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.
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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 monitori
| 31 Mar '08 - 06:53 | kenneth | 
no comments | news source ~ http://securevantage.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!905E136EE69247B4!241.entry 
