What is in a name?

Since Microsoft bought Operations Manager from NetIQ it has been know affectionately as MOM. With the next version being called System Center Operations Manager 2007 then the obvious short hand is to call it SCOM but that does not have the same ring to it as MOM does. While working with a Microsoft Technical Specialist [...]

Fault Tolerant MOM 2005

As I read an article about the new dual core PCs with dual graphics cards it brought to mind a question that frequently comes up. Should MOM be made fault tolerant? Some organisations say no as it is not a business application and so does not matter while others say yes as if MOM goes [...]

Microsoft Softricity

As Microsoft has now purchased Softricity (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-17SoftricityPR.mspx) I thought I should take a look at it. If it works as well as they show on the web and on their demos then I wonder why all companies would not want to use virtualised application deployment rather than deploying apps the traditional way or using Terminal [...]

Problems with MOM and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i – specifically ScriptScan.dll.

If you are getting a lot of failed scripts with MOM 2005 and are also running McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i then it is a well known problem that has been buzzing about for a while.
Typical is “The remote procedure call failed” error with event 21245.
KB article 890736 – 14 April 2006
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890736/en-us
The KB states
Patch 11 for [...]

Citrix Management Pack

When deploying the Citrix MP I have often seen a lot of WMI errors. I recently came across this thread on the Citrix site.
http://support.citrix.com/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=24&threadID=60156&tstart=0
 
The key bit of the thread is to run dscheck (Data Store Validation Utility) and if there are problems reported run dscheck /clean.
 
Another useful tip in the thread is not to [...]

System Center Virtual Machine Manager beta 1

Well beta 1 has been released but there are already some good posts on it. I did say in my earlier post that virtualistion management will be a big thing and SC VMM is Microsoft’s answer.
Clive Watson has been busy with three posts on VMM with some good screen shots showing the features.
http://blogs.technet.com/clive_watson/archive/2006/08/08/445532.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/clive_watson/archive/2006/08/11/446016.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/clive_watson/archive/2006/08/12/446025.aspx
The Virtual PC [...]

MOM 2005 and ITIL – Part 3

Capacity Management 
The goal of Capacity Management is to understand the future business requirements and ensure that all current and future capacity and aspects of the infrastructure are provided cost effectively to support those objectives. 
Capacity Management tasks 

Monitoring the performance and the throughput of IT services and supporting IT components.

Tuning activities to make efficient use of resources.

Understanding [...]

SCOM 2007 Architecture

One of the interesting things about System Center Operations Manager 2007 is that it is not just MOM v3. But it is also Corporate Error Reporting (CER) v3 (now called Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM)) and Microsoft Audit Collection Services (MACS or sometimes ACS). The original beta of MACS was called Distributed Audit Database (DAD) so [...]