Download – http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26804 (About 1 GB and 3 MB for the zipped docs)

Microsoft site for beta – http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/om-vnext-beta.aspx

Technet Site -  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh205987.aspx

There are already three posts showing a simple (all components on one server) screenshot install. The big thing I am seeing from these is that there are new prerequisites which need to be checked and installed.

Christopher Keyaert

http://scug.be/blogs/christopher/archive/2011/07/20/system-center-operations-manager-2012-beta-installation-step-by-step.aspx

Dual – Polish – English by Łukasz Rutkowski

http://oopsmgr.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/instalacja-operations-manager-2012/

Bob Cornelissen
http://www.bictt.com/blogs/bictt.php/2011/07/20/scom-2012-beta-first-install

There is a bunch of useful information as usual from Kevin Holman

http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2011/07/21/operations-manager-2012-public-beta-has-launched.aspx

And Graham Davies (MVP) has setup a new blog to deal with OpsMgr 2012 posts – http://www.systemcentersolutions.com/2011/07/whats-new-in-scom-2012/

Some nice snippets of information.

There is a lot if useful information in the docs from the download.

• Quick Start Guide – 62 pages
• Deployment Guide – 104 pages
• Operations Guide – 305 pages
• Supported Configurations – 19 pages
• Release notes

Plenty to read and it is needed as the requirements for SQL and Windows to install 2012 on is much higher.

SCOM 2007 RTM = 6.0.5000 23 Mar 2007
SCOM SP1 RC1 = 6.0.6246 5 Nov 2007

SCOM 2007 SP1 = 6.0.6278 22 Feb 2008

SCOM 2007 SP1 Update Rollup = 6.0.6278.100 (KB 971541) 13 Nov 2009

SCOM 2007 SP1 CU1 = 6.0.6278.112 (KB 2028594) 30 Jul 2010
SCOM 2007 R2 Beta = 6.1.6407 20 Nov 2008

SCOM 2007 R2 RC = 6.1.7043 25 Mar 2009

SCOM 2007 R2 RTM = 6.1.7221 23 May 2009

SCOM 2007 R2 CU1 = 6.1.7221.13 (KB 974144) 30 Jan 2010

SCOM 2007 R2 CU2 = 6.1.7221.15 (KB 979257) 29 Jun 2010

SCOM 2007 R2 CU3 = 6.1.7221.49 (KB 2251525) 1 Oct 2010

SCOM 2007 R2 CU4 = 6.1.7221.61 (KB 2449679) 31 Jan 2011

SCOM 2012 Public Beta = 7.0.8289.0 – 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.

The link is here http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/systemcenter.

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.

I note that a few people are having problems with flights to MMS due to the volcano in Iceland. If that does not clear up it will be a very quiet MMS as a large portion of the attendees come from Europe. I had no plans to go (which is just as well) as I tend to skip an MMS. It works out as the OpsMgr stuff usually happens every 2 years. R2 last year and 2007 3 years ago. The interim years have really good sessions on best practices and notes from the field which is great if you are new to the product and looking to deploy it in your organisation.

The big thing this year will be around Service Manager. It would have been nice to get some in depth hands on with Opalis now that Microsoft have bought it and bundled it with the System Center Suite license. I remember talking to those guys years ago and seeing it demonstrated. It looked really good but the price was way too high in comparison to what a customer was paying for MOM 2005. Bundling it as part of the suite makes the suite more attractive. I have not heard if they will release it as a stand alone product. They might even change its name! Bets are off that it will start System Center. It is what comes after that. What about System Center Workflow or System Center Automation. Sounds like the type of generic word that Microsoft would use. Marketing person from years ago – “it is a word processor. I know. Let’s call it Word.”

Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) is formally being discontinued, effective immediately, as it no longer supports the current versions of Microsoft applications it was designed for.  The most recent version, SCCP 2007, is no longer available.   No new versions of this standalone capacity planning tool, as well as any new or updated application capacity planning models, will be developed.

As an alternative to SCCP 2007 for capacity planning, we encourage you to make use of the following resources:

• Microsoft Exchange Server – Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator, Mailbox Server Storage Design, and Performance and Scalability.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server/Windows SharePoint Services – SharePoint Products TechCenter, SharePoint Team Blog, and To the SharePoint Blog.
• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager – R2 Design Guide and Sizing Helper.

We recognize that capacity planning/management is an important IT systems management discipline.  We will continue to evaluate how capacity planning/management functionality fits best in our System Center portfolio.

This comes as no surprise to me. I did a post on why I did not think it was up to the job (May 200). The concept was great but the execution did not come up to scratch. Back to the sizing spreadsheet. Well I never actually left it.

SQL Agent Jobs

According to the MP Guide the discovery for  SQL Agent Jobs is not turned on but you can obviously override that. I had a customer complain that they found out a job had been failing but there was no alert. Luckily Jimmy Harper posted about this. Apparently the discoveries do not work if certain fields are blank with Description being the main culprit. The customer did not want to go through each job and put in a description but luckily Jimmy’s post contains new MPs to replace the discovery ones in the SQL MP. This worked a treat and the jobs started showing up in the console. The customer created a new SQL Agent Job with nothing in the description and that was picked up. A must have if you want to monitor SQL Agent Jobs. Nice one Jimmy. Hopefully that will be fixed in the next version.

The other thing that I had a long discussion about with the customer was SQL jobs failing. When they fail they are picked up but when the job is set to carry on with the rest of the jobs in sequence after a fail nothing is shown in the console. The customer appreciates why this is. After all if you do not think that one part of a sequence is important enough to stop the other jobs running you can’t call it a failure. They can see it if they look at SQL but in the OpsMgr console there is nothing. We tested it with a few jobs. They would like to see something – even if it is information. As they said if it fails once it is not important but if it keeps on failing it needs investigating. Something else for the next version of the MP.

SQL Replication

Replication is also not discovered by default. When turned on it discovers replication servers but there are no rules or monitors. So if you need to monitor SQL Replication you have to do it yourself.

SQL Mirroring

If you want to monitor SQL Mirroring pick up the Extended SQL Server MP by Matt Goedtel on OpsManJam.

Noisy DBCC Rule

DBCC Check comes up every now and then with an information alert that says no errors. I have always thought that bizarre but never had time to investigate. Jimmy Harper’s post on it explains why that is and how to fix it to give you useful warning and critical alerts when there are real problems with DBCC. Another good post from Jimmy.

SQL DB Properties

Jimmy also has a post on SQL DB properties not being discovered and how to fix it.

 SQL Server Full Text Search Service Monitor

As Jimmy Harper says it is mentioned in the guide but his post goes into great detail on it. This is usually the case for servers running MSDE like WSUS. Also mention by Kerrie and Cameron in their OpsMgr R2 by Example which goes into a lot of information about the typical alerts that come up for SQL MP and some resolutions for those. Required reading after the MP Guide.

SQL 2008

If you have SQL 2008 in your environment then you will need to install the SQL DMO bits as they are no longer shipped with SQL but the SQL MP still needs them. This shows up as no space performance counters for SQL 2008 DBs and event 4000 in the OpsMgr log.  Marnix Wolf (Thoughts on OpsMgr) has posted a good set of articles on this. First here which includes showing what to download and install and then problem with DMO Installation.

Conclusion. You may think that after you import the SQL MP that you are monitoring SQL. But unless you dig into the documentation and the MP you may find that critical bits are not being monitored.

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

A blog post is not a good place to ask a technical question. Especially when the post is al;most 2 years old. It is called a comment field for a reason and not Ask The Blogger a Technical Question. The best places to ask technical questions is on the forums. There are a few but these are probably the best two for OpsMgr.

Microsoft – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

SystemCenter Central – http://www.systemcentercentral.com/tabid/60/tag/Forums+Operations_Manager/Default.aspx

There are plenty of Microsoft Support people and MVPs as well as other people that know OpsMgr that go onto these forums to answer questions. That should be your first port of call for a technical question unless you have a support agreement with Microsoft and you can ask them direct.

Ian

PS I had a great time skiing by the way. It is nice to get away from technology now and again.

http://blogs.technet.com/timmcfadden/archive/2010/01/15/system-center-operations-manager-2007-r2-cumulative-update-1.aspx

Before you install it be sure to check out Kevin’s post on the best way to install it.

http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2010/01/17/opsmgr-2007-r2-cu1-rollup-hotfix-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx

And a tip from Daniele on updating the console.

http://nocentdocent.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/eventually-we-got-cumulative-1-for-r2/

This should now put OpsMgr up to v6.1.7221.13.

http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenteressentials/archive/2010/01/20/essentials-2010-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

And they have then posted about how to use SCE 2010 to deploy Office 2010 beta.

http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenteressentials/archive/2010/01/21/how-to-deploy-to-deploy-office-2010-beta-using-system-center-essentials-2010.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2010/01/22/file-services-management-pack-for-system-center-operations-manager-2007-beta-now-open.aspx

It is on Connect if you want to try the beta. It is nice to see the Product Groups improving on the MPs and releasing betas for feedback.

Supported OS Versions

The following table describes which File Services role service can be monitored with the beta management pack on various Windows Server versions:

Role Service and OS Version Supported

• DFS Namespaces
• Windows Server 2003, 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2
• DFS Replication
• Windows Server 2003 R2, 2008, 2008 R2
• File Classification Infrastructure
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• File Server Resource Manager
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• NFS File Sharing
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• SMB File Sharing
• Windows Server 2008 R2

New Features

Here are  several of the key features provided in this beta management pack:

Agentless Monitoring

Ability to monitor file services on servers without deploying a SCOM agent to the specific server

Highly Available Cluster Instance Monitoring

Ability to monitor the health status of a Highly Available File Server deployed on a Failover Cluster

NFS Role Service

Monitor activity logging, NIS configuration, port registration, portmaper service, NFS service driver, username mapping service, and more

FSRM Role Service

Monitor FSRM service, quota driver, filescreen driver, file classification task progress, and orphaned mountpoints

DFSR Role Service

Monitor the health of DFS Replication service, communications with replication partners, database recovery, communications with Domain Controllers, free space on volume containing a replicated folder, USN journal wrap events, overlap with FRS, inconsistent configuration, and more

DFSR Backlog Tracking

Ability to display the backlog count per connection for a DFS replication group

DFSR Performance Counters

Track data for bandwidth ravings, replication conflicts, deleted files and staging area

DFS Namespace Role Service

Monitor DFS namespace service, health of a single namespace hosted on multiple servers, health of the AD component of DFS namespaces, site table initialization, namespace initialization, Namespace Synchronization with AD, Folder Target Health and more

SMB Role Service

Monitor the health of Lanman server service, creation of shares at system startup, IRP stack overflow events, firewall port configuration

Details of the improvements to the packs are here which includes the links to the download locations.

The post highlights the fact that they have significantly increased the number of discoveries, classes and monitors but have reduced the rules. But as we all know more does not always mean better. In fact one of Microsoft’s big advertising themes for Windows Server was “Do More With Less”. I would rather have 1 good quality monitor than 10 poor ones. But it looks like they have improved the health monitoring as shown in the screenshots. Significant improvements for large SharePoint installations.

In 2010 you can monitor multiple farms, multiple servers, services, shared services, SharePoint Health Analyzer rules (Which saves you a trip to central admin which also means that System Center Operation Manager console is your one stop shop for all monitoring requirements) and web applications.

In case you were not aware SharePoint Foundation is the new name for Windows SharePoint services. So SharePoint Foundation 2010 is actually WSS v4.0. Note that the new versions of SharePoint are 64 bit only.

The main MP covers

• SharePoint Server 2010
• Project Server 2010
• Search Server 2010

Alert

Name

DNS 2008 Monitor Zone Resolution Alert

Description

Zone TrustAnchors on DNS Server VDC01.Cosiris.local is not responding to queries.

Source

TrustAnchors (VDC01.Cosiris.local)

The MP is DNS 2008 MP v6.0.6480.0 and OpsMgr 2007R2.

I had not seen this before and as i was having some general problems with the test environment I thought that it might be linked. In fact it seems to be a new feature of Windows 2008 R2. A bit of searching brought in some more information on DNSSec (DNS Security).

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-dnssec-trust-anchor-03

http://www.dnssec-tools.org/wiki/index.php/Trust_Anchor

http://blogs.technet.com/sseshad/archive/2008/10/30/dnssec-in-windows-7.aspx

DNSSEC in Windows Server 2008 R2

From http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee649277(WS.10).aspx

A trust anchor is a preconfigured public key associated with a specific zone. Windows Server 2008 R2 supports the configuration of trust anchors by using DNSKEY resource records.

A validating DNS server must be configured with one or more trust anchors in order to perform validation. At least one trust anchor is required if any DNSSEC data is to be validated by the DNS server. Additional trust anchors can be deployed to support islands of trust. DNS server management tools (DNS Manager and Dnscmd.exe) can be used to locally or remotely view and modify trust anchors. Trust anchors apply only to the zone for which they are configured.

If the DNS server is running on a domain controller, trust anchors are stored in the forest directory partition in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) and will be replicated to all domain controllers in the forest. On standalone DNS servers, trust anchors are stored in a file named TrustAnchors.dns in %windir%\System32\DNS.

The reason it shows up as an alert is that it appears to be a DNS zone in Windows 20089 R2. As I am not intending to run DNSSec I just put an override on this alert.

For a 12:47 video on DNSSec and a link to a deployment white paper go to this link http://edge.technet.com/Media/DNS-Security-DNSSec-Overview/.

Ian

Dec 2009

Group Policy Preprocessing (Active Directory) Alert
Alert Description

Source:
Server name
The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not authenticate to the Active Directory service on a domain controller. (LDAP Bind function call failed). Look in the details tab for error code and description.

Active Directory Bind Monitor

Summary

Group Policy Preprocessing (Active Directory)

Group Policy processing requires Active Directory. The Group Policy service reads and updates information stored in Active Directory. The absence of Active Directory (or a domain controller) prevents Group Policy from applying to the computer or user.

Resolutions

Correct binding to the directory

The Group Policy service logs the error code. This information appears on the Details tab of the error message in Event Viewer. The error code (displayed as a decimal) and error description fields further identify the reason for the failure. Evaluate the error code with the list below:

• Error code 5
• Error code 49
• Error code 258

Error code 5 (Access is denied)

This error code might indicate that the user does not have permission to Active Directory.

To correct permissions for accessing Active Directory:

Use Active Directory troubleshooting procedures to further diagnose the problem.

Error code 49 (Invalid credentials)

This error code might indicate that the user’s password expired while the user is still logged on the computer.

To correct invalid credentials:

• Change the user’s password.
• Lock/unlock the workstation.
• Check if there are any system services running as the user account.
• Verify the password in service configuration is correct for the user account.

Error code is 258 (Timeout)

This error code might indicate that the DNS configuration is incorrect.

To correct timeout issues:

Use the nslookup tool to confirm _ldap._tcp.<domain-dns-name> records are registered and point to correct servers (where domain-dns-name is the fully qualified domain name of your Active Directory domain).

Use Active Directory troubleshooting procedures to further diagnose the problem.

Note: These steps may have varying results if your network constrains or blocks ICMP packets.

This knowledge is identical to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc727283(WS.10).aspx about event ID 1006.

Additional error codes for event 1058  can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc727259(WS.10).aspx

If you follow the link in the knowledge to do troubleshooting AD then you go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732148(WS.10).aspx and get told that “The document that you are attempting to access is not yet available.” even though it is dated 7th November 2008.

There is a hotfix for Windows 2008 servers that this applies to.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;950876&sd=rss&spid=12925

Information

Alert is “Active Directory Search Monitor” from Group Policy 2008 MP. It is looking for event 1080 in System and is a Manual Reset monitor. The same named alert is from “Active Directory Bind Monitor” and is looking for event 1006 and is also a Manual Reset.

NB as this is a monitor you have to do Reset Health in Health Explorer and not just Close the alert. These alerts rollup for Availability and will create the calculated alerts (AD Domain Availability Health Degraded and  AD Site Availability Health Degraded) for the domain if more than 60% of DCs are affected.

OpsMgr is R2 and AD MP is v6.0.6452.0.

http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/results.aspx?&chtext=&cstext=&csttext=&chbtext=&bCatID=1333&cpID=0&avc=10&ava=0&avq=30&OR=1&PGS=25&ready=0

The only ones on the list (as off 2nd Dec 09) are the following 12 HP ProLiants.

• ProLiant BL280c G6 2.93GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant BL2x220c G6 2.53GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant BL460c G6 2.93GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant BL490c G6 2.93GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant DL320 G6 2.93GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant DL360 G6 2.93GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant DL370 G6 3.20GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant DL380 G6 2.93GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant DL380 G6 3.33GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant ML330 G6 2.53GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant ML350 G6 2.93GHz Quad Core
• ProLiant ML370 G6 3.20GHz Quad Core

Enhanced Power Management
The Enhanced Power Management qualifier identifies servers which support the next generation power management technology available with Windows Server 2008 R2. The software infrastructure and management interfaces in Windows Server 2008 R2 that help improve the power efficiency of the server platform and enable remote monitoring of power consumption and remote control of the power profile. There are three major requirements for a system to qualify for this Additional Qualifier;

1. The server system provides a system power meter and system power budget capability in hardware

2. The server system supports the new power metering and budgeting ACPI interface (ACPI V4.0) specification

3. The server system enables control of processor performance states by the Operating System

These new features in Server 2008 R2 will provide cost-savings associated with reducing power consumption on each server. They will also help with capacity planning by making power consumption and power budget information available to administrators. This helps enable more efficient allocation of power and cooling infrastructure in the data center. System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 provides a Management Pack that takes advantage of all of these new features in Server 2008 R2. Any server that qualifies for the Enhanced Power Management qualifier has native support for the features in this Management Pack.

Unless you are rolling out Windows Server 2008 R2 on those hardware configurations and on OpsMgr R2 then you will not get any advantage of deploying this MP. Hopefully other vendors will catch up as the facilities to monitor power and carbon footprint is intriguing. It may be that some of these features can be enabled on other machines with a future BIOS update?  Or maybe they need to be built in from scratch. One to keep an eye on for the future (in more ways than one!).

Ian

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

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!

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.