As you might have read earlier,
the System Center Virtual User Group was launched, on March 27th. It's a user group dedicated to providing resources for education and collaboration between users of Microsoft System Center technologies everywhere. Check it out at
www.systemcenterusergroup.org.
So, what is next?
To get the user group off to a fun start, we were discussing the possibility of hosting a contest for the best custom System Center solution, and need to know if you'd be willing to participate. Please read the following, and then post a comment to
this thread if you would be willing to play.
The contest would showcase the best custom System Center community solution for a number of categories, including custom Management Pack (Opsmgr / Essentials), Configuration Pack (SCCM), Scripts (any System Center product), etc. Users would submit their entries to the site for judgement by a panel of System Center experts. Prizes would include
XBOX 360 (for the overall winner), a
Zune for the first couple of runners-up overall, and then books and miscellaneous prizes for the runners-up in each category.
Would you be willing to participate?
If so,
register on the site (free) and add a comment to
this post. If it looks like there will be a good number of participants, we will announce something official in the next few days! So, what are you waiting for?
Daniel Oxley: I like the lite-touch installation (LTI) feature of MDT, it think it's great and is very impressive as it allows clients to easily see the benefit that they will gain by using MDT to create and deploy their images. I can go on-site with a customer to demo the product and have a basic MDT server configured to deploy Windows Vista and Office 2007 (both with the most basic of configurations) over the network in their laboratory, all in one day. Admittedly, the setup won't do much else because it lacks all the details but, as a demo, it works well. However, one thing that LTI does not offer is 'high-availability'; something that Systems Center Configuration Manager excels at.
In one of my previous posts I wrote about using DNS to create 'distribution points'-like behaviour in LTI scenarios. That post got quite a bit of feedback, so with this post I want to 'steal' another Configuration Manager feature so that it can be applied to a LTI scenario, namely, making your MDT server highly available. With this post you will be able to improve the reliability of your deployments by ensuring that your single point of failure (your MDT server) is always available, simply by clustering your MDT distribution share. As before, I once again recommend Systems Center Configuration Manager as the product of choice if you need a highly-available platform for installing your images as it really is the best option available; the content offered in this post could never replace the functionality offered by Systems Center Configuration Manager.(
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Daniel Lai: In some cases, we may want to use SCCM DCM to verify that the SCCM Client applied the specified GPO or not. It is a very difficult task because you may not sure that what you should use to query this information from the client machines or Active Directory. And SCCM DCM does not provide the feature for you to import the GPO/Security Template for the compliance checking.
I tried to use Active Directory Query and Registry, but the result is not very well. Finally, I use WMI Query to query the client machine and build the Configuration Baseline Successfully.(
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The MOM team made a blog post to outline the supported configurations for Operations Manager Reporting and help align this to the supported configurations of SQL Reporting Services.(
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For the most part removing Management Packs (MP) is a quick administrative process done in the OpsMgr console, which is as follows:
1. In the OpsMgr Console
2. Administration -> Management Packs
3. For each XXXX MP -> Right Click -> Delete
However occasionally we have seen issues were people have setup references to other unsealed MPs and it can be time consuming to remove all the override references and you don't want to delete the entire Management Pack. We have released a tool that you can use to remove override references from the MP you are trying to remove. Please note this is a utility resource for general community use, we’d be glad to answer any questions or get feedback on improvements but this is not a supported solution. (
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Jonathan Hambrook wrote an article on how to monitor your VMWare ESX environment using System Center Operations Manager:
Monitoring VMWare ESX with SCOM isn’t a hard thing, however getting correct and relivent information in a clean and easy way can be. This guide I have compiled with VMWare should provide the mechanics of setting up monitoring between VMWare ESX and SCOM.
Download Here:
Mirror 1|
Mirror 2
Kerrie Meyler: Operations Manager 2007 is a product established on the concept of model-based management. The abstraction of services into models is necessary to describe and act on physical entities such as routers, and logical entities such as distributed applications, using software tools.
Using models is a way to transform knowledge and experience into something that machines can operate with. In OpsMgr, service models live inside management packs. The management pack author or vendor encapsulates service health knowledge into the management pack. A solid, accurate model of an object's health lets Operations Manager present information to the operator. The models underpin both the OpsMgr 2007 application, with a workflow framework, and the OpsMgr 2007 operator, with augmented and accelerated decision making.
OpsMgr 2007 introduces an architecture that sets the foundation for a new, broader spectrum of monitoring capabilities and extensible that has ever been available before using Microsoft management technologies. Fundamental concepts within OpsMgr 2007 include service and health modeling. (continue at source)
We are happy to announce the formation of the System Center Virtual User Group, a user group dedicated to providing resources for education and collaboration between users of Microsoft System Center technologies everywhere! Thanks to all in the community and at Microsoft who have assisted in it’s formation and offered resources.
Future announcements and resources will be available online at
http://www.systemcenterusergroup.com. Thanks to Pete Zerger of
Systemcenterforum.org for starting the group!
This group is intended to function not only as a traditional user group holding periodic meetings (via Live Meeting in our case), but as a forum where users can come together to find resources in establishing their own traditional “physical” user groups.
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Paul Ross: With MMS just around the corner I’m starting to turn my thoughts to the breakout session we’ll be running there to talk about System Center Service Manager. (Obviously I’m also thinking about five days in Las Vegas – not sure if that is going to be a good thing or a bad thing but I know it’s going to exhausting). The next 12 months are going to very important for Service Manager and our customers, as we
switch to our new infrastructure and ramp up to a release a new beta at the end of the year.
This year’s MMS gives us the opportunity to discuss what we’re doing with the product and to introduce some of the key leaders in the development of the product – something we’ll be doing more of on this blog in future. It also provides a forum to discuss how System Center as a whole fits with IT Service Management and how specifically Service Manager will be able to help. I’m mostly looking forward to hearing how our customers are progressing with implementing ITIL based processes using our existing technology - something that we are hearing very mixed signals about as organizations comes to terms with the reality of their plans.
For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog posts, this is Jalasoft’s last article about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. Prior posts discussed the monitoring of
network device interfaces,
port status, a
device’s response time,
asynchronous monitoring, the
monitoring of processes,
distributed applications with Xian Io,
policy templates and Xian Network Manager Io’s
UI integration. On this occasion, we will look into receiving mail notifications associated to network devices being monitored by Xian Network Manager Io.
Ops Mgr 07 provides network administrators with the option to receive e-mail notifications associated to any of the servers, computers and applications being monitored. As soon as the event is generated network administrators will be informed about this problem quickly and thus will be able to take the proper actions to solve this issue. (
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Rob Stack: Recently, I’ve been working on the documentation set for a great new feature in the upcoming Configuration Manager 2007 R2, client status reporting.
What’s client status reporting, you might ask? Those of you who’ve been around since SMS 2003 days might remember the SMS 2003 client health monitoring tool which gave you the ability to identify a number of site system and client problems on your site. This was a great tool, but had some disadvantages such as:
· The tool stored its data in a separate database adding administrative overhead for the site administrator.
· Client health reports could not be displayed in the SMS console; the tool used Microsoft Excel and Internet Explorer to display reports.
Client status reporting is an evolution of this tool designed to integrate with Configuration Manager 2007 R2 and provides a number of improvements over existing methods of diagnosing client status:
· Identifies clients that are online, but are not requesting policy
· Generates trending reports, showing client status over a period of time
· Provides standard Configuration Manager reports to examine the status of clients
· Identifies clients that are online, but are experiencing problems with one or more client components
· Identifies clients that are online, but do not have up to date discovery or inventory information
· Identifies offline clients
· Identifies obsolete clients
Another advantage of this tool is that it’s not dependant on Configuration Manager site systems. If an inbox on the site server is backlogged, this will not affect client status reporting.(
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Carol Bailey: My previous post recommended that you use the documentation to help you resolve problems with Configuration Manager 2007. But the Configuration Manager documentation library contains a lot of information, and it would be unrealistic to read every topic, every word. So what’s the most efficient way to use the documentation to help resolve problems you run into when you're using Configuration Manager? Here’s my suggested top 10 tips for a documentation solution that could save you a lot of time and frustration in trying to track down a problem.
Note: Many of these solutions involve using search, which is easy enough if you’re using the help file (SMSv4.chm) that ships with the product. However, if you’re using the online Web version, searching so that returned entries are relevant only to Configuration Manager is more challenging – but can be done. See
How to more easily search the Configuration Manager documentation library online.(
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Eric Fitzgerald: I've decided to start dumping my knowledge of ACS for posterity's sake. My first installment is here, and it's an excerpt from an external email I put together which describes how event transformation works on ACS.
Transformation is performed on the agent (using instructions provided at connect time by the collector) and on the collector. Transformation instructions are all stored on the collector in a file called EventSchema.xml which is in the AdtServer directory (%windir%\system32\security\adtserver). This file is pointed to in the collector’s registry and is read during startup of the collector service; failure to successfully read and parse this file at startup is a fatal error for the collector (the debug log will complain about parsing).
The collector reads EventSchema.xml and builds in-memory binary tables of event transformation instructions and event string types by OS version/event log/event source.(
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It is more than a year ago that we first
blogged about System Center Online Services. Larry Orecklin, at the time General Manager for the Windows Enterprise and Management Division at Microsoft, first informed partners of the upcoming Online Services at the
System Center Partner Airlift in January of 2007.
At the time, Larry showed his vision of what probably now is know as the "Software + Services" initiative within Microsoft. The System Center Online Services would be a set of services on the internet. The services would extra value to current and new customers by adding functionality from "the cloud" in two flavours; (A) finished services and (B) attached services. The first one would bring products that are
not available as standalone products and the second one would bring products complimentary to the full products which companies run within their infrastructures.
During that week in January, Jeff Campbell, just appointed as Director of those System Center Online Services, held a 75-minute session with more details about the roadmap of those services. He said that 2007 would be the year that Microsoft would build the underlying "framework" and that end of 2007 / begin 2008 would bring the first System Center Online Services to market.
(Click more to read the full article and see the screenshots!) (more)
Carol Bailey: I’ve recently been involved with some interesting issues reported on the TechNet forums that relate to Internet-based client management. Two resulted in KBs and the third is a confirmation of a change in behavior in SP1. All three resulted in revisions to the March documentation update that is going out with the RC release of Configuration Manager 2007 SP1.
*
KB 950023: Internet-based clients in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 may be unable to run software distribution advertisements on the Internet
*
KB 950024: You experience issues in the Configuration Manager console when you try to configure connections for Internet clients in System Center Configuration Manager 2007
* Running an unscheduled advertisement on the Internet for a low-rights user – confirmed fixed in SP1 Beta 1 onwards.(
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Boris Yanushpolsky: I recently saw an interesting mail thread about how does one figure out which MPs will work for agentless monitoring and which MPs will not. The interesting part is that at the MP level there is no way to declare whether it is designed for agentless monitoring or not. The MP author can decide this for every workflow (rule, monitor, task, diagnostic, recovery, discovery) by setting the Remotable attribute to true. If the attribute is set to false, the agent will not execute the workflow against the agentlessly monitored computer and will also drop an event to the OpsMgr event log. To help clarify this a bit more, I updated the MPViewer utility to include one more column which is called "Remotable". You can use this to determine which workflows are capable of working for agentless monitoring. I also added a command line switch to enable the generation of an HTML report for only the monitors and rules that are configured to generate an alert.
Here is how you can use the new switch:
MPViewer.exe c:\Microsoft.Windows.Server.2003.mp c:\win2003.html AlertGeneratingWorkflowsOnly
For the next version I am hoping to add knowledge to the HTML report that the utility produces.
MPViewer 1.4.zip
Pete from System Center Forum: In working with Configuration Manager 2007, I’ve come to believe that in the age of regulatory compliance, the Desired Configuration Managment (DCM) feature is one of the most significant. In comparing the capabilities with a couple of the most popular enterprise systems management platforms, I think it compares quite favorably. DCM eliminates the temptation of using Operations Manager 2007 for configuration change auditing, which is not really what the monitoring platform is intended for.
In this post, I’ll provide an overview of DCM functionality, some of the business drivers for it’s use, as well as links to 3rd party resources with offerings to augment out-of-the-box functionality in DCM to give you a running start at DCM in your own environment.(
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DPM 2007 is designed for the SharePoint Administrator or the IT generalist and uses wizards and workflows to help ensure that you can protect your data – without requiring an advanced degree, training or certification in storage and backup technologies
DPM presents the data to be protected in the same context as users access it. In DPM 2007, platform owners can manage backups from the perspective of the application. SharePoint administrators simply select the farm to be protected; DPM understands what components need to be backed up
Similarly, SQL Server administrators choose databases, Exchange administrators select storage groups, and managers of virtual environments choose virtual machines and file server owners choose file shares.
DPM2007_datasheet_How_to_protect_SharePoint.pdf
Pete at System Center Forum: Matt @ MS has a good post on
verifying MP workflow on the agent managed computer, but there are a couple of things to be added here that are of value in checking for MP updates being delivered to an agent that do not involve reading XML output.
What other methods can tip you off that the change is received? Here are a couple of options.
#4 Operations Manager Event Log - On the target agent machine, you’ll see event ID: 1201 fromsource HealthService with the MP name and verision in the event description that was just updated. Pretty clear evidence, and no xml required. Incidentally, event ID: 1204 from the same source tells you about MPs that are no longer needed and are unloaded. This is an easy way and pretty safe I think if you don’t have folks making ad hoc changes to your MPs.
#5 MP xml files on the agent - This is not my favorite either, but provides a clue as well. In the agent installation directory under \Health Service State\Management Packs, you’ll find the MPs running on the agent. You can also check the date/time stamp in the ‘last modified’ column. When you see your target MP with a time stamp from a moment ago, that’s your hint. Since it should be accompanied by a HealthService 1201 event, I don’t see much point.
I think I like #1 and #4 together. You can use effective configuration viewer and watch for the event and I think that’ll do in most situations. But in the end, this is easier if you have some measure of change management in place to prevent ad hoc changes.
By default, SCCM2007 installs the Boot images included with WAIK 1.0. If you want to update the boot images to the ones of WAIK 1.1 you will notice that the procedure described in the article "How to Add a Boot Image to Configuration Manager" (
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb680372.aspx) won't work at the step where the windows6.0-kb939663-x86.cab must be imported into the image. This is because this update isn't necessary anymore for the WAIK 1.1. boot image, but MS didn't update the article yet to reflect this.
Here is the procedure to update your boot images to the ones from WAIK 1.1.
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Rory McCaw: Every application has it’s challenges and the learning curve is certainly one of them. Are they things that I feel we missed in Ops Mgr; yes definitely but Ops Mgr also provides for more flexibility in how and what you monitor. I can start a list of what I envision as improvements and another of what is a pain in the but.(
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Kerrie Meyler: Avodart recently
posted a comment to an entry on DSI dated 12/12/07. The comment read:
Suppose this application needed to be deployed. If your application contains the knowledge about its dependencies, that part of the model could be consumed by Systems Configuration Manager to find servers that met those requirements. If the knowledge about how your application needed to be installed was in the model, if could be deployed too, configured and monitored. With knowledge of the applications performance over time, it should be possible to perform capacity planning calculations and predict when bottlenecks will occur.
Sounds far fetched? Not really a lot of what i talked about is possible today if you do-it-yourself. What DSI does is do-it-for-you, or at least it provides the tools, OSes and management tools that enable it.
The comment referred to using models in ConfigMgr for ease of deployment. The model would have the intelligence to determine what the requirements were for using this application and deploying it only to those systems that met the requirements. Now this is COOL.(
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For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog posts, this is Jalasoft’s seventh article about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. Prior posts discussed the monitoring of
network device interfaces,
port status, a
device’s response time,
asynchronous monitoring, the
monitoring of processes,
distributed applications with Xian Io and
policy templates.
On this article we are going to focus on Xian Network Manager Io’s UI integration.
Xian Network Manager Io (Xian Io) extends the OpsMgr 2007 monitoring capabilities to a heterogeneous environment so you could monitor your Windows servers along with your network devices and UNIX servers. The Xian Io UI integration features further extend the integration with OpsMgr since most of the Xian tasks, such as discovering, removing and configuring the rules to monitor network devices/servers can be executed directly from the OpsMgr monitoring console; therefore, there is no need to work with other windows besides the OpsMgr one.(
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Announcing Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 – now Windows Vista SP1-Ready!
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was Released to Web via Windows Update and Download Center this Tuesday and we know there are a lot of companies waiting to deploy it into production. You may be familiar with the Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) tools from the past and the latest version, dubbed Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) which was released in November. We changed the name from BDD because you can now build images and deploy desktops and servers (including Windows Server 2008) with the same toolkit and we thought MDT better reflected that functionality. Today we’re excited to announce the release of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008! MDT makes imaging and deployment much easier with its new checklist and wizard-driven user interface. At the same time it continues to provide lots of great in-depth guidance for managing your deployment projects end-to-end, as well as quickstart guides if you want to quickly dive into the tools. If you are among the more than 350,000 people still using BDD 2007, we didn’t forget about you. An update for BDD 2007 to support SP1 imaging and deployment is also available today.
Both these tools can save you lots of time in planning and building out a standard desktop experience all the way to rolling OS images out into production. Download
MDT 2008 or the
updated BDD 2007 today. For more information, go to
http://www.microsoft.com/deployment or contact a
Desktop Deployment Planning Services specialist.
Are you struggling with setting up SCCM 2007 Operating System Deployment and integrating MDT? - download and view the video walkthrough that shows you how to:
- Setup the server environment for SCCM 2007 OS deployment
- Configure the SCCM 2007 Site Settings
- Configure the SCCM 2007 Computer Management Settings
- Configure the SCCM 2007 Operating System Deployment Settings
- Setup and use MDT integration with SCCM 2007
- Add a reference machine object to SCCM 2007
- Create a build and capture reference image for mass deployment using SCCM 2007
Download from here (51.2Mb)
The download pack contains the following high resolution (1024 x 768) narrated video
- SCCM2007 and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Setup and Config.wmv
Pete from System Center Forum:
As I mentioned in a
post earlier this week, I really like the many formatting options in Powershell. Here’s another formatting tip not well-documented in my experience. Let’s take this example in which we are looking at whether agent proxy is enabled on my Operations Manager 2007 agents. I want to print all agents and their agent proxy status to the screen, but I want to be able to quickly identify agents where agent proxy is NOT enabled.(
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Microsoft System Centre Data Protection Manager (DPM) is one of the suite of System Centre products to be released last year. DPM offers a new approach to backing up our Exchange data and introduces a number of new alternatives to traditional approaches to backup, particularly when used alongside Exchange Server 2007. Before you can understand what these new approaches are it is useful to understand how DPM works when used to protect Exchange server data.(
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Steve Rachui:
There is a fair amount of documentation about how to enable AD Integration for OpsMgr 2007. Most of what is available is either outdated (pre-RTM) or an incomplete description of all that is involved to properly configure and understand how AD Integration works. This document will pull all of the available information together, add clarity to some of the available information and add additional detail where it has been missing from existing documentation.(
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Pete from SystemCenterForum: Here’s another silent addition to SP1 I’ve been meaning to show you for weeks now, which I bet will be a surprise to many folks. There’s a new report that showed up in the SP1 beta releases of Operations Manager and Essentials 2007 in the Generic Library labeled simply “Overrides“.
The report is a bit more exciting than the name implies. More than a list of overrides, it’s an override change history report of sorts.(
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Things are really busy at Microsoft with regard to virtualization. In just a few months, we've released the Hyper-V Beta, announced the Calista acquisition in January, announced the Kidaro acquisition in March, and we're back with more. Today, we are pleased to announce the
Hyper-V Release Candidate!
So, what's new in Hyper-V RC? Here's a quick list...
Hyper-V Release Candidate Features:
· Improved usability:
* Partial localization support for Japanese and German.
o Hyper-V Release Candidate is partially localized in Japanese & German. This means that when Hyper-V is enabled on Windows Server 2008 Japanese or German many of its text strings will appear properly translated. In other cases, text strings may still appear in English. Hyper-V will be fully localized in numerous languages at Hyper-V RTM...
* Ability to enable Hyper-V RC on international locales.
o The Hyper-V Release Candidate can now be enabled on international locales. (As opposed to previous versions which could only be enabled on an EN-US locale).
o However, Hyper-V Release Candidate is only partially localized for Japanese and German. Thus, if you enable Hyper-V Release Candidate on any other language (such as Spanish, French, or Italian) it will appear in English. Hyper-V will be fully localized in numerous languages at Hyper-V RTM...
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Have you ever created a build and had to pop up a message to the user/technician? - or had to start an HTA application to request some kind of user input during the build or deployment process? If you have then you will know that the task sequence window sits centre screen and everything else pops up behind. This is because the task sequence windows is fixed to the top of the Z-order so that no other window can overlap it...
Recently I had to create an DVD based deployment for a customer where I wrote an HTA application that prompted the user to switch DVDs. I hit this issue where my app was popping up behind the task sequence window and users were missing the prompt - so I set about developing a solution - and the solution I came up with was to move the task sequence window to the top left corner of the screen every time the task sequence starts - I soon found that it wasn't as simple as it initially sounded....(
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This white paper provides guidance and script samples for integrating System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and Virtual Machine Manager 2007 to provide automated software updates for virtual machines stored in a VMM library (offline). By automating the enumeration and deployment of virtual machines to maintenance host, the IT Administrator can manage virtual machines with no additional effort over managing physical machines.
Download whitepaper:
Automating Software Updates for Offline Virtual Machines Using Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007
Pete from SystemCenterForum: My favorite characteristic of Command Shell is the availability of the huge array of rich formatting, filtering and sorting options. Oh, and the fact that I can do almost anything in one line. Put these two things together, and we can do some pretty amazing stuff. Watch as we take a MOM 2005 function with it’s own Solution Accelerator (the
Alert Tuning SA), complete MOM Reports - and deliver a functional substitute in
a single line of Powershell code.
Let’s have a look at the solution and deconstruct what we’re doing. In addition to the obvious get-alert cmdlet, we’re using 4 additional cmdlets together here, each of which has a purpose in filtering, sorting and formatting the output.(
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Christian Dam: System Center can emulate end user experience by monitoring a Web Application.
Here’s how to monitor a Web Application, even if it requires credentials, and how to record a browser session.(
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The Active Directory Management Pack monitors the availability and performance of Windows Server 2000 and 2003 Domain Controllers. It can also issue alerts for configuration problems. Availability and performance monitoring is done using synthetic transactions. In addition, the Management Pack collects Event Log alerts and provides associated knowledge articles with additional user details, possible causes, and suggested resolutions. The Management Pack monitors Windows services critical to a Domain Controller, such as Net Logon, File Replication, KDC, and Windows Time. The Active Directory Client Perspective monitoring is used independently from the monitoring on the Domain Controller. It runs synthetic transactions to validate the availability of the Active Directory deployment from the perspective of an Active Directory client. Client monitoring can be enabled on selected critical members servers or desktop clients.
The Active Directory Management Pack monitors Active Directory and the external components that are related to Active Directory. It provides forest-wide monitoring of the directory service and its required subsystems. In addition to real-time performance and event monitoring, it allows you to respond immediately to critical performance, health, or capacity issues.
Download the Microsoft Windows Server 2000/2003 Active Directory Management Pack
For many enterprise products, technical flowcharts can be an invaluable tool for IT Professionals to help them understand a feature or process within the product and to help them troubleshoot issues that might occur. The SuperFlow is a new concept that takes a technical flowchart to the next level by providing the following:
Interactive Flowchart
The SuperFlow interactive flowchart provides:
* General and in-depth technical information about each step in the process.
* Sample log files, status messages, including sample log file entries, procedures to accomplish tasks, troubleshooting information, and more!
Animation
The SuperFlow animation provides:
* A visual representation for the steps in the SuperFlow process.
* A detailed description for each step in the SuperFlow process.
Resources
The SuperFlow resources provides:
* Links to internal resources such as the detailed dataflow for the process, sample log entries for the end-to-end process, verification checklists, etc.
* Links to external Web resources that provide more information about the product and SuperFlow process.
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Software Updates Synchronization SuperFlow
Don Hite: This guide discusses various scenarios for upgrading to System Center Essentials 2007 and includes a brief discussion of outgrowing and migrating from Essentials to System Center Operations Manager 2007.
The guide includes the following:
- Migrating from WSUS to Essentials 2007
- Migrating from Operations Manager to Essentials 2007
- Migrating from Systems Management Server 2003 or Configuration Manager 2007 to Essentials 2007
- Outgrowing Essentials 2007: Migrating to Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007
Download the System Center Essentials 2007 Migration Guide
The Intel® Active Management Technology's (Intel® AMT) Setup and Configuration Service (Intel ®SCS or SCS) provides developer or ISV with the tools to set up and configure Intel AMT devices. The Setup and Configuration Service (SCS) allows for most aspects of setup and configuration to be completed through a remote management console. The service package consists of a configuration engine and installer in binary form, plus a reference graphical user interface that the ISV may integrate into their Manageability Product.
So where is the Intel® SCS in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) SP1? The short answer is MS SCCM SP1 does not use the Intel SCS. The longer answer is that Microsoft, as part of their architectural design of SCCM SP1, has chosen to develop their own mechanism for performing the initial provisioning and configuration of the Intel® vPro Clients. This is different from the requirement the
Intel Client Manageability Add-on for SMS 2003 had on the Intel SCS for enterprise provisioning and configuration.
Each ISV, as part of their enablement of vPro Management Technology within their product, can choose to leverage the Intel® SCS or use it as a reference design to develop their own implementation. Microsoft, with SCCM SP1, is not the only ISV that chose to develop their own capability for provisioning and configuring vPro Client; did you know that LANDesk also does not use the Intel SCS for vPro Client provisioning and configuration?
Steve Rachui: When enabiling modem paging (or similar) it is often a requirement to pass the user name or phone number of the user being contacted to the application handling the paging operation. In MOM 2005 this was easily done using the $operator$ command line variable. It is still very easy to do in OpsMgr 2007 but the mechanics have changed.
In OpsMgr 2007 the $operator$ variable is replaced with the $Data/Recipients/To/Address/Address$ variable. This variable is documented on several other blog entries but is not visible on the 'flyout' option list when selecting the command line variables to use. Using this variable it is possible to pass the 'delivery address' as defined on each recipient to the command line being executed in the notification channel. A few examples of how this would work might be helpful.(
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The System Center Operations Manager 2007 SDK documentation includes information for developers that explains how to programmatically automate and extend Operations Manager 2007 features. The documentation also contains code examples that demonstrate how to write applications that access and modify Operations Manager data. For the most recent version of the documentation, see
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=108753.
This white paper provides guidance and script samples for integrating System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and Virtual Machine Manager 2007 to provide automated software updates for virtual machines stored in a VMM library (offline). By automating the enumeration and deployment of virtual machines to maintenance host, the IT Administrator can manage virtual machines with no additional effort over managing physical machines.
Download the Automating Software Updates for Offline Virtual Machines Using Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007 whitepaper
Paul Thomsen: Summary: SMS 2003 and ConfigMgr 2007 have an often useful feature called protected distributed points. But a site can have many protected DPs, and the locations that correspond with each DP will be of various sizes, so how do you know how many clients you have for each DP? How do you know if any of them are possibly supporting too many clients?
With protected DPs, you can't just divide the site size (in client count) by the number of DPs in order to get the clients per DP ratio, as you would with regular DPs. Each protected DP only serves the clients within its boundaries, and that will vary widely. So you'll need a query that relates the clients in the boundaries to the boundaries for each of the DPs.(
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Ronni Pedersen: After you have installed System Center Essentials 2007, you should complete the Computer and Device Management Wizard, the Feature Configuration Wizard, and the Update Management Configuration Wizard to complete initial configuration. To start using System Center Essentials 2007, there are a number of tasks that you must complete. For more information on these tasks, see the video presentation on the Microsoft TechNet site.
This guide discusses best practices for everyday use of System Center Essentials 2007 and the guide includes the following:
* Getting Ready to Operate Essentials 2007
* Managing Computers
* Monitoring Network Devices
* Deploying Software and Updates
Download the System Center Essentials 2007 Operations Guide
Joey Snow: Today's post on
Edge is an interview I did recently with
Michael Niehaus and Jeremy Chapman regarding
Vista deployment. These guys have done a TON of work around making deployment (not just Vista) much easier to handle. Check out the interview. For even more good stuff on deployment, you should check out the
Deployment Guys blog.
Are you struggling with setting up MDT Lite Touch? - download and view the video walkthrough that shows you how to:
* Add operating systems, applications, drivers and packages to MDT
* Configure Office 2007 into the build process
* Create a MDT Lite Touch task sequence
* Setup a lab based deployment point
* Create a customised build to a reference computer
* Capture the reference computer as a customised WIM
* Add the customised WIM back into MDT for deployment
MDT Lite Touch Build Capture and Deploy.wmv
The Microsoft® Windows® Print Server Management Pack monitors the performance and health of print servers running on Windows® 2000 and later Operating Systems. In addition to monitoring the health of print servers, this Management Pack can also provide insight into the status of shared printers.
By detecting, alerting on, and automatically responding to critical events and performance indicators, this Management Pack helps indicate, correct, and prevent possible operating system service outages.
By using embedded expertise, this Management Pack highlights performance, health, and availability conditions that indicate problems. It helps you identify issues before they become critical, thus providing you with a level of customer responsiveness that increases the overall availability and performance of your Windows Operating Systems. As a result, this Management Pack will reduce the cost of ownership by enabling proactive management and reducing resolution times for the issues identified.
Download the Microsoft Print Service Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007
Contoso has multiple offices around the country that all connected to their head office, some with high-speed network connections and others with relatively slow ones. Contoso is planning their Windows Vista rollout which will be driven from their central office, in this example, Madrid. Contoso wants to deploy their Windows Vista image that they created on their MDT server in Madrid but with a lite-touch installation to all their clients nationwide.
The problem they need to solve is one of distributing their image file to all company workstations without saturating the network at the time of deployment. Unfortunately, they do not have the infrastructure of SMS or Systems Center Configuration Manager which would make this problem fairly trivial, so they need to create a solution that will allow them to deploy their image created in Madrid to all clients without using up all available network bandwidth. The biggest problem that they will have with a lite-touch scenario is that all clients will contact the MDT server directly by hostname (as configured in the file bootstrap.ini that MDT created and placed inside the WinPE image file) to download the corporate WIM image which, in Contoso's case, is 6 Gb in size. This will work fine in the Madrid office because the MDT server is there and there is high-speed network connectivity between the server and the workstations. But when Contoso starts the deployment in their office in Bilbao, which only has a 256kb network connection to Madrid, it will almost certainly fail due to network bandwidth/latency issues.(
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Andrzej Lipka: Together with my colleague Marek Kuzminski, we have slightly modified Brian's scheduled maintenance mode MP (
Scheduling Groups of Objects for Maintenance Mode) to add following features:
- Override by group display name
- Add additional rules to allow 10 different maintenance schedules
- Add a run as profile to the MP to facilitate permissions to schedule maintenance mode
- Added simple error handling in maintenance mode script for troubleshooting
I wasn't able to re-use that MP to do different schedules just by overrides. So the design is still rather 'quick', and limits your number of schedules to 10 (number of rules). To use overrides for different schedules and computer groups bound to the same rule, the MP would have to be redesigned.
Thx to Brian for posting his great MP, and Marek for his help.
Satya Vel: Every week I see one customer running into an issue where they either see the management servers or agents showing up as not monitored. While there a number of reasons why these roles may show up as being ‘not monitored’ I wanted to list out a couple of things to check to help you figure out what the problem maybe. Below are some steps to drill down to understanding why you are seeing a 'Not Monitored' state for Management Servers and Agents.(
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Ian Blyth: A number of people have mentioned these are now going to be free. And the general feeling is that this is a good thing. Well free is good isn’t it? I have misgivings. Let me explain with a bit of history.
In the days of MOM 2000 organisations were interested in the product, especially in its ability to monitor Exchange and AD which has always been MOM’s strong point. They generally would have another system like Tivoli for example. The only way that they would consider using MOM was if it could connect to their manager of managers. Skywire’s iWave was a leader in this field in those days. But then the objection came up that if they used a 3rd party connector who do they go to when there is a problem. So they wanted a connector that was either from Microsoft or their manager of managers company. Well IBM (Tivoli), HP (Openview), BMC (Patrol) or CA (Unicenter) had no desire to let Microsoft steal part of the estate that they were managing. So it was up to Microsoft. Except that the product group were less than enamoured by this prospect as they did not want to be tied to the other companies release cycles. With a lot of persuasion (especially from Sally Baldauf, Microsoft NY) they decided that they would do something.(
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Inovativ has updated it's free to download Scheduled Tasks Management Pack.
The update has a fix for Windows 2000 servers and has more 'relaxed' timings for discoveries and monitors.
Download the Scheduled Tasks - Management Pack v1.1
System Center Essentials 2007 provides a single solution with a single console for managing your servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services for a more unified experience. This unified user experience simplifies the complexity inherent in using multiple IT management tools or tools specifically designed for Enterprise IT environments. Also, using the same central console from which you monitor your IT environment you can assess, configure and deploy updates, plus install software to groups and computers you want to target.
Download System Center Essentials 2007 SP1 Upgrade (x64 & x86)
If you've had the "opportunity" to move your Root Management Server (which Cameron describes at
http://cameronfuller.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!A231E4EB0417CB76!908.entry), there are other components you will need to update as well. This includes the Reporting Server and Web Console Server, which will need to know the new location of your RMS.
- Change the rsreportserver.config file on the Reporting Server. There are two entries there for <ServerName>; change them to point to the new RMS name.
- On the Web Console Server, modify the web.config file where it says <add key = "MOMServer" value='FQDN name of RMS"> to reference the FQDN name of your new RMS.
- On the registry of the reporting server, change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Reporting for the DefaultSDKServiceMachine to the new RMS.
System Center Forum: In this installment, we’ll discuss a very nice feature that Operations Manager 2007 offers, which is the use of Distributed Applications (DAs). Although the term might suggest differently, it is not at all limited to applications. So its applicability can easily go beyond them.(
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The Deployment Guys: In this post I am going to talk about a solution I put together for a customer around OSD and application installation by querying a collection.
Anyone who has used Zero Touch Installation will be familiar with the ability to install applications from SMS packages. In the wizard screen you enter information about each package; the package ID - made up of a site code and a unique number; and the install command line. Then when the task sequence runs ZTIApplications.wsf reads each entry you made and installs the application referenced. This is all well and good but you have to go dig up all the information about a package and enter it into the workbench. If one of the applications changes you need to update the workbench entry again. Plus the person managing BDD may not have enough rights in SMS to to the query.
On the project where I put this solution together the SMS team were responsible for creating application packages and advertising them. The BDD team did not want to have the additional workload of having to manage application updates - which were expected to be frequent. In addition applications would be grouped on core language, business unit or role.(
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The Deployment Guys: So over the next few weeks, I will be presenting a mini series of scripts that may useful in your deployments. All of the scripts will be BDD/MDT specific - meaning that they can be run from the task sequencer and will have the correct format for using the BDD/MDT framework for logging/utilities etc.
The first script in this series is one for starting and stopping services - originally I created this script because I needed to stop and start the SMS service so that SMS auto site allocation could take place, but then my colleague Richard Trusson suggested that I build this into something that is more flexible....(
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Get out your list, because you can add another application to the tally of legitimate uses of BitTorrent.
Apparently, software updates are getting so big these days that simply downloading them from a server is becoming prohibitively time consuming, especially when the same updates need to be applied to many different machines. A Dutch university has some 6,500 desktop PCs in ten locations, which on occasion need to download 3.5GB worth of different types of updates. That's a handsome 22.2TB in total. In a traditional client-server world, that's some modest lifting.
In fact, INHOLLAND University's IT department used to have almost two dozen servers distributed over the university's locations to serve up these downloads. The school was able to retire 20 of them after adopting a new way to distribute updates: BitTorrent. (
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Pete from SystemCenterForum: Following
Ian’s suggestion for a simple format to find MPs for Operations Manager and Essentials 2007, I have created something closer to a proper management pack catalog with freely available management packs from various sources in our
Community Management Pack Catalog. I have added in here community MPs, but also free management packs from popular vendors like
eXc Software and
Secure Vantage. Also in the list are a couple of our most downloaded MPs.
Find the Community Management Pack Catalog at
http://www.systemcenterforum.org/mps
The Windows Service template in the Operations Console lets you discover and monitor a Windows service by doing little more than typing in the service name. I was just talking with someone who had a situation where the name of the service includes the local computer name meaning that it's different on every computer. It's the same service and should be monitored as such - just a slightly different name on each agent. Unfortunately, the template won't allow us to provide a wildcard in the service name.
For those who are skilled with management pack authoring, you're probably not relying on the template anyway, and this wouldn't be too difficult of a task. As such, I'm going to write this post from the point of view of someone who primarily lives within the Operations Console. We do have to get exposed to a bit of XML in order to pull this off, but it really should be minimal.(
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Daniel Savage: I get asked a lot about the best way to use Operations Manager Reporting to answer business specific questions such as "How do I gain efficiencies with my IT Operators?" or "How can I continually improve my monitoring system?" . Although these may be process related, the data we keep within the data warehouse can be used in conjunction with our reporting to supplement these business improvements.
Throughout this blog series I will explore various data collections and attempt to show how these questions can be best answered.(
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From the newsgroup by Åke Pettersson [MSFT].
“Hello, I wanted to update you on the roadmap for the Exchange MPs on OpsMgr.
Exchange 2003
There is an updated Exchange MP on the OpsMgr SP1 CD. There will also be an updated MP guide to cover the fixes in this release. The MP and MP guide will be on the MP catalog, they are about to be released to the MP catalog.
There will be another update to the Exchange 2003 MP during March. We will update the MP guide with the fixlist for this and do a general overhaul of the MP guide to make it consistent with the MP.
Exchange 2007
There will be an update to this MP during Q2. It will be a converted MP focusing on high-priority improvements such as Exchange 2007 SP1 support. At a minimum we will also do release notes for this MP to cover the fixlist.”
Our evaluation upgrade strategy has changed from the RTM version of OpsMgr 2007 to the SP1 version. So in today blogs I wanted to share the various evaluation upgrade strategies customers have.(
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The Windows Server 2003 Cluster Management Pack monitors the health of the Windows Server 2003 clusters. This management pack is designed to improve the availability, performance, and security of your Windows Server 2003 cluster deployment.
You must enable agent proxy on the agents of physical servers which manage cluster nodes.
If you did not upgrade to the final bits of SP1, you will need to install the QFE and the import the Microsoft.Windows.Library management pack. After that’s done, you will need to import the following MP files:
Microsoft.Windows.Cluster.Management.Monitoring
Microsoft.Windows.Cluster.Management.Library
Microsoft.Windows.2003.Cluster.Management.Monitoring
Microsoft.Windows.2003.Cluster.Management.Library
If you do have SP1 installed, all you need to do is import the following MP files:
Microsoft.Windows.Cluster.Management.Monitoring
Microsoft.Windows.Cluster.Management.Library
Microsoft.Windows.2003.Cluster.Management.Monitoring
Microsoft.Windows.2003.Cluster.Management.Library
Download the Windows 2003 Cluster MP.
More info
here
Paul Thomsen: Summary: here's a technique for collecting details about ActiveX controls on your computers.
Do you have a need to inventory the ActiveX controls on your computers? Collecting details about ActiveX controls is not trivial. Many have a .OCX extension, but not all of them. And even if you find them on disk, are you confident they've been installed for use? So a simple software inventory rule won't do the trick.
I built a hardware inventory extension for ActiveX controls a few years ago, and a little research today didn't reveal a better solution. If you have one, I'd be pleased to hear about it (as would others, I'm sure).(
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In addition to new native features NAP and WSUS integration, SCCM 2007 includes the support for added security through elevation of your SCCM site to "Native Mode". Native Mode enables Internet-based clients to connect to your SCCM server for management and converts much of the client communication from HTTP to HTTPS.
But it also requires a PKI infrastructure in your domain, something I'll bet very few networks currently have in-place and a technology that is fairly complex to setup.(
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Kerrie Meyler: Is systems management (or operations management) fascinating, or just necessary? I suspect some people would find it more fascinating than others. Some (including myself!) may even consider it their passion to have an IT environment properly managed; it is highly preferable to not spend time putting out fires.
However, systems management definitely requires resources that often are not available. Although system management costs vary depending on whether that process is manual or automated. An
IDC white paper discussing IT labor costs and SMS shows that labor costs are higher for those IT shops at the "basic" level ($1,320 per PC/year) than at the "rationalized" level ($230 PC/year). These terms are taken from Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization Model (IO Model), see
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/infrastructure/default.aspx. The IO Model is also discussed in the IDC paper. A "basic organization" does things manually, while a more "rationalized" orgazation has implemented IT best practices and automates whenever possible.
System Center Forum has posted the third installment in the System Center Forum Scripting Series. The first two posts were:
Updating MOM 2005 Runtime Scripts for OpsMgr
Custom Performance Objects in Runtime Scripts
Part three covers two simple debugging methods for of accessible to most non-developers (IT Pros). These come in handing when looking up errors on the search engines doesn’t yield results.
Download Debugging Runtime Scripts for OpsMgr and SCE 2007
Cory Delamarter: Here is the next entry in the posts I’m migrating over. Again this intended to be a “snapshot in time” supplement to the
Implementing System Center Operations Manager 2007 at Microsoft white paper.
So what exactly does the RMS do?
The RMS server, by definition, is the first management server installed in a management group. The RMS is differentiated from other management servers (MS) by two distinct services and a host of distinct workflows that run as a part of the health service on the RMS. (
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Brian Wren: I was given a challenge recently to come up with a solution for an organization that wanted to suppress any alerts for certain computers and services during a particular time window every night. The particular set of objects and the times in question had to be manageable by the administrators - preferably from the Operations Console.
This is a great example for a few concepts, so this will be a pretty long post where I'll describe each step along the way. If you just want the answer, scroll to the link at the end for the sample MP. Otherwise, you should find some good information on the following concepts:
* Launching a PowerShell script from a rule
* Composing a rule made up of a data source and write action
* Replacing explicit values in a rule with overrides
* Creating a simple custom class
Update:
Boris Yanushpolsky made an
script to put a collection into maintenance mode.
For System Center Forum readers that might have missed our first blog posts, this is Jalasoft’s fifth article about Xian Io’s functionality in a series of eight. Prior posts discussed the monitoring of
network device interfaces and port status, a
device’s response time and
asynchronous monitoring and
monitoring of processes.
In this installment, we’ll discuss a very nice feature that Operations Manager 2007 offers, which is the use of Distributed Applications (DAs). Although the term might suggest differently, it is not at all limited to applications. So its applicability can easily go beyond them.(
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Ying Li:I just upgrade our SCOM environment to SP1 the other day. I have followed the Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Upgrade Guide which is in the UpdateCDImage.
The whole upgrade process is rather smooth except when I was trying to take OperationsManager DB offline to make a backup, It is “In Progress” forever. I have to hard “kill” the process and then tried the below query.(
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The System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) team has released a macro component that populates the required dependent components in your runtime, to enable installation of the SCCM 2007 client once the runtime has run through FBA.
This macro component can be downloaded from
here and imported into the Embedded database. Add the
SCCM 2007 Client Prerequisites component to your configuration. After FBA the client can be installed from a licensed installation of SCCM (a trial version can be found
here) in order to manage and service your devices as part of a whole Enterprise.
Pete from System Center Forum: The next release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (currently dubbed “SCVMM vNext”) aims to consolidate management of virtual machines from multiple platforms and sources (VS 2005, VMware 3.x, and Xen in a future release). But to really win the war in the end, I believe MS needs to target the following key areas:
- DR / HA - MS currently has no true VMotion equivalent today. Addressing disaster recovery scenarios is definitely a key area. Check out the High Availability with Hyper-V webcast.
- Performance - By some estimates I’ve seen, VMware outperforms Virtual Server 2005 by 15-20%. We’ll see how far Windows 2008 cuts into that.
- Make virtualization accessible for the mid-market - Virtualization has found it’s way into shops as small as 35 users amongst my clients, but the VMware mgmt interfaces (and let’s face it, virtualization concepts in general) are tough for IT generalists to grasp. Delivering a better mouse-trap to this market is critical for adoption.
- Appliances - With the release of 3i, VMware enterered the world of plug-and-play virtualization with minimal user knowledge of necessary configuration items. This would no doubt ease deployment not only in mid-market, but branch office deployment in the enterprise space.
With the temporary workaround for the ‘Performance Module’ issue requiring disabling of a rule, it’s got me thinking about best practices for storing your overrides.
Issue: Everyone knows that you can right click a rule in Operations Manager or Essentials and create a rule disable override. However, when you select the Disable option, you will not be prompted for the management pack, meaning the disable override will be stored in the Default Management Pack. Not ideal.
Workaround: Instead, 1) Select Override the Rule, 2) Select the target object(s) and the MP where you’d like to store the override and finally 3) Override the Enabled property and set to False.
Same effect without touching the Default Management Pack with your overrides. While you’re at it, back up your unsealed MPs. Just as in MOM 2005, backing up your customizations prevents the need to perform a database restore to retrieve customizations deleted or otherwise mucked up by someone else.
Ian Blyth: A few people now have mentioned that this has been released. It is RC and needs SCOM SP1 I believe. It can be downloaded from
Microsoft and there is a 32 bit and 64 bit version.
I installed the 32 bit version on my demo system and it was a simple install. The program unzipped 3 files and then ran the setup. One tick to confirm the EULA and I was done.(
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Boris Yanushpolsky: When you deploy a management pack and the action account is configured as a low priv account, some workflows (monitors/rules/discoveries/tasks/diagnostics/recoveries) may not be able to execute because by default they will run under the low priv account and may not have sufficient rights to access the instrumentation they need in order to function properly. The solution for this problem is for the MP author to use a RunAs profile. This allows the customer which is deploying the management pack to specify a particular account which will be used to execute the set of workflows that are configured to use the RunAs profile. One of the difficulties today is that when you configure a RunAs profile in the UI, you can only configure it for one agent at a time. We have posted several powershell scripts to allow doing this in bulk. To simplify things a bit more, I wrote a small utility that will allow you to configure a RunAs profile for agents in bulk.
In order to configure a RunAs profile, you need to right click on it on the left hand side on the RunAs profile that you wish to configure, and click on the "Add Computer(s)" menu item. In order to remove computers from a RunAs profile, you need to multi-select the computers in the right hand side, right click and select the "Remove Computer(s)" menu item.
This is the first version of the utility. I would really appreciate feedback as to how I can make this utility more useful.
Download Run As profile configuration helper v1
Microsoft has released the Release Candidate version of the Authoring Console for Operations Manager 2007 SP1. With this you can create your own Management Packs in a much better and "easier" way than with the Operation Manager Console.
This is what Microsoft says about it:
This powerful console enables our customers and partners to author Management Packs offline and get them developed quicker for the Operations Manager 2007 SP1 platform.
The Authoring Console comes in both x64 and i386 versions. You need to have Operations Manager SP1 installed. The RTM version should just be a month or two away.
Download the System Center Authoring Console (Release Candidate)
Q. Why are Active Alerts vs. Computer State View different?? In the old MOM, if there was an unresolved error/warning/etc, then that would show in the State View as well. Most of my servers show a Healthy status in the Computers State View in SCOM but show error/warnings/critical type alerts in the Active Alert view in SCOM.
A. Remember that in SCOM you now have monitors and rules. Monitors alert based on state changes and allow you to define the rollup of health for the object being monitored. I.E. Monitoring a windows service such as the DNS client service via a monitor allows you to generate an alert by the actual unit monitor that is monitor for a change in state to the DNS client service. You can also create an alert at the aggregate rollup monitor of Windows Core Services. This alert can be set to auto resolve when the start of the DNS client service changes back to healthy.
A rule on the other hand can be configured to create an alert but that alert can’t be set to auto-resolve based on a change in state because the alert isn’t based on a change in state it’s based on other criteria that you are monitoring for.
The end result is that if a rule generates a critical alert, this may not be displayed in the Computer state view because it’s not state based but there could still be an active alert in the active alerts view.
The other thing to note about monitors and rules is that when you create a rule you have the ability to populate a custom attributes but this isn’t currently possible with monitors.
Ian Blyth: My demo system consists of 2 Windows 2003 SP2 VMs with one being a DC and the other being an OpsMgr server with SQL 2005 SP2, the RMS role, web role, reporting role and a console.
The upgrade went smoothly and similar to Cameron’s (see his screen shots here). After doing the RMS upgrade I then did reporting and that went smoothly as well.
My RMS was up at 6278 and my DC was still 6246 and when I looked at the Pending view the server was listed. I right clicked and chose Approve and the agent was successfully updated. I did not run into the not in pending so do repair problem as mentioned by Clive but it is a small demo system.
Clive Eastwood: Finally the edits for SP1 RTM have been made to
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=944443
This article contains a list of Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) articles that describe the issues that are fixed in System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1. This article is primarily intended to help IT professionals and corporate helpdesk workers to support and to maintain a company’s computer system.
System Center Guide: With the consent of the Microsoft product group, I’m proud to present to you the underlying architecture of the next version of Virtual Machine Manager, which will proudly support both Virtual Server and VMWare virtual machines:
| 31 Mar '08 - 06:53 | kenneth van surksum | 
no comments | news source ~ http://securevantage.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!905E136EE69247B4!241.entry 
