To R2 or not to R2?

That is indeed the question.

This was something that I was concerned about but with the release of the new Exchange 2007 MP it is confirmed – this is an R2 only MP.

This is great if you are on R2 but as R2 is a Software Assurance release there will be organisations that bought OpsMgr without SA and so will not be able to use this MP. This brings up the question of support. After all the Microsoft standard for support is 5 + 5 which means that MOM 2005 is still supported but how many new 2005 MPs have you seen?

If the OS or application is only using some events and perfmon counters it can not be too hard to create MPs for MOM 2005, OpsMgr 2007 SP1 and OpsMgr 2007 R2. Notice that I don’t expect anyone to create an MP specifically for OpsMgr 2007 RTM. That is because SP1 is free and fixes so much with the RTM version that you would be foolish not to implement it. But creating 3 MPs would be hard work for complex products that use health models and lots of synthetic transactions. Like the Exchange MP for example. Still I think it is something that MP creators should aspire to. It would be interesting if there were any figures on deployments of MOM 2005 v 2007 and how how many organisations bought 2007 with SA. If Microsoft can show that 90% of organisations have moved to 2007 and most of them have SA then there is a stronger case for R2 only MPs. But there is still a need to support people on older versions. This presents an interesting challenge for Microsoft. I still come across organisations using older OSes and applications. As much as Microsoft would like everyone to move to the latest version the fact is that they don’t but still need to be supported as long as they are in the 5 + 5 timeframe.

It would be nice to see a white paper covering creating MPs for the 3 versions to help MP authors. I think that with the modular nature of OpsMgr it should be possible to create the base MPs for SP1 and have addition MP files that you can import if you have R2 that utilises the extra features and functions in R2. That would mean a different approach to creating a Management Pack but it would help in the long run. Mind you testing would be more complicated. And Microsoft’s track record on testing MPs before releasing them has not been that spectacular.

By the way I have been informed that there will be a native Exchange 2007 MP for SP1 that is due out in Q3. Good news on that front.

Disk Extravaganza

Having posted about the hard disk free space report a few days ago there are a large number of posts recently concerning hard disk monitoring. Hard disk monitoring is one of those givens that all organisations expect from a monitoring solution.

Setting The Thresholds

One area that causes confusion is the double threshold that the disk space monitor uses. Both figures have to be breached to create an alert.

	Warning		Critical
	%	MB	%	MB
System	10	200	5	100
Non System	10	1024	5	2048

Having talked to a few customers I have found the best way to discuss it is to use the spreadsheet created by Jonathan Almquist. This allows you to put in figures for typical hard disks and see when the threshold will be breached and whether it was MB or % that did it. Pump in some larger figures (as suggested by Anders) and the threshold changes to the other etc. It is a great visual tool to use with customers. It is a good article that explains the monitor really well.

Hard Disk Script Alert

Scott Moss at MyITForum updated his MOM 2005 script last July and turned it into an MP. There was a need for this type of script in 2005 and I used part of Scott’s along with Geeky Girls to create my own 2005 disk space script. He has redone his MOM 2005 script to ignore the MB threshold and added the ability to set a threshold on an individual disk using a percentage value using the DiskThreshold.MOM file, or disable alerting all together on a per disk basis using the NoDiskAlerts.MOM file. I find that with the 2007 monitor I have not needed to run a custom script. Understanding the double threshold makes it easy to customise and the fact that you can now create overrides for individual disks is useful and something that was not possible in MOM 2005. I suppose if you need to give other people the rights to make those changes then having the 2 files on the servers that they can change is a good idea. But I am happy with the default monitor.

Getting the Hard Disk Free Space Info

Here is a script to extract the percentage free disk space on all servers in a SCOM environment, and email it to an administrator. From Electric Bunnies (aka Geeky Girl aka Vanessa). I have not tested this one.

I was talking to Stefan Stranger at the MMS and he has a SQL query which returns all the disk space for the servers regardless of the OS rather than running a report per OS.

Run the query against the DW database in SQL Management Studio. Change the dates to dates that you want the info on. You can click the top corner of the table like a spreadsheet and copy and paste the info to a spreadsheet for further work.

Query in doc text file – SQL Query for Disk Space

Updated Disk Space Report

And Zeimbor (Ziemek Borowski) has posted a new version of his disk space report which looks a lot better that the “proof of concept” one that he originally did. He provides the MP as a .MP and .XML.

He also provides the SQL query and has redone the zip file which seem to cause a lot of problems for other people. And the MP can be downloaded with the zip file which contains the XML file. It shows up as a directory called Board in the reports. I don’t know why but if you use the XML file you can change that. I like the way you can put in a figure for free space like 20 and all server hard disks with less that 20% free will show up as a red graph bar on the right. It is a really great report now and highly recommended. My big disappointment (and others from the correspondence I have received on this subject) is why didn’t Microsoft do a report like that out of the box.

I did find an issue with it (well not really with the report) as System Center DPM creates a large number of mounted disks with very long names which throws the report a bit. Exporting it as a PDF is a nightmare but I found that exporting it to Excel tames that column and still shows all the nice info in the report.

I have tried Ziemek’s report on R2 and it works on that as well. Good news.