v.Next = 2012

I attended the event “War on Cost” run by Inframon on Friday 5th. There was a whole bunch of Microsofties from Redmond there on their way to TechEd. It was great hearing some of the stuff that will be coming out. As soon as they said that the new products are going to be called 2012 (SCOM, SCCM and SCVMM) I knew that there was going to be a delay. Microsoft name the products based on their financial year which is July to June and not the calendar year. That means anything that has 2012 in the title will not be released until at least July 2011.

OpsMgr will have a public beta in Q2 2011, RC in Q3 and RTM in Q4 (probably about Oct/Nov) – this is calendar year and not Microsoft financial year. Key points are that OpsMgr now has the networking technology from EMC Smarts that they announced a few years ago at a previous MMS, that you can do an in place upgrade from 2007 and at the moment the console looks very similar to 2007. With it being a year away from RTM a lot can change.

They were also very keen to keep a cadence going with the Cumulative Updates being released every quarter and they mentioned that new features could be added as part of the CU. I asked about certificates and DMZ scenarios in 2012 but it seems there will be little change in that area. Which is doubly annoying. Not only is it one of the trickiest areas for organisations to get right but as DMZ agents are often manually installed a quarterly CU means a lot of work to keep them up to date.

ConfigMgr 2012 takes on the System Center style console which is supposed to improve console performance. Flattening the hierarchy and better performance seem to be key areas. Having not looked at it for a while 2012 looks good.

Later this month Opalis 6.3 gets released with connectors for all the System Center products and a new improved one for OpsMgr. Microsoft is working their way through this product to make it more of a Microsoft product. The demos looked pretty good and it looks like another great buy for Microsoft and provides a glue that can link all the System Center products and provide Run Book style automation or even link into other systems. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

I have seen the AViCode stuff before but it was nice to see it demoed now that Microsoft have purchased it. A great tool for monitoring and analysing code and performance problems with web sites – especially .Net.

I am sure these will all be covered at TechEd in more depth so expect more announcements. The main thing that I took away from the day is that I will not be going to the MMS in March as it is too soon to get up to speed on the new version of OpsMgr. A shame as I have gone every second year to coincide with the major releases of the product.

Authoring PRO-Enabled Management Packs

Patrick Pendergast (SCVMM Program Manager) has posted that there is a document out to help create PRO enabled MPs.

http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm/archive/2009/08/25/writing-pro-enabled-management-packs.aspx

This is a 32 page document starting with explaining what PRO is.

Physical Resource Optimization (PRO) is extended through a System Center Operations Manager 2007 management pack.

PRO enables you to  augment the available knowledge in the management packs to make recommendations or take actions that take advantage of the additional capabilities available when workloads are running in a virtualized environment.

PRO relies on Operations Manager 2007 to monitor and collect performance data from hosts and virtual machines within an environment.

Nice diagram showing how it all fits together.

This document goes into a lot of XML and so is not for the faint hearted!

VMM 2008 R2 RTMs

Good news for virtualisation management fans as System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SC VMM) 2008 R2 has now been released and general availability is for 1st Oct.

http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2009/08/24/system-center-virtual-machine-manager-vmm-2008-r2-rtms.aspx

The post mentions a webcast coming up in September.

…upcoming TechNet session ‘Technical Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2’. Presented by our Technical Product Manager Kenon Owens, it will be chocked full of new and cool VMM 2008 R2 items. Go here to register for this Wednesday, September 09, 2009 (10:00 AM Pacific) event.

180 day eval available now at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=292de23c-845c-4d08-8d65-b4b8cbc8397b&displaylang=en
. 3 files to download – about 3 GB.

Feature list

• Live migration
• Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) support that enables multiple Highly Available Virtual Machines (HAVM) per LUN.
• Hot add of storage
• Support for VMware vSphere 4 (VMware VI3 feature parity only)
• SAN Migration into and out of clustered hosts
• Processor flexibility
• Network optimization
• Quick storage migration
• Maintenance mode for hosts
• Support for third party cluster file system, Sanbolic Melio FS
• Support for third party storage class resource, Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows
• Expanded support for iSCSI SANs
• Support for VMware port groups for virtual switches
• Support for Virtual Machine permissions assigned in Hyper-V
• Dynamic policy based load balancing

 

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Host Management

• VMM 2008 R2 creates and manages virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V hosts. When you add a host that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 that does not have Hyper-V enabled, VMM 2008 R2 automatically enables the Hyper-V role on the host.
• VMM 2008 R2 supports the following new features of Windows Server 2008 R2:
  • Live migration between Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered hosts. With live migration, you can migrate a virtual machine from one node of a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to another node in the same cluster without any downtime. Because the virtual machine does not experience any downtime, the move is completely transparent to the users that are connected to the virtual machine.
  • Network optimization detection during virtual machine placement. VMM 2008 R2 supports both Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney, which are Windows Server 2008 R2 features that improve network performance for virtual machines.
  • Network adapters that support the VMQ feature are able to create a unique network queue for each virtual network adapter and then connect that queue directly to the virtual machine’s memory. This connection routes packets directly from the hypervisor to the virtual machine, bypassing much of the processing in the virtualization stack.
  • Network adapters that support the TCP Chimney feature are able to offload the processing of network traffic from the networking stack. Both of these features increase network performance and reduce CPU utilization.
  • Hot addition and removal of virtual hard disks (VHDs). In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V allows users to add and remove VHDs from a virtual machine while it is running.

Windows Server 2008 R2

RTM was with Windows 7 but it is now available for download on (at least TechNet Plus) and MSDN. This means that System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is not far away. This is probably the one System Center family member that has most synergy with OpsMgr. For more info about SCVMM R2 there is a webcast on 7th Sept.

Windows Server 2008 R2 is unique in that it is the first OS from Microsoft that is 64 bit only. That should trigger more applications to be 64 bit only. A 180 demo VHD for Hyper-V can be downloaded from here.

MMS Keynote – Brad Anderson

Brad Anderson did this morning’s keynote. This was more focused than yesterdays but was still quite low energy with not much excitement or feedback from the audience. Most of his talk was futures and about focusing on the client and end up with a demo of the next version of Config Manager showing that an application can be set to follow a user on a number of devices and use different ways of presenting that app depending on the device. If the PC is the users primary device then it installs, if it is not a primary device then a Remote App session shortcut is presented and on some devices they will just get a message saying that the subscribed app is not available on this device.

Service Manager was demoed and that is building up for a release next year.

My old colleague, Jeff Wettlauffer, demonstrated the new OS upgrade method of SCCM installing Windows 7 RC on XP but keeping all the data on the PC without having to copy the data up to a server and back down. Also showed the app compatibility toolkit and then getting that old app to run on Med-V which is basically a copy of Virtual PC with XP but seamless so that the user only sees the app.

The most interesting demo was the new System Center Online tool which builds on WSUS and is like a web based version of WSUS, ForeFront and Config Manager in the cloud that you can log onto and then start managing your desktops with this tool. No servers to buy and no software to buy, install configure and look after. I can see this being very popular in small organisations if they get the pricing right.

Key dates for next major versions

For 2011

• System Center Operations Manager
• System Center Configuration Manager
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• System Center Service Manager

For 2010

• System Center Service Manager
• System Center Data Protection Manager
• System Center Online Desktop Manager
• System Center Essentials

See slide
http://www.scom2k7.com/system-center-roadmap/

No mention of System Center Capacity Manager!

Operations Manager in 2008 Review

I was going to to this at the end of 2008 but other things got in the way.

The big news was that SP1 was released in February. Not just bug fixes but enhancements with the key one speeding up the console so that it was usable. Still not a speed demon but so much more usable without having to wait for the green bar. And if your console is still slow see Cameron’s post to identify bottlenecks. System Center Capacity Planner was released for free but with models only for Exchange and SharePoint. The Engyro connectors were released for free. Well they had to do something with them as SC Service Manager was seriously delayed.

 

March was the release of the only book on OpsMgr worth buying – System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed. Very big. And I even get a couple of mentions in it.

 
In April there was the sold out MMS at Las Vegas and the big news was the beta release of the Cross Platform Extensions that will ship with R2 in 2009. Great beta showing great functionality. Silect also released a free starter version of MP Studio and Savision showed off Live Maps 2 with v3 in December. The Authoring Console was also released although the version number was the same as the RC one!

May saw the release of the Service Level Dashboard Solution Accelerator. May also saw the release of the OpsMgr model for System Center Capacity Planner which was talked about in the documents as the “official” tool for sizing OpsMgr 13 months after OpsMgr was released. Although it is free I panned it.

TechEd, Orlando saw the release of the new System Center logo and branding.

July saw the release of the hotfixes needed for Windows 2008 support. Windows 2008 got some great reviews whereas Vista got hammered.

 

August saw SQL 2008 released and an update to the Service Level Dashboard with Dundas gauges.

October saw the release of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 with integration into OpsMgr.

In November we had the first public beta of R2.

There were a lot of new MPs release, then re-released and then re-released again. Some MPs were released with bugs so shocking you had to wonder of anyone had tested them. I had a number of posts berating some of these. Too many to list which is not good. And some MPs just did not want to be found. SystemCenterForum had to post on how to find the IBM hardware MP.

On the community side the System Center Virtual User Group was formed with some good Live Meeting sessions and a competition that brought out new MPs and scripts. There were some good community MPs. A great MP for backing up unsealed MPs from Derek that now I have changed to using C instead of D I use at all installations. Another favourite is from Raphael Burri when you have multiple forests which has been missing from the AP MP for years. And although 6.0.64520 can find these it still does not do a 100% job but Raphael’s got a fix for that with this MP. I got fed up with all the links and posts for MPs that were not in the main catalogue so I created a page to keep track of them and SystemCenterForum.org has created a much nicer looking page.

Boris Yanushpolsky kept releasing new versions of MP Viewer throughout the year ending up with v1.7 in June. A must have tool and it is free. He also released Module Explorer in Feb, and v2 in June. Run As profile configuration helper v1 was done in Feb. A prolific year as well as the posts and PowerShell scripts. Other people released tools as well and Stefan summerised them here and SystemCenterForum.org created a new page to keep track of them.

More bloggers and posts through 2008 showing how much momentum the product has picked up. I found it difficult to keep track and remember all the good posts that everyone has written. Some bloggers started off and showed great promise but posts just stopped. It is difficult to blog on a regular basis. My favourite blogger of 2008 has to be Kevin Holman with an honorable mention to Jonathan Almquist and Marius Sutara. I star good posts that I want to find quickly again. I have starred most of Kevin’s blog. Great articles explaining things in depth, clearly and not documented elsewhere. Required reading. There are many other good blogs out there but for me those stood out.

PowerShell’s use kept increasing during the year but half of me thought it was because the console GUI was not that good compared to the learning curve of PowerShell. There is no doubt it is powerful and System Center Forum had a nice run of posts going through the most popular commands in October.

 

On licensing I had a post on trying to explain the various types. Then I had a rant about the fact that Microsoft had changed the licensing of OpsMgr but had not seen fit to update the web site with the latest information. That was in May and it took some prodding with e-mails and explaining how, at least in the UK, they were probably breaking some laws. That seem to get them moving and in July the web site was fixed with the correct information. Come on Microsoft. You can do better than this!

For me it has been a busy year with constant customer work. Good for the finances and for improving my skills but not so great for posting. I have a pile of half written posts that I did not have time to finish off, or the post became moot due to a new update or someone else wrote about it. Must do better in 2009. All in all 2008 was a good year for Operations Manager, OpsMgr, MOM, SCOM or your favourite way of pronouncing it. The best I heard was hearing it pronounced as S-Com. Sounds more like an audio connection for a hi-fi.

 

Disk Space CPU % Report Part 2

I blogged in June about this nice report that comes with the Virtualisation MP. I received a number of comments and I have seen the post mentioned in the newsgroups. As I said in the previous post it is report that many people want – Product Group take note!

Some info about this report.  I mentioned that the perfmon counters are already collected by the OS MP. I said that because that is what it said in the report description. As Derek points out that is not correct. It seems the people who did this MP were too lazy to update the descriptions. I delved into the MP and it does collect the counters from collection rules that are part of the VMM MP itself. They are collected every 900 secs (15 minutes).  If you search Rules for Virtualization Candidate you will see the eight rules.

The other problem is that is is the virtualisation candidate report. If the server is running on Microsoft virtualistion technologies it is ignored as a candidate. I run the report on servers running under VMWare ESX which means that Microsoft does not consider it a VM! I remember filing a bug in the SCOM beta as there is a column called “Is VM” which only picks up Microsoft VMs. Basically I was told to write my own discovery. It would be interesting to see what they do now given that SC VMM does ESX monitoring as well. The least they can do is change the heading to “Is MS VM”.

Pontus Blomqvist has a post on changing the discovery and this explains why some reports are blank.

http://blopon.blogspot.com/2008/02/why-virtual-candidates-reports-is-empty.html

There is a small issue with the Virtualization Candidates reports.  I have made my own discovery (For HP Servers, since I just have them) and disabled the default as mentioned in the blog post. And now the Virtual Candidates reports works just fine. 

There are a number of discoveries in this MP but the one that counts for this report is the Virtualization Candidate and a class is created that the rules target to collect the data. If the counters are being collected you can look at a view rather than run the report. Under the Virtual Machine Manager view there is an All Performance view but they are not shown there even though that is the MP that collects the data. Create a new view and chose “collected by specific rules”. Scroll down the Select Rules box and near the end are the 8 rules starting Virtualisation Candidate. Select them and you can then see what has been collected for each server. If you have data then the report will run. Otherwise see Pontus’s post.

Assuming that you do not want to use this set of MPs apart from this report then the options are change the discovery or disable the 8 rules and recreate them using a new target like Windows Server so that all servers will be used and not just those that are virtualisation candidates. Or do your own report.

Ziemek Borowski left a comment that you could use the vPerfRAW, vPerfHourly or vPerfDaily views in OperationsManagerDW to create a similar report. There is information on this in the Report Guide but most infrastructure people are not that au fait with SQL queries and SRS. I challenged Ziemek to create a report and he has created a sample report that can be used as the basis for a fuller report.

You can download his MP at
http://ziembor.pl/post/SystemCenterReportingPerformanceOverview-MP-0018.aspx
both in MP and XML. The XML makes it easy to see the SQL query.

Here is a PDF of the report when I ran it on my demo system.
systemcenterperformanceoverview

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

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?

New Stuff

As well as the release candidate for SCOM SP1 there is a lot of new management stuff.

WSUS SP1 RC is also available on Connect.

http://blogs.technet.com/smsandmom/archive/2007/11/06/wsus-3-0-service-pack-1-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

PowerShell 2 community technology preview.

http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/11/06/the-community-technology-preview-ctp-of-windows-powershell-2-0.aspx

Eric Berg talks about the new System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM?) and how it differs from SCCM with the now embedded Device Management Feature Pack that was originally done for SMS. Something I was curious about so I am glad Eric cleared it up.
http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/archive/2007/11/02/managing-mobile-devices-with-system-center.aspx
 

SCVMM R2 BETA ships 45 days after Viridian. Also it may be this version or the next that is supposed to able to manage VMware and XEN as well. That would be good news.

SCCM is now available on
https://licensing.microsoft.com
if you have the rights to download it and the tip for finding it is to search for “Config Mgr Svr 2007″.

http://blogs.technet.com/smsandmom/archive/2007/11/06/configuration-manager-2007-rtm-is-now-available-on-the-mvls-site.aspx

Insight for AD is from the Sysinternals guys and is about helping diagnose AD issues with real-time monitoring (think Sniffer for AD).

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/adinsight.mspx

The home page lists all the tools and utilities by date released. Lots of handy stuff here for managing and diagnosing servers.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx