you are going to check if you really, really need it. If you really need it, and it is not included in SCE… well then go for the full suite. If you don’t need it, consider SCE for a moment. But what if the company is growing? And what if it outnumbers the 50 servers and 500 desktops. For the new version I don’t know if it will be possible, but with SCE 2007 you could buy an upgrade path to the full solutions, and it costs you nothing extra, meaning that you already paid for SCE and pay additional the price for OpsMgr and ConfigMgr minus the price for SCE. So no loss there. Again, I don’t have information yet about pricing for SCE so I don’t know if they will keep that option.
Now let’s look at a few different features that are not the same in essentials. I will just ask some questions that can help you in deciding. The answer is not to be given by me, but should be taken by the company.
Differences between OpsMgr and SCE 2010
- Network monitoring. Both products don’t have a “great” way to monitor network devices. If you need this, then the solution won’t be to upgrade to Operations Manager but to look at 3rd party add-ons for OpsMgr and SCE.
- Reporting: As said, OpsMgr allows you to author and has a data warehouse. So the questions you need to ask yourself are: Do I really need to author reports or am I happy with the reports (over 60) out of the box? And for how long do I want to keep my data? 1 year, or the maximum of 40 days in SCE. Both questions are crucial for deciding. Do you really want (or obliged to) to keep your performance data for a server for 1 year? Do I really want to retrieve an alert from a year ago?
- Branch office monitoring: This can be a tricky one. How is the connection to your main office? Still using dial-up? SCE might be not a good option. Having a very slow WAN link which is already overused for other things? Maybe SCE not a good option. On the other hand, can I deploy additional OpsMgr roles to that branch office? Do I have a (virtual) server overthere that can do the trick?
- Role based security: Important one! Who needs access to the console? Does it need to be limited for some users? Then SCE is not an option. Do you have just a few admins that all have the same rights? Then nobody cares…
- Connector framework: Are you going to connect your monitoring solution to an external solution? Then SCE is not an option anymore. If you want the alerts (for example) to appear immediately in a helpdesk system then you need to consider Operations Manager (and check that your solution has the possibility to connect). If this is not important, well, another feature gone :-)
- ACS: Do you need to audit your security? And if you’re not having a solution in place then ACS can help you. But then you need OpsMgr. Otherwise, the options remain open.
- Web console: Do you need to be able to view alerts, performance and other items through a webconsole, then you have OpsMgr that does the trick. On the other hand, this mostly means that you also need Role Based Security. If your admins have a console locally installed (We call these consoles the Outlook for Admins) or pushed through RDS or Citrix then they can also access it anywhere. Make sure that you check with your admins whether they really need it or if it is just something “nice” to have.
- Cross Platform Management: Do you need to monitor non-windows environments? Are they supported by the cross-platform agents from OpsMgr? Are there third-party add-ons that can deliver the same functionality? Make sure you know these answers before deciding
Differences between ConfigMgr and SCE 2010
- Patch management: How much do you want to automate in the patch management? If you want to automate the entire patch management process, including installing and rebooting of your servers then SCCM is the way to go. But if you don’t want to do that, and if you are perfectly happy with doing the user patch management almost fully automated (meaning just approve certain updates where you don’t have an Auto-rule for) and the server patch management more manually, then the both products can do the same. (But keep in mind that the way to handle the patch management is quite different in SCCM)
- Hardware and Software inventory: Simple question, what do you want to know from your hardware and software. If you don’t need to know some really really specific items where you need to adjust MOF files or write your own WMI queries, then SCE will do the job. You need to know more, go for SCCM. It all depends how important that data is.
- Branch office updates and software distribution: Check above, think about the connection bandwidth again. Don’t forget that it uses bits and will download its updates during the day when traffic is low but still, this can be crucial for the decision
- Operating System Deployment: Do you need Operating System Deployment? Yes? SCE doesn’t have this. But wait, before you shout SCCM! Do you need zero-touch deployment, meaning don’t touch anything, boot the computer through wake-on-lan or intel vPro or is a light-touch deployment (meaning press F12 in the lightest case) enough? If the LTI choice is enough, then bing MDT 2010 asap. (And put it on the same server as SCE ;-))
- Desired Configuration Management: Do you want DCM? With this you can create baselines (for example: Windows Server 2008 R2, IIS, Powershell enabled, HIT driver version x, Latest patches, AV version x etc…) and do you want a tool that checks if all is OK (you can do the same for your workstations) then go for SCCM. If you are not interested then this is another feature that you don’t need. (By the way, this is a very nice feature, but takes time to deploy, but still very nice feature ;-))
- Wake on Lan: SCCM has it. SCE doesn’t. SCCM can use wake-on-lan for its purposes. If you want this, then go for SCCM, but, first ask you network team if they allow it (you can’t believe how many network people start shooting the moment I drop the words Wake on Lan… Welcome to the real world gentleman. Wake-on-lan is great to have, and not every workstation has Intel vPro. :-))
- NAP integration: SCCM has NAP integration. With the right policies this is a great feature. Imagine that a workstation is denied through NAP and quarantined to a separate Vlan. At that moment, SCCM can be used to automatically push all the requirements. User disabled Anti-Virus? Don’t think so. User doesn’t have the latest patches… You guessed it. If you need this, then SCCM is the tool. If not (because you use NAP but update a quarantined workstation another way) then we loose another feature to choose from :-)
Differences between Virtual Machine Manager and SCE 2010
Before I start, one important statement. I said I’m not going to compare the hyper-v console with SCE 2010, but you do need to keep in mind that some features that can’t be done by SCE but only with Hyper-V require more work. It’s much easier to do this from VMM then by doing it through the Hyper-V console. Why? Well, you need to know on which host the virtual server is residing. But if you have a limited set of hyper-v hosts, then this is still perfectly possible. If you have a lot of hyper-v hosts, then start considering Virtual Machine Manager, but then again, you probably are over the 50 server limit…
- VMWare management: You need to manage also virtual servers running on ESX? Use virtual machine manager. It connects through your Virtual Center and you can do everything which virtual center can.
- Self-service provisioning: This is a fantastic feature if you have people that need to be able to create their own servers or if you want certain people to be able to restart their own servers and follow the boot process. This is quite often used in development environments where the developers have their own environments (and infrastructure guys don’t want to restart every five seconds a server that is blocked by a bad code or wrong formed SQL query) But again, do you need this in your environment?
Conclusion
Before taking a decision about what tool to use, make sure that you look at all the questions. SCE is a very powerful tool that has the advantage of one console, but lacks features compared to its big brothers. It is also a one server solution so flexibility is limited. You can’t separate roles on different servers. If you have doubt if one server is capable of managing 50 servers and 500 desktops, I can guarantee you it doesn’t. Size it well enough and it won’t be a problem. But think about the features, because that should conclude whether you need SCE or the others…
Just my 2 cents,
Cheers
Mike
Hey All,
System Center Essentials 2010 will be released soon, and a few weeks back I had some live meetings about this new product. Since I used and implemented SCE 2007 a few times, I wondered how the product got evolved. SCE 2007 is quite a nice product, but it had its flaws and shortcomings. So in the next few posts, I’m going to try to describe some interesting features about the product.
So let’s start with what System Center Essentials 2010 exactly is and what the requirements are.
SCE 2010 is called a unified solution for midsize businesses.
Unified experience: SCE 2007 was already quite a unified experience. You could manage your software, updates through one console. Create your line-of-business applications through one console. You could monitor your servers and workstations through one console. As said, it had its shortcomings but for 90% of the cases this was enough. I heard many times that you can’t deploy every software with system center essentials. That’s true, but then again, if you can’t deploy it with SCE 2007, then it means that the software will need advanced techniques to be deployed. And the question here is what you are going to do at that moment. Every software vendor that brings his package in MSI can be deployed.
Proactive management: SCE 2007 was the “little brother” of Operations Manager. It allowed you to monitor your environment and do proactive management. It lacks a data warehouse compared to Operations Manager, but if you need that, then you probably need more then SCE.
Increased Efficiency: Working with one console and being able to perform many management tasks from this console is indeed an important asset of this tool. Now with SCE 2010 you also will be able to manage your virtual environment from one console which will make it even more efficient.
First thing learned, they increased the number of servers that can be managed. With SCE 2010 you can manage 50 servers (instead of the 30 from before) and 500 clients.
Second, System Center Essentials will need SQL Server 2008 instead of 2005 from SCE.
This picture represents the architecture overview for SCE 2010. Here you can see very well on what SCE 2010 is built. SCE 2010 is built onto a combination of Operations Manager 2007 and WSUS 3. Now for those who worked with SCE 2007 know that not many management packs were available for SCE 2007 in the catalog, but that it was quite easy to check if a management pack from Operations Manager 2007 SP1 could be used. That is something that many of us did and still do. My first question here would be if this still would be the case or is the management pack library for SCE 2010 going to be maintained better as before. The statement they made is clear: Essentials is using the same management packs as Operations Manager 2007. So that’s a good thing. A very good thing.
Platforms SCE 2010 can be installed:
- Windows Essentials Server
- Windows Server 2003 Standard, Enterprise SP2 or later
- Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise
- Windows Small Business Server 2008 (note: x64 only)
- Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (note: x64 only)
Of course the management console can be installed on remote machines and the database can also be placed on another server (SQL Server 2008 express, workgroup, standard, enterprise SP1 or later)
Also very important to know is that if you want to work with the virtualization part of essentials 2010 you need to install it on Windows Server 2008 or R2 and only on a x64 platform
Managed nodes
What can we manage with essentials 2010
- XP SP2 or later
- Vista Business, Enterprise or Ultimate
- Windows 7 professional or ultimate
- Windows Server 2003 Web, Standard, Enterprise SP2 or later
- Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise
- Windows Essentials Business Server 2008 x64 only
Prerequisites
What is needed to use this software? I’m assuming here that you want the full blown solution, including the virtualization management:
- 2.8 GHz or faster CPU
- 4 GB of RAM
- 20 GB of Disk Space + additional 150 GB for virtualization + 100 GB for the wsus updates if stored locally
- Windows Server 2008 with IIS 6.0 or 7.0 and .NET 3.5 SP1
- .NET Framework 3.0
- Active Directory
- Domain Admin / Group Policy Admin
Now this Group Policy Admin is optional, but I’ve been in situations where I couldn’t create the GPO for SCE 2007. This is quite messy to manage afterwards so I strongly suggest that you have the rights for creating a GPO during the implementation of SCE 2010. SCE works with group policy to pass the correct settings to the clients and it is quite handy that this can be arranged for you.
All on 1 server
SCE 2007 was a one solution server. It doesn’t have the flexibility to spread roles over multiple servers like his big brother. For SCE 2010, this remains the same. Put everything on one box. The only two things that you can separate are the management consoles (remember, only 5 consoles can be used at one time) and the reporting server / databases that can be placed on another server.
That’s it for now, next post: SCE 2010 compared against Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager.
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Today I was with a customer and they told me that the system administrators weren’t able to deploy an agent to a certain workstation. This workstation was just deployed clean with MDT.
The error they got is the following:
The MOM Server could not start the MOMAgentInstaller service on computer <computername> in time
Also, I received error 80070102.
Since I never saw this error, and the logs didn’t really told me a lot, except somewhere in the installation log file that the firewall exceptions couldn't be made.
This was quite strange since I deployed the firewall exceptions through GPO (it is not only for SCE so I used 1 GPO for all firewall exceptions).
So I started surfing on the net for solutions.
Not much info there, but finally I came across a blog post from Kevin Holman
http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2009/01/27/console-based-agent-deployment-troubleshooting-table.aspx
Ok, since this was one isolated case, I could have gone to the user and installed it manually, as many people advised on the internet, but since I’m quite lazy I didn’t feel like it.
According to Kevin, and I quote:
Sometimes – the Windows Firewall service – even if disabled – will have a stuck rule. Run: (netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=”MOM Agent Installer Service”)
So I fired up psexec from my workstation and checked if this could be true. And yes, there was a rule that called Mom Agent Installer Service.
Since the program wasn’t installed, it was not necessary so I used the command to delete the rule.
Tried the remote installation again, and it worked.
Thanks Kevin :-) I didn’t had to leave my chair today
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
It’s Friday (TGIF) and I’m sitting on the train (for quite a long time) heading home after an exiting, but exhausting week. I’ve had some nice successes with my customer and I went to the Techdays 2010 in Belgium. As I am sitting here, I was thinking about a few things that were said on the techdays about System Center, and also what the new products will mean for System Administrators in their day-to-day work. And I realized that many people are having the wrong ideas about the system center suite. So here are my thoughts about some wrong assumptions.
Wrong assumption #1: System Center is a technical solution
Every time I’m talking to IT-pro’s, I basically meet two kind of people: the ones that are convinced about System Center tell me that it can do practically everything. And the ones that are not yet convinced will tell me that it is a great suite, but needs some additional work, and most of them will tell me that they either use it in their environment, or certainly looking at it at a constant base. But this is were tehy all go wrong. We look at it as a great tool that can do great technical things. So what are most people doing? They integrate it as a technical solution, deploy as many management packs, DCM rules, packages or whatever, as possible, and finally deploy all the agents. Oke, we are monitoring everything, deploying everyting, backing up everything… how cool is that.
Yes, it is cool, but we should also look at it from a business perspective, and preferred BEFORE we start to implement this solution. Why? To deploy it as a monitoring tool for services. Or a deployment solution for services or… Think about it. What if you can say to your peers (and I know I am talking now an easy example) that you monitor the email system as a whole. They will like it (and probably ask a monthly report about it). Imagine that you say to your peers that you can use Operations Manager to monitor all your exchange servers, both the virtual and physical ones, your switches, your internet line for sending and receiving emails, your gateway, your anti-virus, your … What will the response be? If you are lucky, they will say ‘Good for you’ and if not they will say ‘I don’t care’ or even worse ‘Did I pay that much money and that’s the only thing you can do with it?’.
Back to the ‘email service’. Peers or managers or directors or whatever title your bosses have will not care what technical magic you are doing. They only care about the fact that their email is working, that it is safe, and that they can’t catch viruses. That’s it. So if you say that you monitor the email service (call it messaging service, sounds even better for them) and can give a report about it, then they will say “Job well done” and you are on the way for buying your next system center product ;-)
Doing it like this, will give you additional benefits. Think about it, the only thing that you need to monitor is the “messaging service”. As long as it runs, no problem. So if you have failover, clustering, DAG, live-migration and who knows what extra protection then you can deliver your 99,99% messaging service availability almost every time. Even if one of the components go down, you get an alert, your SLA is not violated, you fix it with the knowledge in the system, case closed, nobody cared, no time pressure, and no slap on the head because you didn’t meet your SLA’s.
Wrong assumption #2: Opalis takes the ITPro’s work away
A new product is coming to the system center suite. For the moment, still called System Center Opalis (no idea if they going to rebrand it) and it is the talk of the town. Opalis is what they call an ITPA (IT Process Automation) or RBA (Run Book Automation). A few weeks ago, I was telling about Opalis to a colleague and the first thing he said was ‘Damn, something to create automatic ITIL processes, keep it away from me as long as possible’. Wrong assumption. While it can be perfectly used to implement ITIL processes (or Cobit, or MOF) it can also do general maintenance. So he says, it is a ‘scheduler’. Wrong again, true, this can be done by it, but it is also event-driven. ‘So what is it?’ he asked. I explained him, that the purpose of this tool is to create processes in such a way that it takes away as much as possible of the day-to-day work and to automate solutions to problems when it goes wrong. Before I could say more, he drew his gun and shot me down :-). The reason for that? I was talking away his work. He would get fired because he wouldn’t be necessary anymore. And if it wasn’t him, it would be one of his colleagues. Wrong assumption. Although that he was wrong three times, it is quite a clever IT guy. I told him that there still were people necessary to build these processes. And that these processes aren’t always working. Ill explain that a little bit later with an example given by Maarten Goet yesterday at the techdays in Belgium which I found a very good example. Anyway, what Opalis will be doing is:
- Try to solve issues out of its own
- Fill in data (ticketing systems, alerts, …)
- Do day-to-day maintenance out of its own without a user intervening so stopping human errors (and we all know that these most of the time happen when you need to do repetitive work)
- Be faster then humans! Think about it, if you can automate many things, the problem will be much faster resolved then you can as an IT pro. And is that a bad thing? No way, the lesser fires you need to put out, the better.
So what’s the IT Pro is going to do more? Simple. As I said, he is a clever guy, so he can use his time to improve the IT infrastructure and processes. He can use his time to think actively about the requirements of the users, his customers. If he’s lucky, he will even have the change to discuss the future roadmap of the company. And that is exactly what he should do. No, changes are that he won’t be taking the decisions. Hey, he will probably not be in the meeting where the decision is taken. But he will be actively involved in finding a good solution for the business requirements and assist his manager in finding and defending a good solution towards the management. The manager who doesn’t want this is in my opinion not a good manager. And the IT Pro that doesn’t want time to investigate new things on the market, study on business requirements but only wants to fight fires? I still have to meet this guy. And even if he doesn’t get the ability to do these things, it will still mean less evening work, less weekend work, and less stress. Hooray!
Now about that example. Maarten showed us a process where Operations Manager alerted that a certain windows service went down. The process created a ticket in the helpdesk system, changed the alert in Operations Manager, tried to start the service again, and on success updated the alert, the ticket and case closed. Nobody did something except see that there was a new ticket in the helpdesk system. But Maarten created also the path when the service didn’t start again. And then the ticket got escalated. An SMS was sent to an engineer (in the demo a pop-up but you get the picture right :-)) and now it was time for the engineer to troubleshoot why the service doesn’t start anymore. Still, the first step, restart the service was already taken, the ticket already existed, so basically the engineer won at least 15 minutes if not more.
Wrong assumption #3: The suite are stand-alone separate products
The system center suite consists out of x number of applications, and they don’t work together. Difficult one, because it is true, and not true. Yes, you can perfectly setup an infrastructure where all these tools are running next to each other, and where they don’t work together. In fact, I hear that many projects are dealt this way. Why? Probably because it is much cheaper this way, and the project is much faster implemented so you have quicker results. This is (of course) short term thinking, and should be avoided. Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager work perfectly together. Configuration Manager and Operations Manager work perfectly together. And while you are busy, deploy your virtual machines with Configuration Manager, just the same way you are deploying your physical machines. Don’t forget to use the patch management within Configuration Manager and view the failures in Operations Manager. Data Protection Manager and Operations Manager. Check. Data Protection Manager and Virtual Machine Manager. Check. Deploy your different agents with configuration manager. Check. (I can continue for a while but I hope you get the picture.)
The statement is also true, because it was lacking two important things within the suite.
- A central helpdesk system (or service desk, whatever term you are using and don’t get me wrong, I refuse to look down on the “helpdesk”. I invite every engineer, architect or whatever to run a few weeks in an average helpdesk, they will start smoking and drinking after day 3 ;-))
- An automation system
Hey, number 2 is just discussed, and number 1 will be there very soon. Say again that Microsoft has no vision, they just proved you wrong :-)
But for all those guys that like to shoot at Microsoft, it was already possible before. There were connectors to other products that could do the job very fine.
Wrong assumption #4: It is only for technical guys
No, no, three times no. Almost every product within this suite can be organized so well that whoever needs access to whatever data, you can arrange it WITHOUT risking that those persons screw up everything. This takes me back quite a few years where I wanted to delegate the right to create, update and disable (not delete) users within Active Directory to the secretary of Human Resources. Reasons:
- I’m lazy and type to many times a name wrong :-)
- By the time I knew that somebody new started at department x, he was already standing at my desk for a username (don’t you just hate that, but hey, another reason for Configuration Manager and OS Deployment, or MDT if that fits your needs)
- I never had the time (I used to be an excellent fire fighter.) to drop everything and create that user. Not to mention that I always wanted to see paperwork from HR, you never know who tries to fool you :-)
About every colleague I had started to shout that that was about the most stupid idea I could have (And I can assure you, from time to time I really can have stupid ideas ;-)). Why I asked? Answer: Nobody wanted the secretary (there were actually 2) to do something inside the heart of our infrastructure. Now you have to image that Identity Management solutions were or extremely expensive or basically not usable so that was not an option. So I tried to convince them with delegation of rights, tutored the secretaries for 2 hours, and let them use it, closely monitored by the colleagues. After one month, nobody cared anymore, and no one of us needed to create a user anymore. Only if the user needed to be deleted (which I think is bad practice…) we needed to get in action. No more changing AD data because a user had a new address, changed her last name into her married one and so on.
Back to 2010 and system center. Why not delegate certain jobs to other people. Wouldn’t it be great if the helpdesk could use Config Manager to take over desktops. To deploy workstations. (I even have the scenario where the guy from the warehouse accepts the new workstations, takes the attached email sheet received from VendorX (I can’t advertise here right :-)), puts it in SCCM, takes out the computers to a desk, plugs in the cable and magic is happening… 50 new workstations ready to be given to new users. Or what about the SQL team? Give them a limited view in Operations Manager so that they can see their alerts. And how about some managers? Give them reports about the software metering, number of alerts on a monthly base (Imagine this, a manager sees 500 alerts in one month, but no user complaints and more important, he never noticed anything… Meet your new nickname: Speedy Gonzalez). I can probably continue here with hundreds of examples but just think about your own situation in the office. How many times do you need to deliver data or reports or whatever to managers, other IT teams and so on. Give them the rights to look at them their selves. Then they won’t bother you, and you just have some more free time.
Wrong assumption #5: First we implement a project, then we think about System Center.
Yeah, common mistake, but big mistake. Try to convince your co-workers, peers and whoever is involved to think about the management upfront. I promise you, you will gain with it. We actually use sometimes Operations Manager to take away human errors out of our implementations. If it is there, use it. Oh, and never forget Backup before you start a new project. I hate it when they do that and it always costs me way too much time to resolve everything afterwards. First thinking, then touching the keyboard.
Conclusion
Do you agree with me? Some will say no, others will say yes and others will say yes but… And it is normal. You should look at the system center suite as a framework. Don’t just install everything with next next next finish, but think about it before you start. Think about the advantages that you can have if you model the suite to the business needs. You will save valuable time to spent with your family, investigate new stuff or get a go from your boss to be at the techdays next year and come over to the SCUG booth and have a discussion with me :-).
If you have comments about these Friday evening thoughts just shoot. Don’t agree? Fire away. The more people, the more ideas and hey, the better the results. Some of you will probably have even more wrong assumptions about System Center. Will be glad to hear them.
Hoping that you do these things above so that you don’t read this in the weekend ;-) Oh and sorry about my proza, it is friday evening after all, and I really just typed my thoughts :-)
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
The techdays 2010 Belgium are over. After two days of intensive sessions, talks and meeting with great people, it’s back to the day-to-day work again.
So here are my thoughts about the two days (didn’t went to the pre-conference)
Arrived way to early (how come there is always traffic when you are in a hurry, and when you actually count traffic into your travelling time, there is none whatsoever :-)) but started the day with some breakfast and a lot of coffee. Went over to the SCUG booth (of course…). After talking to a lot of people, it was time to start.
It all started with the keynote from Luc Van de Velde, called IT in a Transformative Time, how we can change the game. It was years ago since I saw a keynote that was this good. Yes it contained the traditional “what is Microsoft up to”, “how good Windows 7 is”, “what will bring the future”, … But it also brought an interactive session of three great speakers who gave a great performance on stage, and demonstrated, in a story-telling way, what the future will bring, and what the new tools of Microsoft will give us. I especially liked the part where I could work from my lazy chair at home and still have all the rich tools with me. I’m already dreaming of working this way, with a nice glass of wine next to me. For those who want to view it (and I think you should… http://edge.technet.com/Media/TechDays-2010-Keynote-IT-in-a-transformative-time-how-can-we-change-the-game/
Things I certainly remembered from this session:
- Bitlocker-to-go
- System Center for Azure
- Branch Cache
Next session: Corey Hynes, Managing Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 with Windows PowerShell V2.
This session was all about PowerShell. And about Remote powershell. With a few quick demo’s and some interesting tools, Corey showed us how easy it is to do remote work with PowerShell. To quote him, ‘If you want to mean something the next few years in IT, start knowing PowerShell or IPv6…).
Things I certainly remembered from this session:
- Modules (Import-module, get-module …)
- Troubleshootingpacks (certainly worth to check out, you can troubleshoot remote computers with these things)
- GPO backup with two commands on one line: get-gpo-all | backup-GPO
- Steps to enable remote management (Enable Remote management through GUI (win2k8R2) or PowerShell (Core / Windows 7)
- Firewall needs to open port 5985 for http
Yep, I think I’m going to need to invest some time in PowerShell because I saw really cool stuff.
Next-up, lunch-time, which was not bad, but not great. Those catering businesses should really learn to understand that we work in IT, we need heavier food :-)
Next session: Sneak-preview of Windows Server 2008 R2 and SP1, by Bryon Surace.
This was an ‘undisclosed-session’ and the reason for that was that they couldn’t announce it in front that there was going to be a sneak preview of SP1.
What we saw, was a history of Virtualization (from Microsoft) throughout the years, and spent the last 45 minutes or so on SP1.
And yes, SP1 contains what everybody expects: Dynamic Memory. And they thought it through. You can set your virtual environments with a Startup amount of Ram and a maximum. This doesn’t mean that your server will have at least the Startup Ram, it will lower if it can. But they also build in some sort of Buffering, so that certain servers can get a block of memory very fast. You can put your thresholds and importance for each server separately which I think is a good thing.
Also on SP1, RemoteFX. If you are running Windows Server 2008 R2 as the terminal server (yeah, I know, RDS…) and Windows 7 as the client (you need RDP 7.1) you can have a full-blown remote Windows 7 Desktop with all the features in it. Silverlight, DirectX, Windows Media, Aero Glass, Flash… It will work, and fluently. How they did it? You can now have configure your virtual machine with a “3d graphical card”. Something to watch out for
Things I certainly remembered from this session:
- Dynamic Memory
- Memory Priority
- RemoteFX
- 3d graphical card in a server :-)
Next-up: Kurt Roggen with Buidling Hyper-V in a real-life world
To be honest, not exactly what I expected. I figured this would be tips and tricks about a hyper-v implementation, but it was more a session on how to size your hyper-v to make the best hardware choices. Looking at it afterwards, this was a nice approach for an architect and I certainly took some points with me. His point of view on asking the hardware vendor the right questions was a good approach, as long as you know what you need.
Things I remembered:
- Second Level Address Translation (make sure that you have that now!)
- How many nics? What will that do with your switches (cables!)
- VLans and Network Teaming
- VMQ and Network Teaming
- TOE
- Jumbo frames
- …
And then I headed to Rhonda Layfield for Deploy Windows 7 Using Microsoft’s FREE Deployment Tools
Rhonda is an unbelievable speaker. She threw 75 slides and 6 demo’s in 75 minutes at us, and at the end of the session, it was all clear and understood. She is a passionate speaker, and explained many possibilities and pro’s / con’s for MDT and WDS. Since I quite often work with MDT, not much new here, but certainly a confirmation and hearing the people afterwards, they all agreed that this was a session not to miss.
Things I remembered:
- Wim VS Vhds (Vhds not supported in MDT2010… yet?)
And with that, the first day ended for me. There was one more timeslot, but had to attend something else.
Day 2 also started not so well since I had to go to the office for a few hours. Luckily, I could close-up quickly so that I was in time for session 2.
Session: WMI for the SCCM Admin by Kim Oppalfens
Yep, our very own, SCUG co-founder, MVP and SCCM expert gave a session on techdays. What we got there was, to start with, a short but thorough overview of WMI, the tools and some good pointers and tricks. And then came the Magic. He actually succeeds on making SCCM event-driven instead of schedule-based. This session was certainly a great one, but maybe a little hard for most of the people in the room. People from MMS, if you read this, this is a must-have session on MMS :-) Already waiting until the session gets online.
Thins I remembered:
- WbemTest, WMI Explorer, WMIC, Policspy
- Synchronous, Asynchronous and semi-synchronous WMI calls
- Licenses that expire on the 1st of april :-)
Lunch again, and now it were some sandwiches (these little ones you know…) Most heard comment: They should have placed plates so that you could take a few at the same time and didn’t had to run to the table all the time ;-)
Next on my plate: Performance, Resource, and Security Optimizations for Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager by Bryon Surace and Belgium’s Arlindo Alves.
This session was a 75-minute trip with a lot of tips for implementing Hyper-V. If you missed it, certainly worth to watch it if it comes online.
Things I remembered:
- Tips for AV (exclusion of VHD’s)
- Use the SCVMM library
- Always create a windows server 2003 template with 2 CPU’s. Downsize later if necessary (enjoy always the multi processor HAL)
- Performance of Dynamic VHD’s is getting close to a Fixed VHD
- Pass-through performance is slightly better so only use it in IO-intensive demands
- Snapshot chaining performance is much better in R2
- Always close the Window Managers, they take resources!
- Don’t use the Root partition for anything else then Hyper-V, management consoles and AV
- Pro Tip: Exclude the SCVMM server from the tips if it is running virtual
Next on topic: Maarten Goet with Opalis
Maarten is a well known speaker about System Center products and gave a session about Opalis. He started with explaining what Opalis is and what it can mean for an IT environment. The dynamic data center is getting closer and closer :-)
Things I remembered:
- Microsoft has a lot of work to do
- DPM is not yet on the roadmap (as a DPM fan, I’m disappointed)
- Opalis is a continuous work-in-progress product
- But you can do great stuff with it…
Final session for me (had again some other business to attend to… damned) Virtualization for the End User – Implementing VDI with Windows by Corey Hynes
When you give a presentation about VDI, and start with telling that you will be convinced of NOT using VDI by the end of the session, then you get my attention :-) In the 75-minutes, we got an incredible overview of the VDI solutions from Windows and Windows + Citrix offering. He explained all the different layers and gave us great information on how to handle a project implementation. Corey gave us a lot of pointers and where the pitfalls are. At the end of the session, he certainly convinced me of the fact NOT to use VDI unless in specific cases. And I think that he is right (funny was that we had this discussion with the SCUG members just before this session). VDI is certainly something to look at, and will give a lot of advantages in many cases. But it won’t be always a great solution. Make sure that you understand the requirements of the project very well, before deciding on using VDI, or just plain RDS or Xenapp. He ended with a funny movie about one computer that provisioned 250 workstations over one gigabit UTP line. And the damn thing worked :-) http://youtu.be/IWGMwmv13UE
Conclusion:
Some great sessions, some good sessions, others where I hoped to much or did already know what they said. Still, considering the public, I think it was a great match of sessions and speakers. Make sure to keep up with the good work on selecting your speakers. The food could be better (or maybe I’m just to attached to good food :-)), we had some nice questions at the user booth, I met some great people and I even got interviewed at the SCUG booth (hope they loose that movie ;-)). The conference bag was lousy (Hey, it is crisis after all) but the coffee mugs made it all good :-). As a true system center fanatic, I missed of course System Center sessions. So for next year Arlindo, get JBuff over here or contact us for DPM and SCE sessions :-)
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Microsoft has released information about their licensing model for System Center Service Manager…
SCSM will be part of the SMSE and SMSD suites.
For more information:
http://systemcenterguide.com/2010/02/18/licensing-for-service-manager-2010-revealed/
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/management-suites-faq.aspx
Cheers,
Mike
Hey all,
You probably noticed that it has been quite silently here on this blog, mostly because the SCUG team allowed me to post the DPM blogs straight to the SCDPM blog of SCUG. (Thanks again for that guys…)
But this doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about my own little blog, and today I’m going to discuss a recently posted announcement from Dell
The Press Release dates from 16 February 2010:
Dell Helps Customers Efficiently Deploy, Update and Monitor IT Resources For Enterprises Using Microsoft System Center
Original release can be found here: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/press-releases/2010-2-16-dell-ms-integration-tools.aspx
With a title like that, it had to draw my attention :-). Anyway, I decided to read on and see what they actually have done.
Basically, Dell has released a set of software tools that integrate directly into the system center suite from Microsoft, and they do that at no charge for Dell customers. Now this is good news! The more integration you can have into one platform, the easier it is to work and the bigger the return on investment. So I continued to read and see what they had to offer.
Most of the tools you will probably know already. Actually all tools are already out there for a while. Why Dell now comes with this press release is a mystery for me, but still, the importance of the press release is big.
By announcing it to the world, Dell has committed itself to deliver add-ons for the System Center Suite from Microsoft. And I’m quite sure that other hardware vendors will come out with integration tools also. Again, this is not really new, since Dell and HP and IBM and … already are doing this for a longer period, but it could step-up the speed for more integration tools into the System Center Suite. And preferably free of course ;-). And this is something I can only like.
So what has Dell for us to offer?
1. Dell Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (link)
This management pack is @ release 4.0, A00 dated from 31 august 2009 and monitors the status of Dell PowerEdge / PowerVault Servers, Dell Remote Access Controllers (DRAC) and Chassis Management Controllers (CMC) on a defined network segment.
It is supported on SCOM 2007 SP1 / R2 and SCE 2007 SP1
2. Dell MD Storage Array Management Pack Suite for System Center Operations Manager (link)
Also @ release 4.0, A00 dated from 18 January 2010. The management pack allows SCOM SP1 / R2 and SCE 2007 SP1 to discover, monitor and give the status of Dell MD Storage Arrays (MD3000, MD3000i, MD1000 daisy chained to MD3000 or 3000i)
3. Dell Client Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (link)
Release 4.0, A00 dated from 26 October 2009. This Management Pack allows SCOM SP1 / R2 and SCE 2007 SP1 to discover, monitor and give the status of Dell Business Client Computers.
4. Dell Printer Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager (link)
Release 4.0, A00 dated from 11 November 2009.
The Dell Printer Management Pack v4.0 enables System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) R2/SP1 and System Center Essentials (SCE) SP1 to Discover, Monitor and accurately depict the status of Dell Printers on a defined network segment.
5. Dell Server Deployment Pack for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (link)
Release 1.1, A00 dated from 17 July 2009
The Dell Server Deployment Pack is an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) based tool that integrates directly into the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (ConfigMgr) console.
It eliminates the need for command-line tools and scripts normally used in the DTK. To configure and deploy your Dell systems, you need to select configuration options and commands on the GUI using drop-down lists and check boxes. This makes your system deployment an easy, automated task.
6. Dell ConfigMgr – DLC Plugin (link)
Released 30 October 2009, version A00
The Dell Lifecycle Controller Integration for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager v 1.0 allows customers to simplify and improve their Operating Systems Deployment experience on Dell Servers. Combining the capabilities of our embedded Lifecycle Controller (LC 1.2), the Dell Server Deployment Pack (DSDP 1.1) for ConfigMgr and the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC6), Dell is positioned to offer a very powerful remote provisioning solution to MS ConfigMgr users.
7. Dell Client Deployment Pack for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (link)
Version 1.1, A01 and released @ 18 December 2009.
Dell Client Deployment Plugin Installer pack installed as an add-on to Microsoft ConfigMgr 2007 SP2 helps administrators simplify the image deployment process on Dell Systems in their Enterprise Environment. With the plug-in installed, the end user will be able to use the capabilities to:-
1. Import drivers packs released in ‘CAB’ format from Dell Support Website
2. Create Windows Vista and XP Deployment task sequence
3. Remotely Configure BIOS using Client Configuration Toolkit
8. Dell Server PRO Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (link)
Released @ 29 December 2009, version 2.0, A00
Dell PRO enabled Management Pack's integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager(SCVMM) 2008, R2 and SCOM 2007 SP1, R2 or SCE 2007 SP1 enable customers with effective management of Dell Virtualized Server Hardware with PRO. It enables remedial action/recommendation, such as migration of Virtual Machines and placing the host into Restrict mode, based on alerts generated by the host with workloads running in a Hyper-V based Virtualized Environment.
Need more information?
Make sure you go to http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/sitelets/solutions/management/microsoft_sms?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz and find the information you need.
Conclusion:
I already worked with most of the tools that Dell delivered for System Center, but the first versions contained many issues. But many of these issues are out now, and the tools are getting better with each version. So I certainly advise everybody to try them out if you are having Dell hardware running in your environment.
I also hope that more vendors will release tools such as Dell, and I’m not only talking about the major hardware vendors, but also vendors such as 3Com, Cisco, Juniper and so on are hopefully getting the picture. The more integration into one suite of management tools, the more easier it will be for the system administrators to effectively monitor their environments in a pro-active way, and not do the fire fighting which many of us know, still do or have done. And even further, it will allow for system administrators to get closer to the much wanted dynamic data center… But more on that topic later.
Just my thoughts…
Cheers,
Mike
Today, Microsoft announced the End-Of-Life for System Center Capacity Planner.
More information can be found @ http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sccp/default.aspx
Capacity planning will be provided in the future through dedicated resources
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Just received this announcement from Jalasoft and Savision:
Jalasoft and Savision announced today that they will both be coming out with new versions of Xian Io and Savision Live maps in 2010. These version are more integrated and offer Savision users to use topology discovery from Xian Network Manager Io R2 to autorelate objects in Live Maps
Houston . January 20, 2010 -
Jalasoft and Savision announced today that they will both be coming out with new versions of Xian Io and Savision Live Maps in 2010. The companies have been working together since 2008 in order to create products that complement each other in an endeavor to provide a more complete monitoring solution for Systems Center Operations Manager.
One of the most important features that will be introduced in Xian Network Manager Io R2 is a topology discovery module that gathers information on the relationships between the devices and servers being monitored and provides the information to Savision Live maps in order to facilitate the drawing of your network topology. Live maps uses this information to determine the relationship between devices and servers and automatically draws the connections between them saving the user a significant amount of time.
“Thanks to these new feature and cooperation between Jalasoft and Savision, end-users will be able to create a real topology of their environment, something that was not possible before in Operations Manager” says Arnold Hagens Product Marketing Manager at Jalasoft.
Many other features aside from the ones detailed above are being introduced in the new versions of Savision’s and Jalasoft’s software releases. Both the releases are expected in the first quarter of 2010.
For more information contact:
Arnold Hagens, +1 888 402 6717
For more information: http://www.jalasoft.com/Web/News/Default.aspx?id=36
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Jason Buffington’s book, Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers, is available for pre-order on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470572140?ie=UTF8&tag=chrgamdad-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0470572140
Considering the fact that this guy is the author of the All Backed Up (http://blogs.technet.com/jbuff/default.aspx) and one of the specialists from Microsoft on DPM, this will be a must read for all of you needing to protect their infrastructure.
More information can be found on his blog http://blogs.technet.com/jbuff/archive/2009/12/21/my-book-is-now-available-for-preorder-data-protection-for-the-virtual-data-center.aspx and looking at the topics that will be covered, I’m already curious…
Cheers,
Mike
While registering a Datawarehouse with Service Manager 2010 I got the following error in the eventviewer of the Datawarehouse server…
A module of type "Microsoft.SystemCenter.Orchestration.Module.WorkflowWorkItemModule" reported an exception System.FormatException: String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.
at System.DateTimeParse.Parse(String s, DateTimeFormatInfo dtfi, DateTimeStyles styles)
at System.DateTime.Parse(String s, IFormatProvider provider)
at Microsoft.SystemCenter.Orchestration.WorkItem.ShredReader(XmlReader wiInstance)
at Microsoft.SystemCenter.Orchestration.WorkItem..ctor(XmlReader wiInstance)
at Microsoft.SystemCenter.Orchestration.WorkItem.GetWorkItem(String processCategory, String process)
at Microsoft.SystemCenter.Orchestration.Module.WorkflowWorkItemModule.PollForNextWorkItemItem()
at Microsoft.SystemCenter.Orchestration.Module.WorkflowWorkItemModule.OnDataItem(DataItemBase dataItem, DataItemAcknowledgementCallback acknowledgedCallback, Object acknowledgedState, DataItemProcessingCompleteCallback completionCallback, Object completionState) which was running as part of rule "WorkflowOrchestration.DeploymentRule" running for instance "Deployment Workflow Target" with id:"{0B09E978-69C6-709F-5D5E-B03C5477393C}" in management group "xxxxxx".
The problem here was that the system locale from the service account used wasn’t set to English-US
After that change (and rebooting the server) the job succeeded
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Last week I had a strange error with a customer. Here’s the situation:
One primary DPM server with quite a lot of Protection groups and protected servers that handled the disk to disk backup. A secondary DPM server that did the backup to tape and of course the backup off the first DPM server.
All backups on the first DPM server went most of the times without any problem, and if there was a problem it could be solved with a consistency check or a rerun of the failed job.
However, everything on the second server failed completely.
After investigation, I’ve noticed that many times the DPMRA service crashed on the primary server each time the backup server was doing a backup of the first.
I’ve read log files, event viewers but every error described on newsgroups and blog posts were about DPM servers that didn’t had the latest hotfix rollup. This server and the secondary server however had all the hotfixes installed till date.
So because I couldn’t figure it out, I decided to log a call together with the customer. Because I am not often with that customer I let him handle it but requested to forward me the steps taken by Microsoft support and hopefully the solution.
After one week, they found the solution together with the Microsoft engineer.
Just as extra information, here is the error they got on the secondary server
Error Messages: The protection agent on primaryserver.FQDN was temporarily unable to respond because it was in an unexpected state. (ID 60 Details: Internal error code: 0x809909B0) followed by DPM failed to communicate with the protection agent on primaryserver.FQDN because the agent is not responding. (ID 43 Details: Internal error code: 0x8099090E)
So here are the steps taken and the solution.
1) They needed to run an MPS report as described on
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=CEBF3C7C-7CA5-408F-88B7-F9C79B7306C0&displaylang=en
2) They needed to run the following command (run as administrator!)
MOUNTVOL >c:\mountvol.txt
The engineers from Microsoft quickly viewed the problem
As you can see in the following exctraction out of the mountvol.txt file
\\?\Volume{8639bea9-80c6-11de-a621-0015179ff253}\
Q:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\Replica\servername\MSDEWriter\naamdatabase
D:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\Replica\servername\MSDEWriter\naamdatabase
\\?\Volume{32c0e517-64c6-11de-9f82-0015179ff253}\
Q:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\Replica\Servername\Non VSS Datasource Writer\Computer\SystemState\SystemState\
D:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\Replica\Servername\Non VSS Datasource Writer\Computer\SystemState\SystemState\
\\?\Volume{1ea729a2-7c50-11de-bff1-0015179ff253}\
Q:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\DiffArea\Servername\File System\D-2a56f4ae-783c-11de-8b69-005056ac1ad1\
D:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\DiffArea\Servername\File System\D-2a56f4ae-783c-11de-8b69-005056ac1ad1\
The whole file was full with duplicate paths to the same volume, although this was not seen in a normal explorer
This happened because they once changed the location of the volumes.
Now the customer can use the mountvol command (with /d to remove the duplicates one by one, or take the the old disk offline and use the /R for all in once) to clear out the duplicate paths.
That solved the case
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
When I tried to install the Compliance and Risk Process Management Pack, I got following errors:
Output:
G:\Sources\Compliance and Risk Process Management Pack (Beta)\ComplianceAndRiskProcessMPBeta\Setup\Microsoft.ServiceManager.GRC.mpb
G:\Sources\Compliance and Risk Process Management Pack (Beta)\ComplianceAndRiskProcessMPBeta\Setup\Microsoft.ServiceManager.GRC.DocumentManagament.mpb
G:\Sources\Compliance and Risk Process Management Pack (Beta)\ComplianceAndRiskProcessMPBeta\Setup\Microsoft.ServiceManager.GRC.ControlManagement.mpb
Error:
The client has been disconnected from the server. Please call ManagementGroup.Reconnect() to reestablish the connection.The server did not provide a meaningful reply; this might be caused by a contract mismatch, a premature session shutdown or an internal server error.
After searching on the web, and even posting a question on the system center service manager forum, I found the answer.
Many problems seem to arrive if your servers locale is different from en-us. After changing that on my servers, the installation went smoothly.
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Just finished in setting up Service Manager 2010 beta 2 update in order to install the compliance and risk process management pack.
However, before I can start doing that, I’m first going to show you how you can connect your Datawarehouse with your service manager management group. You need to do this in order to get the reporting running. And if you want to have reports on the compliance and risk process management pack, this step is also necessary, so here goes.
In the SM console, under the home page of administration, go to the Register with Service Manager’s Data Warehouse
Select Register… there
The following Wizard will appear
Press Next to continue
In this screen, type in the servername that is your datawarehouse management server and then press the Test Connection. Don’t forget to make sure that your firewall is correctly configured as stated in the documentation otherwise this will fail if your DWM server is on another server.
Press Next when the Your connection to the datawarehouse management server wass successful is shown.
Now you need to give the credentials for the connection registration. These credentials can already exists, or you can create a new one. This account needs to have Administrator privileges on the datawarehouse management server.
Now you see the Summary and off we go, press the Create button
During this, it is perfectly possible that you will receive a notification that the report deployment process is not completed. Just press OK
Done?
Not exactly :-). The process of synchronizing can take up a few hours. But, you can immediately see already some changes.
Close the console, wait for a few minutes and open the console again.
You will see two new buttons in the navigation pane
You can of course extract the navigation pane so that all buttons are fully shown
Now go to the Data Warehouse button.
Select the Data Warehouse jobs
You will see five jobs here
Select the MPSyncJob and then press the resume button
Refresh the view so that you can see that the MPSyncJob is running again
As said, this can take a few hours to complete. From time to time, you can click the details of that job to see how far the job is.
When all the Management Packs are associated or imported, the job is done.
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Microsoft has updated its whitepaper Bare Metal Recovery of Windows Server 2008 with System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1
It can be found at http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/A/B/2AB50D28-D892-4BF3-B823-C62CA02E4CF8/DPM%202007%20SP1%20Bare%20Metal%20Recovery%20of%20Windows%20Server%202008.doc
Important to know is that the DPM SRT (System Recovery Tool) that is used for recovering windows 2003 and windows XP has been completely replaced by the built-in backup utility of Windows server 2008, the WSB (Windows Server Backup) utility.
In the white-paper, they give a step-by-step instruction on how to enable bare metal recovery of a windows server 2008
Except for the fact that you need to do some additional work, this procedure certainly has some possibilities for the BMR of a physical windows server 2008.
Still, I believe more in the procedure of working with the offline P2V which was discussed two weeks ago. Since Matthijs Vreeken has responded on my questions I’m gonna keep working on this procedure and test it out.
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
As said in the previous post, I promised to give some additional information about the live meeting
One of the greatest things they said (it actually made my day) was that backup for Workgroup based servers or DMZ servers will be supported in the RC. For now, the beta hasn’t included it yet, but the RC will.
Or so to speak with the words of Jason Buffington… “Consider it as an early Christmas present” ;-)
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Just finished with an interesting live meeting from Microsoft. This live meeting was about managing the Exchange 2010 infrastructure with System Center.
It was a very cool meeting, getting into some details about the new management pack for exchange 2010 and operations manager but also (and for me the most interesting part) about using Data Protection Manager 2010 with Exchange 2010.
Jason Buffington (http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/) was in the meeting and showed some very nice features for the future.
In the next few posts I will give some information that was said in the presentation.
In this one, I will start with an overview of the capabilities of DPM 2010 with Exchange 2010.
First screenshot you see is the basic drawing for DPM
Probably nothing new here, but the next screenshot is more interesting for the exchange 2010 fans
As you can see in this screenshot, DPM 2010 will have the possibility of backing up (or protecting) the different Exchange scenario’s.
What’s very interesting about DPM 2010 is that you will be able to have offsite backups of your Exchange environment if you are using the DAG (Database Availability Groups) scenario where one server is located… off-site.
What’s also cool is that you can use DPM 2010 to offload the eseutil tool from your exchange server and put the load on the DPM server as you can see in the next screenshot
More information, including screenshots from the demo will come in the next posts but one thing is already for certain… Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan for your exchange environment will become more easier then ever before.
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
While reading up on the different blogs I follow, I found this interesting post from Anders Bengtsson, Microsoft MVP.
It’s all about SQL End-user Recovery. In DPM 2010, it is possible to give SQL Administrators the rights to recover their databases without the need for a backup administrator.
See the article for the technical specifications (http://contoso.se/blog/?p=1130)
The end-user recovery drew my attention for the following reasons:
- End-user recovery makes the live of a backup administrator more easy. In 2007, when we implement the end-user recovery for files for users, we notice every time again, that the backup administrators are having less work
- Doing this for SQL administrators gives you an additional advantage. Imagine that you have a test environment at your site. This test environment is a virtualized “copy” of your production environment. The programmers team is doing different things there and testing new features and so on. They need a refresh of the database very often. Now the SQL team can do this instead of the backup administrator. How cool is that. You as a backup administrator have less work, the programmers team will be helped more quickly, it’s a win win situation :-)
Now I am wondering if Microsoft would pull this further? What if we could delegate end-user recovery tasks for exchange, sharepoint and so on…
For the moment this is not possible, or at least I don’t have no documentation about this yet, but when I see the power of the SQL end-user recovery, I’m quite sure that this will be a much requested feature for the future
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
One of our engineers was having a big issue with the protection of a sharepoint farm. In DPM, he could not resolve the following error:
The replica of SSPComponent_SSP Intranet on servername is inconsistent with the protected data source. All protection activities for data source will fail until the replica is synchronized with consistency check.
He has searched a lot on the problem but finally found that the problem was not with the DPM program but with the Sharepoint configuration.
The problem was that some service accounts tried to do a remote log-on to the server. These service accounts are used for the timer / search server functions and had the appropriate rights locally but did not had the rights to do this remotely.
After adding the service account the rights to “logon as a batch” and “logon as a service” it suddenly started to work again.
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
During one of the implementations of DPM, one of my colleagues got into problems with the recognition of a tape library. Although the tape library worked during the staging phase, when it got into production, it stopped working. There were 20 tapes in the library, but DPM didn’t recognize them, and after you ran a fast recovery, you got the following error:
Connection to the DPM service has been lost.
DPM service could be running in recovery mode, which was initiated by the DpmSync tool. If DpmSync is not running and the DPM service is still in recovery mode, then run DpmSync again.
After having multiple steps with the Microsoft support team, they finally found a solution. Because I thought the process of troubleshooting was interesting, I thought I posted it here.
1) Try the obvious
- Make sure that you have run the DPMDriveMappingTool.exe
2) If you want to log a call with MS Support:
- Run a DPM MPS report, the tool can be downloaded @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=14392186-6707-45a5-8987-29665abbd6f5&displaylang=en
Out of the reports that we have sent to them, they saw that “More than one mediapool reported for same media”.
Apparently, this can happen each time the DPM database has incorrect information about the tape drives, which can be caused when OEM drivers are updated when the vendorID’s and productID’s change.
Now to solve this one, you need to run a query that will reset the tables. They gave us two procedures for that, depending on whether the tape library is shared or not.
Here they are:
PROCEDURE-1) STANDALONE (non-shared) TAPE LIBRARY CONFIGURATION REPAIR STEPS
===============================================================================
1) Close DPM UI
2) Backup the DPMDB by running dpmbackup -db from command prompt.
3) Open sql server management studio in context of DPMDB database instance. Make
sure you are admin on the machine
4) Select DPMDB. Right click -> New Query
5) Open the Query.txt file and copy paste its content in the query window
6) Execute the query.
7) Make sure query has succeeded.
8) Close SQL management studio
9) Open DPM UI
10) Go to library management tab
11) Do rescan
12) Let this rescan succeed. This rescan will detect libraries and will run Fast
inventory on the library.
PROCEDURE-2) SHARED LIBRARY CONFIGURATION REPAIR STEPS
===========================================================
(step i) On Library DPM server :
1) Close DPM UI
2) Backup the DPMDB by running dpmbackup -db from command prompt.
3) Open sql server management studio in context of DPMDB database instance. Make
sure you are admin on the machine
4) Select DPMDB. Right click -> New Query
5) Open the Query.txt file and copy paste its content in the query window
6) Execute the query.
7) Make sure query has succeeded.
8) Close SQL management studio
(step ii) On Client DPM server :
1) Close DPMUI
2) Backup the DPMDB by running dpmbackup -db from command prompt.
3) Open sql server management studio in context of DPMDB database instance. Make
sure you are admin on the machine
4) Select DPMDB. Right click -> New Query
5) Open Query.txt file and copy paste its content in the query window
6) Execute the query.
7) Make sure query has succeeded.
8) Close SQL management studio
9) Now run SetSharedDPMDatabase tool with parameter as the library server instance
name (if this does not succeed then reboot the machine and again retry running the
tool)
IE: SetSharedDPMdatabase -Instancename
<dpmservername-hosting-Global-SQL-Server>\MS$DPM2007$
(step iii) on Library DPM server
1) Open DPM UI and then on Client DPM Server.
2) Go to library management tab
3) Do rescan
4) Let this rescan succeed. This rescan will detect libraries and will run Fast
inventory on the library. Let this finish before going to next step
(step iv) on Client DPM server
1) Open DPM UI and then on Client DPM Server.
2) Go to library management tab
3) Do rescan
And finally, of course, you need the query. Because it is way too long to upload the text here, I’ll ask the site owners to upload the query to the media library on scug.be
// Update, just found out that you can attach something to a post. So here it is... query.txt :-)
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
One of the most difficult things there is with backup solutions is Disaster Recovery. Certainly when you want to do a bare-metal recovery of an old physical machine that has died on you. Although you can have many possibilities to recover from such a failure, most of them will cause tricks, workarounds, hoping that you can find a server with the same (or almost the same) hardware configuration and lots of time. Matthijs Vreeken (SCDPM.Blogspot.com) has written an interesting post about this (http://scdpm.blogspot.com/2009/11/disaster-recover-using-p2v-and-dpm.html)
Here’s the theory.
You do a P2V of an existing physical server but leave it off afterwards (Assuming Hyper-V here, so that DPM can take a full backup of the VHD and config files). Every day, you take a backup of the system state and daily data of the physical machine.
At the moment the physical server dies on you, you start the virtual server, restore data and you’re back up and running.
Pitfalls
He also mentions some possible issues that you can have during the start of the virtual machine. (Read at his post for more information)
Although this sounds great in theory (I was already on my way to my boss to discuss this ;-)) I still have a few questions about this.
1) What will happen if the physical server has a different patch level? Will it be necessary to patch both servers @ the same time?
2) You need to keep the system state of the physical server in case you want to go back to the physical server. But if you already have resetted the password for the computer account of the virtual machine, what will happen then?
3) How will an exchange or SQL server will handle this? After all, this will be an online restore.
4) How will the DPM agent react on the virtual machine? What are you going to do when the DPM agent has been upgraded in the meantime.
…
The idea sounds really great, and I don’t want to throw it away although I still have a few questions about it. So if you have idea’s remarks or solutions for the questions, don’t hesitate to reply :-). I’m going to continue to think about it because if we can find a rock-solid solution or process for this, it could become a very popular solution for a disaster recovery plan. Share your ideas….
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Ever needed to get data from a tape that is already expired? In DPM, you won’t have the option anymore to recatalog the tape when it is expired.
Santhosh Sivarajan from Houston has found a simple workaround:
* Select the tape and mark the tape as free
* Select the tape again and unmark the tape as free
* Now you can choose Recatalog imported tape
The original post can be found here:
http://blogcastrepository.com/blogs/santhosh/archive/2009/10/29/recatalog-an-expired-tape.aspx
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Microsoft is really pushing the car for could offerings. It has recently announced that it has established a partnership with i365, the software company of Seagate, to provide could-based data protection for DPM 2010.
The offering would integrate i365’s EVault data protection software and cloud-connected storage infrastructure with DPM 2010.
The announcement can be found here:
http://www.i365.com/assets/downloads/press/pr_2009_11_9.html
More information is found here:
http://www.i365.com/solutions/microsoft/index.html
Cheers,
Mike
Dear All,
A new hotfix package has been released by Microsoft for DPM 2007. It can be downloaded @
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=74ac7461-dbfe-4bc1-85a2-4d2948f30e42
The knowledgebase article is not yet available for the moment but I guess it will arrive soon :-)
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Recently I had to troubleshoot a DPM installation that suddenly didn’t work anymore. After investigation (and having a lot of troubles finding something) I’ve noticed the following errors in the event viewer.
So I started to check everything on SQL level and discovered that the DPM jobs were running as a domain user (a so called service account with log on rights…)
So I looked at Services and discovered that the DPM instance and the SQL Agent for that instance were running under that service account.
After changing it back to the local user MICROSOFT$DPM$ACCT and restarting the server, everything worked back as a charm.
Hope it helps,
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Today I’ve got this notification on a fully patched SCDPM 2007
So, when I read the information in the box, I decided to refresh the tape library. This however crashed the DPM console with the following information:
Connection to the DPM service has been lost.
DPM service could be running in recovery mode, which was initiated by the DpmSync tool. If DpmSync is not running and the DPM service is still in recovery mode, then run DpmSync again.
Review the application event log for information about a possible service shutdown. Verify that the following services are not disabled:
DPM
DPM Replication Agent
SQLAgent$MS$DPM2007$
MSSQL$MS$DPM2007$
Virtual Disk Service
Volume Shadow Copy
So I decided to run a DPMSync Tool and these were the results:
So I reopened the console and started the sync again, and now it worked like a charm.
Hope it helps,
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
If you want to download the guides for SCVMM 2008 R2, they can be found here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee441285.aspx
Documents available are:
· Deployment Guide
· Guide to Operations Manager Integration
· Security Guide
· Operations Guide
· Scripting Guide
· Cmdlet Reference
· Building PRO-Enabled Management
If you have feedback on the documentation, don’t hesitate to contact the VMM team through scvmfdbk@microsoft.com.
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Just been a week in vacation with the wife and kids and had a great time swimming, walking and playing in the playgrounds with the children. Now that the DPM V3 Public Beta is announced and there, I thought it was time again to look at the promised features for V3 and to check if the product is worth our attention. (Hey, a silent evening in a cottage, with the kids and wife sleeping, a good glass wine in my hand and some good music on… ;-))
So here’s what’s new, based on what was already in V2
For Exchange: Of course they will support E14 in addition to Ex2007 and Ex2003. There will also be improved Restore Granularity. What exactly is not known yet but the DPM team worked together with the Exchange team to see what is possible and supported.
For SQL: You will be able to protect an entire SQL instance, making that DPM will auto discover new DB’s within that instance. DPM v3 will also be able to protect 1000 DB’s per DPM server which is a huge improvement over the 300 DB’s that v2 could. There will also be Role-Based Access for a SQL admin to do his or hers work with the DPM console.
For Sharepoint: Support for Office 14, Sharepoint server 2007 and 2003. There will be no recovery farm requirement for Office 14 and auto-detection of new content databases within the farm.
For Hyper-V: Item-level restore from VHD backup, support for Hyper-V2 deployments using Live Migration (CSV) and Dynamic VM guest migration support (Meaning you should be able to restore to alternate Hyper-V hosts)
What’s completely new?
For AD: Active Directory will now appear as a data source and not be part anymore of the system state. This will allow IT administrators to centrally manage backups from DPM (although performed locally) and local admin restore from windows server backup. It will also allow to do a DPM restoration of a whole domain controller.
For Bare Metal Recovery: Windows Server 2003 will continue with SRT but windows server 2008 will use Windows Server Backup for image-based restore, again centrally managed from DPM but locally executed.
For New Datasources: Protection of windows guests on VMWare hosts will be supported and Microsoft Dynamics AX will be a new datasource. SAP running on SQL server will also be a new datasource
For Laptops: Backup over VPN will be possible where Windows seven is of course the new OS that will be included. Per DPM server you will be able to scale up to 1000 clients. Only Unique user data will be protected so that not the entire OS is repeatedly on your expensive storage ;-). DPM will also integrate with local shadow copies for Vista and Windows 7 which will be centrally configured from the DPM Admin User Interface BUT the end user will be able to restore from local copies offline and online as well as from DPM copies online.
Server Side:
DPM V3 promises to be Enterprise Ready where the scalability is increased and each DPM server will now have the possibility of having 80 TB of storage.
New Management Pack updates will be ready for SCOM and SQL admins will have Role-based management at their hands.
The one thing I am really looking forward to is the fact that MS promises to give us automatic rerunning of jobs and improved self-healing. Also the automatic protection of new SQL databases or MOSS content databases seems very promising. They also promised less “Inconsistent Replicas” errors and they will reduce the Alert Volume.
The DPM to DPM replication will also be improved and (more important I think) there will be a One-click DPM DP failover and failback scenario available. Also improved scheduling will be there.
For the SAN restore, there will be continued support using scripts and whitepapers that are delivered through the vendors but there’s no change with the previous version.
And last but not least, the DPM server should be 64-bit and W2k08 or better.
Conclusion: This seems like a lot of improvements and definitely worth to check it out
Next post: Installation of DPM v3 Beta
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Microsoft has released the Product Support Reporting Tool for SCVMM2008 and 2008R2
Use the MPS Reporting Tool to gather detailed system status and configuration information from the Virtual Machine Manager server of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 or 2008 R2 server as well as from all managed virtual machine hosts, library servers, and physical to virtual conversion (P2V) source computers. This version of the MPS Reporting Tool collects gathers data to help Microsoft Support Professionals diagnose error conditions experienced in Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.
The Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) version of the MPS Reporting Tool gathers the following diagnostic data for the VMM server, the virtual machine hosts and library servers that the VMM server manages, and physical to virtual conversion (P2V) source computers:
- Virtual Machine Manager traces
- Virtual Machine Manager database
- Windows event logs and virtual server event logs
- IP address
- Virtual Machine Manager setup logs
- SQL Server setup logs
- Registry information
- Open ports information
- System Information (msinfo)
You can download the tool here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4e3dc013-c299-4b80-9735-64a8b9fa60c7&displaylang=en
Cheers,
Mike
Hey All,
Yesterday, Microsoft has released a new version of KB970867 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970867), although the KB article is not yet updated, the new download is already available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=14e1a04b-2323-4344-b737-a3194b9ab3ed&displaylang=en
So let’s see if I can use this download on my test environment. I’ve installed the hotfix on my environment and after the installation, I’ve opened the console
I can see immediately Update Available so I decided to do the update to check if the protected servers need to restart
Press Update Agents to start
Make sure you select Manually restart the selected servers later
After the upgrade, I can see that the version of the agent is changed to 2.0.8851.0
Cheers,
Mike
UPDATE: In the meantime, the associated KB is online. It is a quite impressive list of fixes… http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;970868
Hey All,
In our series of posts about DPM Errors:
DPM tried to do a SQL log backup, either as part of a backup job or a recovery to latest point in time job. The SQL log backup job has detected a discontinuity in the SQL log chain for SQL Server 2005 database database <name database> since the last backup. All incremental backup jobs will fail until an express full backup runs. (ID 30140 Details: Internal error code: 0x80990D11)
Resolution: After investigation, it seemed that the problem was that there were also backups performed straight from the SQL Management Studio. Stopping these backups resolved the issue. See also http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970642
Cheers,
Mike
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