MMS Press Announcements

If you are not at the MMS like Stefan and myself then you can check out all the press announcements at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mgmtsummit/default.mspx.

Microsoft give the press the news but they are not allowed to publish until the keynote is finished but you can read the press announcement for the speech at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/apr08/04-29MMS08PR.mspx

Key points

• Public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions (out of the box for HP-UX, Read Hat, Solaris and SUSE)
• Working with OpenPegasus – Pegasus is an open-source implementation of the DMTF CIM and WBEM standards.
• Beta of the updated System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors
• Public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”)

The rest of the press releases are customer stories.

So the good news is the beefing up of support for heterogeneous systems – both managing and connecting. VNext of SCVMM was already known. So nothing big to announce as these are all betas which I thought might be the case. It will now be interesting to see if the partners announce something big. I will be commentating on the implications of the announcements in future posts.

And the new funky look for the System Center web site (marketing – not technical) is now live

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/default.aspx

Proxy Enabled Quick Check

If you need to quickly see what servers have the Proxy Enabled setting (needed for AD, Exchange, cluster and others) then you can use PowerShell or one of the tools available (the one by Boris is my favourite) but did you know that you can simply create a view?

Go to My Workspace and create a new State View. Give the view an appropriate name, and change “Show data related to:” from Entity to Agent. The criteria that is displayed increases. Scroll down and chose “Proxy Enabled is true” and OK to save the view.

Voila! – you now have a view that shows all the agents where the Proxy Setting is enabled. Note that as agent is chosen management servers do not show even though technically they have an agent.

If you want to see the servers where it is not enabled then create a state view based on agent but do not select any criteria. Once you have the view Personalise it and tick the column for Proxy Enabled and you will see it set to True or False for each agent. There are a lot of useful columns that will give some great information about the agents.

SCOM 2007 Authoring Console

A number of people have mentioned that the Authoring Console has now RTMed and is available in 32 and 64 bit. See http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2008/04/25/authoring-console-is-now-available.aspx for links to download.

I looked at my current version on my test system and the version number said 6.0.6278.0 (). I uninstalled that, just in case, and installed the RTM version. It has exactly the same version number so that it is difficult to know if you have updated the version.

Just in case I hade done something stupid I uninstalled the program, reinstalled the RC version, checked that and uninstalled it. I then reinstalled the RTM version and the version numbers are identical. Not good.

So if you have installed the RC of the Authoring Console on a number of machines then I would recommend going around and ensuring that they are uninstalled first before starting the new installations otherwise you will not be able to tell. Or it could be that the RC was so good they did not have to do anything and just released as it was!

Update – 1st May 2008

Ellis Paul from MIcrosoft UK asked the Product Group about this and here is their answer:

Unfortunately the version numbers are the same in the RC and the RTW release. We locked the version to match OpsMgr SP1 for various reasons. We should have made it more clear which version you have installed, but if you look at the Help->About dialog there are a few subtle differences. From RC to RTW the line “Version 6.0.6278.0 ()” was changed to “Authoring Console Version 6.0.6278 ()” and the blank registration section was removed.

 

Hope this helps,

Well glad that is cleared up. A bit too subtle for me to notice as I was looking at the version number for differences! My comment to the Product Group is that the golden rule of verssion numbers is that you are supposed to give a unique number to each version. That is the whole point of version numbers!

Reporting Database

While looking at the database sizes in the new Operations Manager 2007 Performance and Scalability Guide it struck me how large the reporting database could become. More so as I am working with a client on MOM 2005 at the moment to try and tame the reporting database which is up to 500 GB.

This database had the Summary Reporting MP installed so it was aggregating the data but also keeping the raw data. So it was a case of changing the grooming parameters and dropping them down slowly so as not to knock out temdb and impinge on other jobs. A good pace to start is Pete’s post which then links off to good stuff by Marcus Oh on the DTS task and grooming and summary reporting.

http://www.it-jedi.net/2006/08/thoughts-on-summary-report_115689315829015304.html

Marry that with Kevin Holman’s MOM 2005 SQL queries and you can sort it all out. But slowly.

With 2007 the aggregation happens automatically so you don’t have to worry about it (so much anyway). And the report on the DW is superb. When I first saw it I thought “why can’t more reports be like this” and secondly “how did they do it?”.

PDF – Data Warehouse Properties Sample Report

Of more concern to me was what value the reports will give the organisation given that they may have to have a database of a few terabytes (plus the capacity to back it up). Organisations have mixed feelings about reports. Some think they may be useful but are more concerned with alerting. Managers seem to be keener on having the reports but are sometimes not sure what they actually want. And some people think it is a magic bucket that you can pull out details of any server over ant time period and give exactly what you are looking for whatever that may be. If only.

If you are not running the reports or even if you are running them but not doing anything with them why do you need reporting especially as it takes up a lot of space?

I would like to see an easy way for OpsMgr (the product group won’t go back to 2005) to show what counters are associated with each report (not having to scan through docs!). A tool that shows the list of reports with the associated counters and you just highlight the report you are not interested in and it creates an override for all those counters. It also knows that if the counter is used in another report it won’t override it until it is the last instance. No point in collecting something you will never use. Even better would be after you switched the rules off a dialogue asking if you would like to delete all those counters from the reporting database so it cleans it up for you without having to mess around with SQL yourself. After all you may not be sure you wanted that report until it collected data but then decided it was not needed. This would help tame the reporting database size. Next version perhaps?

DB Sizes Perf and Scalability Part 2

Stefan left this comment on the DB size post from yesterday.

I was contacting Kerrie yesterday with the same questions. This is her answer to why their figures differ from Satya’s.

“Hi Stefan, yes we did look at that while we were working on the book. Satya came out with his several months after ours. We take a different approach – he is basing it on the number of events collected per day (ground up). Ours took a look at the growth of the databases over time, in multiple environments. More of a top-down approach. We also include a fudge factor ..

our calculator has been verified in numerous installations, including some by MCS consultants. “

I thought it was important enough to turn into a full post to bring it to peoples attention as not everyone reads the comments.

Kerrie is Kerrie Myler co-author of the unleashed books and an ex colleague of mine (small world).

The big thing is that Satya’s figures are in the Performance and Scalability white paper so will be used by people as “official”. Only people that look at the blogs will know differently. If these are wrong and the disk space needed is significantly larger then some organisations will not be happy. The Product Group really need to come out with an official sizing guide that is credible. It is pretty easy to work out the number of servers needed but organisations get more upset over disk space sizing – especially when you are asking them for several terabytes of space.

I stand by my answer from yesterday to use the figures from the spreadsheet based on Kerrie and Cameron’s work as basing it on real world database sizes is more realistic in my opinion. Plus customers get less annoyed if you overspec and they find out that the usage is not as big rather than underspec and run out of space.

DB Sizes from Operations Manager 2007 Performance and Scalability Guide

Pete mentioned that the new sizing and performance guide had some changes. One area I looked at was database size. I picked out these figures from the white paper and stuck them in a table to make it easier to see what was going on. The increases in size are linear with the number of agents.

Database Size Estimates

No of servers	OM DB	Reporting DB
15 to 250	2.5 GB	160 GB
250 to 500	5 GB	320 GB
500 to 750	7.3 GB	480 GB
750 to 1000	9.8 GB	640 GB
1000 to 3000	30 GB	1.9 TB
3000 to 6000	58 GB	3.8 TB

I punched some numbers into the sizing spreadsheet (based on Kerrie and Cameron’s work) and the numbers are significantly higher. Here is the table using spreadsheet sizer:-

No of servers	OM DB	Reporting DB
250	9 GB	293 GB
500	17 GB	586 GB
750	26 GB	679 GB
1000	35 GB	1.1 TBB
3000	103 GB	3.5 TB
6000	205 GB	7.0 TB

Satya Vel posted a spreadsheet last year and using that it matches the figures in the white paper. But then again he was one of the primary reviewers for the paper. He does say in his post that the sizing is based on MSIT and a couple of TAP customers.

So which one do you choose? Well if you are conservative you will use the sizing spreadsheet even though the OpsMgr db is 3 to 4 times bigger and the DW about 2 times bigger. If you think that Satya has a significant sample then use that spreadsheet to save space – especially with the size of the reporting DB. I will continue to err on the side of caution until more information is available.

MMS Announcement Predictions

An interesting article that Techlog highlights mentions that Microsoft should buy companies to fill in the gaps in their heterogeneous monitoring to compete with the Big 4 (Tivoli, CA, HP and BMC). The article also mentions that perhaps there may be announcements at MMS. The trouble buying companies is integrating them. And there is the problem of them working – remember software metering in SMS v2? Worked OK on small numbers but could not scale to the numbers SMS dealt with. I remember Kirill Tartarinov saying that he was against buying companies based on his experience at BMC. But he has moved on so perhaps the strategy will change.

Well it is always fun to second guess the announcements. From last years MMS I would have expected the big announcement to be the RTM of System Center Service Manager but we know that is now delayed. SCOM has had SP1 delivered and SCCM has SP1 in RC form. But SP’s are not much to talk about. They could always talk about how they have renamed Business Desktop Deployment to Microsoft Deployment! That is sure to get a standing ovation.

I am hoping that they will announce the SCOM model for Capacity Planner as it is over a year now since SCOM was released and the “official” sizing tool is still not here even though SCCP RTMed at the beginning of February. And SCOM has had SP1 released.

So what is there left? Next versions of SCOM, SCCM and SCVMM? They are still a bit young to have new versions I would have thought. I will be interested to see what the big announcements are as I can not think of any although another SP or R2 release for SCOM to fix the remaining issues would get my vote. If they have decided to buy a company it will be interesting to see what that will bring and if it is as good as the purchase of SoftGrid which I thought was one of Microsoft’s best purchases.

What would you like to see announced next week?

Windows Performance Tools Kit

This has now been updated for the Windows 2008 SDK. It is quite amazing how much info it will gather. I particularly like the ability to graph the CPU by process or thread. Useful in your bag of tools if you need to do some analysis on a server where you know there are performance problems but are not sure what is causing them.

You can chose the graphs and the details in the graph, zoom in to expand a particular timeframe and overlay one chart on another. And it is free.

“The tools are designed for the analysis of a wide range of performance problems including application start times, boot issues, deferred procedure calls and interrupt activity, system responsiveness issues, application resource utilization, and interrupt storms. The tools are built on the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) infrastructure. ETW enables Windows and applications to efficiently generate events. Events can be enabled and disabled at any time without requiring system or process restarts.”

Windows Performance Tools Kit, v.4.1.1

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx

XPS Viewer to read the documentation

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b8dcffdd-e3a5-44cc-8021-7649fd37ffee&DisplayLang=en

Useful Lists

There is a lot of useful information about SCOM 2007 but it is scattered in white papers or various blogs. Luckily some of the bloggers have created lists which are useful.

List of hardware requirements – guide and spreadsheet by Sata Vel (DeploymentMan from the Product Group)
http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2008/04/10/opsmgr-2007-hardware-guidance-what-hardware-do-i-buy.aspx

OpsMgr security account rights mapping – what accounts need what privileges? Spreadsheet by Kevin Holman (Microsoft)
http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2008/04/15/opsmgr-security-account-rights-mapping-what-accounts-need-what-privileges.aspx

What SQL maintenance should I perform on my OpsMgr databases? Kevin Holman
http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2008/04/12/what-sql-maintenance-should-i-perform-on-my-opsmgr-databases.aspx

Useful Operations Manager 2007 SQL queries – Kevin Holman
http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2007/10/18/useful-operations-manager-2007-sql-queries.aspx

List of Tools Available – Stefan Stranger (was MVP now Microsoft)
http://weblog.stranger.nl/opsmgr_2007_toolbox
And one from Anders
http://contoso.se/blog/?p=266
List of Resource Kit Tools
http://blogs.technet.com/smsandmom/archive/2008/01/08/opsmgr-2007-list-of-resource-kit-tools.aspx

All KB Articles
http://kbalertz.com/Technology_533.aspx

Notification properties – Clive Eastwood
http://blogs.technet.com/cliveeastwood/archive/2007/10/12/a.aspx

Syslog Facility Names and Priorities – Clive Eastwood
http://blogs.technet.com/cliveeastwood/archive/2007/09/07/generating-alerts-from-unix-linux-syslog-messages-in-operations-manager-2007.aspx

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Training Videos
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/opsmgr/bb498237.aspx
System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 Training Videos
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/opsmgr/bb986763.aspx

MPs not in MP Catalogue
I started a page on my blog at http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/mps/
Pete at SystemCenterForum.org has produced one as well which looks neater and he is more likely to keep it up to date.
http://www.systemcenterforum.org/mps/

Collection of Maintenance Mode Scripts, Utilities and MPs for Opsmgr and Essentials 2007
http://www.systemcenterforum.org/collection-of-maintenance-mode-scripts-utilities-and-mps-for-opsmgr-and-essentials-2007/

And talking of SystemCenterForum.org – they have lots of lists:

• How to Guides http://www.systemcenterforum.org/howto/
• Articles http://www.systemcenterforum.org/articles/
• Downloads http://www.systemcenterforum.org/downloads/
• FAQ http://www.systemcenterforum.org/faq/

I have also collated a list of SCOM bloggers which is in the process of being updated (renaming them based on the blog title and removing blogs that have not been updated for a while).
http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/mom-blog-links/

Tip – if you don’t want to add all the blogs to your RSS feed I would suggest the site rollup from SystemCenterForum.org as that covers a lot of what is happening and being released and Walter Chomack scans the blogs and copies posts so you have a single view of the main ones. Techlog blog does this to some extent with other technologies through in.

Win MMS Place

I saw it on the MyITForum and Scott mentions it here. You can put in $25 and win a free ticket to the conference as Secure Advantage has donated a ticket to MyITForum. Need to enter by this Friday – 18th.

Although Scott mentions it is for charity the actual money will go to Rod Trent’s beer fund.

“…the money goes toward improving and expanding the myITforum.com party!”

Rod, at least, does not mention charity in his post. If it was for a real charity I would be happy to put in $25 for a chance to win.