3 New System Center RTMs

As expected there have been announcements at this years MMS. The System Center team try and focus their release efforts around this event.

So we have

System Center Data Protection (DPM) 2010 –
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/data-protection-manager.aspx

and

System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE 2010) –
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/essentials.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenteressentials/archive/2010/04/19/sc-essentials-2010-is-released-to-manufacturing.aspx

Info on both here –
http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2010/04/19/the-right-tools-for-the-job-sce-2010-dpm-2010.aspx

The biggie that ties them all together and was expected last year.

System Center Service Manager 2010 –
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/service-manager.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_stranger/archive/2010/04/21/download-microsoft-system-center-service-manager-2010-eval.aspx

http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb/archive/2010/04/21/service-manager-2010-rtm-eval.aspx

And some additional tools and visualisation for OpsMgr.

Following last Friday’s Office 2010 RTM. This release consists of two downloads:

1. Visio 2010 Add-in and Operations Manager 2007 R2

2. SharePoint 2010 Visio Services Data Provider

What’s new:

In addition to all the great functionality we added in the original Visio 2007 add-in, this adds,

•The Visio 2010 Add-in fully integrates the Visio 2007 add-in functionality into the Visio 2010 ribbon for a seamless user experience.
•The SharePoint 2010 Visio Services Data Provider leverages the power of Visio Services to provide the ability display Visio diagrams as live dashboards in SharePoint pulling health state directly from Operations Manager.

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2010/04/20/visio-and-sharepoint-2010-extensions-for-operations-manager-have-shipped.aspx

This lot will take some digesting.

Silect MP Studio v4.1

Silect have just released their latest version of MP Studio.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of our latest release of MP Studio available for upgrade now for all MP Studio customers currently on maintenance. MP Studio v4.1 has now added additional capabilities to help you further decrease complexity, speed implementation, eliminate risk and increase productivity with System Center Operations Manager:

MP Studio Enhancements Included in this Release:

New Column Creation Wizard for more flexible custom Management Pack Documentation reporting.  MP Studio’s already powerful MP documentation capabilities have been enhanced to include an easy-to-use column creation wizard, where users can extract a subset of data such as Event ID or Frequency and have the data neatly displayed in a dedicated column.

Override Management has become even more flexible with added support for targeting of Groups. Bulk override management has also been extended to allow users to modify the targets for the block of overrides they are creating.

The MP Development Center now supports offline creation of management pack contents such as Targets, Event Rules and Service Monitors. This new operation provides enhanced flexibility when developing an MP where access to a server hosting the line of business application may not be available.

Additional Installation and Administrative Features have also been enhanced in this new version.

Try it for Yourself:

Now is the perfect time to start a free trial of MP Studio for System Center Operations Manager to test drive these new features for yourself.

Request a Product Download or contact us today for more information or a demo of any of these exciting new features at info@silect.com.

Ian, Feb 2010

SCCM R3

My old ex colleague and buddy Jeff Wettlaufer, announce that System Center Configuration Manager will be having an R3 release.

http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2009/09/08/announcing-system-center-configuration-manager-2007-r3.aspx

R3? That is a new one on me. I wonder how the marketing guys came up with that one? And will we see it spread to other products? Anyone for Windows 2008 R3 and then R4?

It looks like the big thing for this release is power management. Interesting as this is an area that 1E has been active in for some time with their NightWatchman product.

http://www.1e.com/SoftwareProducts/NightWatchman/Index.aspx

You can also read more about NightWatchman in the 1E blog.

Ian

MMS DVD

My DVD finally arrived today so I can catch up with all the sessions that I missed. The MMS was 27th April to 1st May so it has taken 11 weeks. Soon to be time for the next MMS!

32 v 64 Bit Programs

Reading Aidan Finn’s post about having problems with agents as he used the 32 bit MOMCertImport.exe tool on a 64 bit server reminded me of a post I wanted to do.

I had a similar problem in that the server build team wanted to build the servers with the OpsMgr agent which was fine. But for DCs they got hold of oomads.msi but were using the 64 bit version on a 32 bit server. So obviously it did not work. And then came to me with the problem.

The files are different sizes but why can’t Microsoft call them oomads32.msi and oomads64.msi etc. If you download KB patches they name the patches differently. One I downloaded recently was 354607_ENU_i386_zip.exe with the 64 bit as 354627_ENU_x64_zip.exe. In the OpsMgr directories there are the various directories for the different versions. Would it be that difficult to name them to reflect the OS version? It would save a few PSS calls I am sure.

SolarWinds free Exchange Monitor

Saw this at 4Sysops

http://4sysops.com/archives/solarwinds-exchange-monitor/

Nothing to do with SCOM but it does provide monitoring. Reminds me of Quest Spotlight. By the Quest do some free tools including Spotlight for Windows –
http://www.quest.com/free-tools/
.

SolarWinds Exchange Monitor is small and neat but it can only point to one server at a time and it does not remember the servers so you have to type in the name each time. You can configure the thresholds but it is only one set. So if you have a set for BE servers and another for FE servers then you can only have one set. But it does a nice “at a glance” view of services, mail queues, CPU utilisation and disk space. It only does Exchange 2000 and 2003. It is an 8.4 MB download.

This free desktop dashboard continuously monitors Microsoft® Exchange servers to deliver real-time insight into Exchange services, mail queue sizes, and host server health. With Exchange Monitor at your fingertips, you’ll be able to track Exchange health at-a-glance and ensure this mission-critical app never fails you.

SolarWinds free Exchange Monitor makes it easy to:

• Quickly identify and troubleshoot Exchange server problems, preventing email delays and calendaring issues
• Spot growing mail queues that can indicate bigger issues, like transport failures, Internet connection failures, and virus activity
• Leverage out-of-the-box settings based on best practices to start monitoring Exchange immediately
• Prevent performance issues before they impact users with built-in red, yellow, and green health indicators
• Monitor critical server health indicators, including disk space, CPU utilization, and memory utilization, to ensure optimal hardware functionality

SolarWinds Exchange Monitor

 

Quest Spotlight on Exchange

SCOM 2007 Exchange Computer view shows state of components.

In SCOM you can create your own performance views in dashboards. As many as you like. Here is a 4 pane dashboard for an Exchange server.

MMS 208 Keynotes

The keynote videos from Bob Muglia and Brad Anderson are available to watch at:
Silverlight –
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mgmtsummit/default.mspx

WMV File –

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mgmtsummit/materials.mspx

Bob Muglia Keynote – April 29, 2008
Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp., outlined the next phase in the company’s strategy to enable organizations to achieve more dynamic IT and announced technology innovations that accrue to that strategy.
Written Transcript | Watch the on-demand Webcast (.wmv file, 1 hr 5 min 53 sec)

Brad Anderson Keynote – April 30, 2008
Brad Anderson, General Manager, Management and Services Division, announced details on the product roadmaps for specific tools within the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) for Software Assurance.
Watch the on-demand Webcast (.wmv file, 1 hr 10 min 13 sec)

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.