R2 Availability in July

Although the docs and the eval version of OpsMgr R2 have been released the actual production code will not be available until 1st July according to the Microsoft Product Team bloggers such as Justin.

1st July! Really? Well yes, even though the eval RTM bits (build no 7221) was made available on 21st May. So that is about 6 weeks. The question most people will ask (rightly) is why it takes so long to copy some files to the main download centres such as Select, TechNet Plus and MSDN?

I know a group of us went through the same questions with the release of MOM 2005. There is some process that is linked to the sending out of the DVDs which was a weak excuse 4 years ago and is pathetic now that even TechNet Plus can be bought “diskless”. There is also some legal process from what I can remember. Microsoft makes a big deal about process and MOF around the management products. It looks like someone at Microsoft needs to take a serious look at their own processes. In these days taking 6 weeks to release code which has RTMed is ridiculous as most people download and do not use the DVDs. More so as the quote at MMS was “availability in 30 days” and not just announcements. To most people that means the production bits. Come on Microsoft – get your act together. It is the 21st century now.

By the way don’t even ask your Microsoft team to cut you a DVD. It was possible to do that years ago but then Microsoft made it a dismissible offence.

According to the Upgrade Guide you can upgrade from the R2 eval or even to the R2 Release Candidate. You can not directly upgrade from a pre SP1 version. Kevin has a good post on his upgrade from SP1 to R2. If you want to go R2 before July the only option is to use the eval version and then do an upgrade when the production bits are out. Not very satisfactory. Can someone from Microsoft post an official and reasonable reason why it takes 6 weeks and will break the promise made at MMS?

OpsMgr R2 Releases

Well it looks like the team have got the RTM code out before the 30 day target. Good news

So far on the downloads are

The OpsMgr 2007 R2 Evaluation (1.29 GB)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=93ddf25b-1ef0-4851-81b0-5fb9a2f76181
(Although it does not say how long the eval copy is for)
Also the requirements are now saying 4 GB for the server roles rather than 2 GB for SP1.

The R2 Documentation (9 docs and an XML file – all have to be downloaded individually – it would be nice to have a single zip file as well with all the docs)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=19bd0eb5-7ca0-41be-8c0f-2d95fe7ec636

And at 4.9 MB -  The Service Level Dashboard Management Pack 2.0 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 assists you in tracking, managing, and reporting on your line-of-business (LOB) application service levels. It displays a list of applications and their performance and availability against service level goals.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1d9d709f-9628-46a8-952b-a78f5dd2bdd9

They are showing new R2 pages on the download pages but these ones are still talking about the Release Candidate so that they have not been updated yet,

Related Resources

1. Operations Manager 2007 R2 Home Page
2. Operations Manager 2007 R2 product documentation
3. Operations Manager 2007 R2 TechNet page

We just need the full version to be released which should be soon if the eval version is out.

Exchange 2007 MP Oddities

This post relates to OpsMgr 2007 SP1 with Exchange 2007 MP v6.0.6461.0.

Normally I ensure that there is an agent on each Exchange server before deploying the MP. This ensures that the underlying OS and IIS are OK before getting involved in the Exchange MP. But on this occasion the customer had one Exchange server that they did not want to have an agent on as it was a temporary server used for migration and was being decommissioned in a month.

After deploying the MP I received the usual alerts from the Test-OwaConnectivity, Test-ActiveSyncConnectivity, and Test-WebServicesConnectivity rules which indicated that the script New-TestCasConnectivityUser.ps1 needs to be run to create the test mailboxes as per the MP Guide. This was done but I was still seeing some alerts but looking closely at the detail they showed that although the alerts were coming from the Exchange server with the agent they were actually referring to the mailbox server that did not have the agent. The Cas_GUID part showed that the GUID was one that I had not seen on running the script originally. I ran the New-TestCasConnectivityUser.ps1 script on the server without an agent and that resolved those alerts. It created the CAS_GUID account with the same GUID that I had seen in the alert.

Initially I could not run the script as the server had a recovery storage group on it. As that can not have mailboxes added the script fails. You need to remove the recovery storage group before running the script on that server,

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125197.aspx

You need to run the commands get-storagegroup and get-mailboxdatabase to get the information to get the right one to remove.

Another alert I saw was that there was an error for the external OWA test. In the MP Guide it says

To set an external URL, you must run the Set-OwaVirtualDirectory Exchange Management Shell command. The syntax of the command is: set-owavirtualdirectory “<Server name>\owa (Default Web site)” -externalurl:https://<Fully Qualified Domain Name>/owa

I checked and found that this was already set correctly. I then discovered that the Exchange server needed Rollup 7 whereas these ones only had Rollup 6. This is because the domain name that the client uses is different from the FQDN that they have and so have a disjoint namespace.

Note that Rollup 8 has been released.

R2 T Minus 7

As they announced at the MMS that OpsMgr R2 should be released with 30 days (28th April) that means that it should be out in the next 7 days if they are going to keep to that day.

Disk Space Free Report Solved!

At a session by Daniel Savage and Vitaly Filimonov on the new features of reporting (Service Level Tracking with integration into SharePoint – different from Service Level Dashboard, new report model for Report Builder and more) in R2 Vitaly demonstrated building a report using SQL queries which he built up to get a table report which included disk space and disk free. This is the report that everyone has asked for and from my previous blogs (here and here) on this particular report that generated the most comments and e-mails.

Although the screen shot above does not show the disk free column it is there just cut off on the slide.

Vitaly provided the SQL Query that he used in the demo so if the other columns like processor, memory are not needed then they can be removed. The other thing about R2 is that once you create a new report you can save that as a management pack and then export it and import it into other systems.

When I get back from Vegas I will be looking at this in my test environment running R2 RC and will report back on this report once I have tested it. But it is looking good for getting this most requested of reports. At last!

Interop Connectors for System Center

With the purchase of Engyro Microsoft purchased the ability to link into other systems. The connectors work initially with OpsMgr R2 and will eventually also work with Service Manager. This uses WS-Man and Open Pegasus which is the same as R2′s ability to monitor Linux/UNIX servers.

The first set will be

 

They announced at the MMS today that these will be available 30 days after R2. The beta is available at

Connect Site under the System Center TAP/Beta https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=446&DownloadID=18150

They will be focusing on connectors for Service Manager and the next ones for OpsMgr will be:-