System Center Operations Manager

OpsMgr Management pack APC ISX Central Integration Management Pack

This week I had to implement an APC management pack at a customer site and I will explain how to get it working. This customer is using APC to monitor and configure his Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) infrastructure.

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The APC InfraStruXure (ISX) Central is a network appliance that collects data from, and monitors status of, devices that provide data-center-critical infrastructure.
The ISX Central Integration Management pack for Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager 2007 provides a tight integration between the physical infrastructure space for whichISX Central provides unprecedented visibility and control and the systems infrastructure space for which OpsMgr provides the same type of solution.

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The Management Pack integrates ISX Central through the new web services interface, available starting with version 5.1 of ISX Central. Make sure you install the ISX Central with a least version 5.1 that you can download from here http://www.apc.com/products/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=SFISXC511 

To install the Management Pack, install the .msi package downloaded from the APC Web site (http://www.apc.com/tools/download) into an appropriate directory. The installation package consists of four
files: this document, the sealed Management Pack (.mp), the optional Overrides Management Pack
(.xml), and the registration utility (.exe).

Steps to configure the APC management pack:

1. Configure your ISX Central
2. Import your APC ISX management pack
3. Run the ISX Central Registration tool
4. Configure the run-as account

The registration utility is a tool that provides a user interface to set certain registry keys that are used by the Management Pack to perform the initial discovery of the InfraStruXure Central servers.

Start the ISX Central Registration tool that you can find in the management pack download folder. To add a new ISX Central registration, click Add. You will be asked to provide a name and FQDN for the ISX Central. The name can be any descriptive name.

The FQDN should be the IP address or FQDN of the ISX Central. Do not use a full URL here. The registry is updated immediately.

Look in the registry.

All registry changes are made in the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\APC\ MsScOpsMgrMpForIsxc
• The registered names appear as the REG_SZ values Name0…Name<n>
• The registered FQDNs appear as the REG_SZ values

Create a run as account and associate it with the run-as profile. O

Click next

Click New which starts the Create Run As Account Wizard and opens the General Properties page

create a new run as account.

Click Next

The Run As account should be created as a Simple Authentication Run As Account. Simple Authentication - any generic user name and password combination, for example, Web form, SQL authentication, or anything else that accepts user name and password.

The username and password should have access to the ISX Central.

“More secure” means that when you associate the Run As account with a Run As profile, you have to provide the specific computer names that you want the Run As credentials distributed to. By positively identifying the destination computers, you can prevent the spoofing scenario that was described before.

In the This Run As Account will be used to manage the following objects area select All targeted objects

On the Distribution tab, in the Selected computers: area, click Add to open the Computer Search tool; Search by computer name (Default), then type in the computer name. The computer name is the computer name where you have run the ISX Central Registration tool.

Enable the “The InfraStruXure Central Registration discovery” discovery. This discovery targets computers running Windows Server (i.e. the Microsoft.Windows.Server.Computer Operations Manager class) and looks for the registry keys that are written by the registration utility. This rule is disabled by default, which renders the Management Pack dormant on import.

Enable the override for the computer object where the you have run the ISX Central Registration tool. Don’t forget to enable the “Agent Proxy” option under Agent Properties > Security.

After a while the ISX Central  will be discovered and you will be able to monitor your UPS infrastructure!!

Hope this helps,

Alexandre Verkinderen

OpsMgr : two new Novell Linux Management packs

Hi,

Novell just announced two new additions to the Novell Linux Management Pack or NLMP family:

SLES 11 and RHEL 5.x.

The Novell Linux Management Packs for OpsMgr expands the monitoring capabilities of Operations Manager by enabling monitoring of key Linux services that are not monitored now with the Cross platform management packs.

You can download the NLMP for OpsMgr from here:

http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=QD-rc_brurs

Thanks,

Alexandre Verkinderen

OpsMgr : Certificate for this system is not valid when installing Linux agent

Today I ran into some Linux agent deployment issues. I needed to monitor about 20 Redhat Machines . In such an environment environment, Kerberos authentication is not possible. Therefore, certificates are used between the management server and the UNIX-based or Linux-based computers.

First if you have some Cross-platform agent deployment issues please have a look at the following blog posts:

• http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb/archive/2009/07/21/opsmgr-r2-xplat-agent-deployment-field-notes.aspx
• http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb/archive/2009/09/02/more-opsmgr-x-plat-notes.aspx
• http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb/archive/2009/07/22/enable-opsmgr-module-logging.aspx
• http://blog.xplatxperts.com/xplat-xperts/2009/08/opsmgr-cross-platform-discovery-errors.html

Ok, let’s start!

So after making sure I had all the pre-requisites needed to deploy an Linux agent I launched the discovery wizard

But my agent installation failed because the certificate could not be signed.

The certificate signing process does the following:

For an unknow reason my certifcate was not signed and trusted.

 I also got the following error in my event log:

Unexpected ScxCertLibException: Unable to open root store
; input data is: -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIDHjCCAgYCAQEwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEFBQAwZjEYMBYGA1UEAxMPU0NYLUNlcnRp
ZmljYXRlMTAwLgYDVQQMEydTQ1g2MzMzNzZEMi1FM0UyLTRmMzEtODQ2MS1EMDky

To solve this problem you need to sign the certificate on your OpsMgr server following this procedure:

 Download and install Winscp on your OpsMgr server.

 Start Winscp and connect to your Linux machine

Click yes

Browse to /etc/opt/microsoft/scx/ssl

Copy the key scx-host-<hostname>.pem  to your opsmgr server.

Open the command prompt on your OpsMgr server and change directories to the location where you copied the certificate. Type the command

“scxcertconfig -sign scx-host-<hostname>.pem scx_new.pem”

and then press ENTER. This command will self-sign your certificate (scx-host-<hostname>.pem) and then save the new certificate.

Rename your scx_new.pem file with scx-host-<hostname>.ad.pem and replace the original file on your linux server with this file.

Connect to your Linux server with putty

and type scxadmin –restart

This step is very important! If you don’t restart the scxadmin the discovery wizard will still complain about the certificate not being signed!!

Now close your discovery wizard and re launch it.

The Discovery Wizard discovers the computer and tests to see that the certificate is valid. If the Discovery Wizard verifies that the computer can be discovered and that the certificate is valid, the Discovery Wizard adds the newly discovered computer to the Operations Manager database.Almost immediately you will get a message saying the agent is successfully signed and installed:

Hope this helps,

Alexandre Verkinderen

OpsMgr bug : console crashing when creating an override on cluster resource group monitor

Be aware that there is a bug when you want to create an override on the resource group rollup monitor to change the maintenance mode behavior!

Let’s see:

In my example I have one cluster with 2 cluster nodes. I needed to do some maintenance on my nodes and they needed to be rebooted. So I put one node in maintenance mode so that my NOC team will not get alerted, do what I had to do and finally restarted my node and do the same for the other node.

Suddenly I had someone of the NOC team yelling at me that they did receive an alert saying that there was a problem with the cluster resource group!!

I opened the cluster resource group health explorer and indeed:

The underlying resources were in maintenance mode but not the availability rollup monitor! So I had a look at the monitor and apparently the monitor is configured to rollup maintenance mode as an error:

So I wanted to change the maintenance mode parameter so that when I put a node into maintenance mode the monitor will rollup the maintenance mode as maintenance  mode and not rollup the maintenance mode as an error:

And here is the catch:

When you want to save your override you will get this nice red error! So it’s impossible to change how the behavior of the rollup resource group monitor!

So now, when we need to put a cluster node in maintenance mode we also put the resource groups in maintenance mode.

Have fun,

Alexandre Verkinderen

OpsMgr Webconsole Runtime error “Server Error in ‘/’ Application”

Just a little reminder that if you install the OpsMgr web console after the UI console has already been installed you will need to Copy the following files from the %Program Files%\System Center Operations Manager 2007 directory to the %Program Files%\System Center Operations Manager 2007\Web Console\Bin directory:

• Corgent.Diagramming.CommandResources.dll
• Corgent.Diagramming.CustomElements.dll
• Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common.dll
• Microsoft.ReportViewer.Webforms.dll

Otherwise you will get the following error when launching the webconsole:

Hope this helps,

Alexandre Verkinderen