We are starting a new series: OpsMgr Answer This questions. These are questions that you probably have asked yourself (or others) more than once. In this series, the writers of the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed book will offer their opinions to some of those (sometimes rhetorical) questions. The first question we are discussing is, Why should one go to Operations Manager 2007? You may be using MOM 2005 and be perfectly happy with it. There is an adage: "if it works, don't break it" - so why go to Operations Manager 2007?(
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The people over at the Operations Manager Product Team Blog posted a video on Bad Situation-Good Results: OpsMgr 2007 High Availability and Disaster Recovery.
The video details how to cluster a Root Management Server and promote a Management Server to take the role of a Root Management Server.
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Jeanie Decker: Previously, I learned
what management packs version numbers mean, but that will be changing in the near future. Coming soon, the part of the version number that was previously tied to the version number of Operations Manager (6.0.
6278.22) will be the version number of the management pack, and the part that was the management pack version (6.0.6278.
22) will be incremented for updates to the management pack.
The details page for the download and the management pack guide will establish the required version of Operations Manager.
Jeanie Decker:I posted last month about the
"missing" management pack guides for the management packs that were included with SP1, and finally have progress to report. As I stated, our goals were to:
- Make the guides available online - and I hope to have an update post on that goal very soon!
- Update the guides with any changes made when the management packs were shipped with Operations Manager SP1 - done!
- Post the SP1 management packs with their updated guides on the download center.
We've packaged the individual management packs with their updated guides, and the first batch has appeared on the
Operations Manager 2007 Catalog:
More should be added to the catalog shortly!
Question:
Is there any possibility, or third party tools, that will make me sure that 100% of computers that I want it to install the client, has the SCCM client installed... and if they don't, is there any way to initiate installation and to be sure 100% that the SCCM Client is installed?
Answer:
To ensure that all systems that are intended and targeted for the ConfigMgr client installation. The best client deployment method I have used here at Microsoft is using AD GPO that will apply 3 settings.
1. the ccmsetup parameters are place in the registry
2. the WSUS URL is place in the registry.
3. applies the ADM Client Assignment template.
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Pete Zerger: Here’s a question from the newsgroups, the answer for which may be of interest to Operations Manager 2007 administrators.
Question: I need to report on Disk Time, and can’t see this counter even under Performance reports. I see Disk Reads/Writes, but not Disk Time on one series. Even Disk Performance Analysis doesn’t contain it.
Answer: While this data could included in the Performance Report in the Opsmgr Generic report library, the data is not present in the data warehouse by default for a couple of reasons. (
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We have the pleasure to announce you the release of the Connector for System Center Operations Manager 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 !
Having developed the connector for MOM-CRM, we decided to upgrade the application for SCOM and CRM 4.0, in the aim to meet the strong demand for the product.
The connector will help you managing your infrastructure by generating cases in your CRM, regarding the SCOM alerts you want to treat, and sending information to SCOM about the resolution state of the cases. (
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Did you hear about Pro Packs or Pro Tips lately? And do you know what they are? I saw this question in an internal mail thread and I must say I didn’t knew much about it also. So here is some info about PRO which is a new feature of SCVMM 2008.
PRO or Performance and Resource Optimization is a new feature in VMM 2008 which leverages the monitoring and alerting capabilities of Operations Manager 2007 to surface Tips or recommendations within VMM which help administrators ensure a high performance and efficient virtualized environment. By leveraging OpsMgr’s MP framework partners and customers can create PRO enabled MPs which surface these Tips in VMM and have associated actions (Users can configure them to run manually or automatically) which implement the recommendations made to resolve issues or increase the efficiency of the environment. (
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We've been asked in the newsgroups:
How does database clustering require enterprise edition? I still don't understand ... You can cluster with standard, if so that's clustering, correct? Other than having more nodes than two, are there any benefits, as they relate to the OpsMgr database itself that you gain by going to Enterprise Edition over Standard? Does it do re-indexing and stuff that may take it offline while jobs run, etc that warrant paying more for Enterprise?
Okay, here's how it works:
* SQL Server Standard Edition supports up to two clustered nodes - and for the OpsMgr databases, those can be configured as active/passive
* SQL Server Enterprise Edition supports up to 8 clustered nodes
The operating system in either case MUST be Windows Server Enterprise (or Datacenter) Edition. (
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Based on some customer and partner feedback we put together a 1 page quick reference sheet for the Audit Collection Service (ACS) included with System Center Operations Manager 2007. This ACS 'cheat sheet' includes best practices, configuration and administrative facts for managing your ACS environment.
If you're new to ACS or it's something you don't administer often this doc is for you. Don't waste time hunting for information, print this doc and keep it close by.
Download ACS Administrators Quick Reference
Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) of System Center Operations Manager and System Center Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM) are identical features with the only difference being that AEM is shipped with Operations Manager 2007 and DEM is shipped with Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) SKU’s. These features leverage the Microsoft Error Reporting (formerly known as Dr. Watson) or Windows Error Reporting client applications for reporting the crash or hang. These client applications are shipped with default settings to forward the Error reports to Microsoft Error Reporting Service. Using DEM, they can be configured to forward the Error reports to DEM or Operations Manager Server.
The attached document describes the steps you need to take to ensure that the Microsoft Error Reporting and Windows Error Reporting are configured correctly. I would like to thank Vishwa for spending time walking me through all the steps to troubleshoot the "DEM" thing :)
Troubleshooting Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) and Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM) features
Richard Trusson: In this post I will talk about the method I use to force a reboot at the end of a ZTI task sequence; when running from OSD. This solution was put together with input from Richard Smith a fellow Deployment Guy and also with help from Avanade/Accenture - Chris Bird, Jonathan Goulding, Chris Urwin and Steven Westwell. We developed this to help us enable BitLocker as part of an OSD deployment. I'll post the scripts and steps for doing that a little later. This post covers some of the ground work that made enabling BitLocker possible, there is a whole lot more around drive partitioning - but that is for another post.
So why would we need a special way to force a reboot of a ZTI/OSD build? During the build process any reboots requested by the task sequence or applications, such as BitLocker install, are suppressed. Take a look in the log file of a build and you'll see the occasional entry saying that OSD has suppressed a reboot. You may have other things that you need a reboot for at the end of your build process.
It is important to point out that this forced reboot only occurs at the end of the OSD process. We can not force a reboot during that process and have OSD carry on. (
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Microsoft published a new 18-pages guide to setup virtual machines fail-over between two Hyper-V (now in Release Candidate 1) virtualization hosts.
Download the guide
Jeff Wettlaufer: Today we release Configuration Manager 2007 SP1!
It is amazing to see that this was not a release based in bug fix, quite the opposite, there are hardly any hotfixes included in this release. This is a reflection of changes such as the ship of Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1.
With some engineering cycles aligning, we have added some additional features that were ready to go at this time, details are as follows:<
As a recap SP1 specifically contains:
1. Complete support for management of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008.
2. Support for Configuration Manager 2007 Server Site roles on Server 2008.
3. Integration with Intel VPro technologies.
4. Asset Intelligence 1.5
You can find additional details, and information for download on our product homepages, located here.
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/configmgr/default.mspx
Also, we will have a full Technical overview at the upcoming
Teched USA in Orlando June 10-13th. We have a full breakout session , and we will be running SP1 (and R2 previews ) at the Microsoft pavilion pod area. Also, we have a Technet webcast on Configuration Manager 2007 SP1, you can find that
here.
Michael Murgolo: In my
previous post on this topic, I mentioned that Windows XP Service Pack 2 will copy the Administrators settings to Default User (see sections B & C). The new profile copy is the default behavior in SP2 with no built-in way to disable it. To disable it you had to request the hotfix from
KB887816 from Microsoft Customer Support.
This has changed with Windows XP Service Pack 3. The fix from
KB887816 is included in SP3. (See
KB946480 for a list of fixes included in SP3.) Therefore, the behavior for SP3 is no profile copy by default. To enable the profile copy, you now have to add
UpdateServerProfileDirectory=1 to the
[Unattended] section of Sysprep.inf before running Sysprep. Unfortunately, due to an oversight you will not find this documented in the Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Reference (ref.chm) included with the
SP3 Deployment Tools.
KB887816 is currently one of the only references for this setting, as far as I know. (
KB908784 also references this setting with respect to a problem that the profile copy can cause on Windows Server 2003)
Overview of the Tool
The Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 is designed to work with an existing Operations Manager infrastructure (it is assumed that Operations Manager is already configured to monitor the business-critical applications). Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 uses the following components to gather and process additional data (see figure for reference):
The SLA agreement is identified and defined by the IT Manager for a given business-critical application or service.
Web application monitors and synthetic transactions. The IT administrator configures and deploys watcher nodes to perform the actions of a synthetic transaction, such as connecting to the Web site or querying the database. A Web application monitor runs on the watcher node and uses these synthetic transactions to perform actions to check availability and to measure performance of a Web page, Web site, or Web application. The IT administrator configures the thresholds for identifying an error or warning state during a synthetic transaction.
An Operations Manager Distributed Application (DA) model is used by the IT administrator uses to define the application or service. Using the DA model, the IT administrator groups Web application monitors and other monitors into applications and regions for the dashboard.
One can use the dashboard interface to analyze the SLA compliance data as soon as the Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 components are configured and operating.
The Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007 evaluates each application over the defined reporting period, determines whether the application was in or out of compliance during that period (and for how long). The dashboard then lists the application as compliant or non-compliant, based on defined service level targets.
If you want to have a closer look at this beta on Microsoft Connect, go to:
https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=2198 (more)
Brian McDermott: I get asked about how to enable AD integration for an untrusted domain in Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 from time to time and since I didn’t see it documented anywhere I thought I’d post a step-by-step here.(
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Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) is designed to help you take backups and restore data easily. For a Microsoft SharePoint® farm, DPM understands the objects within the farm and backs up the most relevant data with least amount of user intervention.
DPM 2007 backs up:
1. Configuration database which stores most of the farm settings.
2. Administrator content database which stores the content of the central admin website.
3. Individual content DBs that store information about specific sites, their subsites, document libraries and documents.
Apart from this, DPM customers have highlighted a need to back up SharePoint Search service as well – both Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Search and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Search.(
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J.C. Hornbeck: This seems to be a relatively popular question so I thought I'd post a quick heads-up here in case you're thinking about trying this in the future. If you want to virtualize the ConfigMgr 2007 admin console then follow these steps. (
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Pete Zerger: Some of you may remember the Remote
Interactive Command Prompt Task I wrote about for MOM 2005 a couple of years ago. This sample MP does this one better for Opsmgr 2007 - it actually creates two console tasks which are targeted at the computer you select in a State view in the Monitoring space.(
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Greg Ramsey: If you attended Angie Stahl's presentation at
MMS, you caught a sneak peak of the
ConfigMgr Client Troubleshooter. The troubleshooter is an
html application, which makes it fairly portable, and all the code can be viewed using your favorite text editor. Use the troubleshooter to help you diagnose ConfigMgr client issues. This tool has become priceless at my company, where it is used by the Service Desk and OnSite teams (as well as my team on a daily basis). There are two modes currently avaible for the troubleshooter,
Single System mode and
Batch Mode.(
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Richard Smith: I have been doing some sizing work for a customer around System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and its use specifically for deployment (Windows Vista)– there seems to be some conflicting info in many different places – however the tables below gives some very rough guidelines pulled from different sources...thought it may be useful(
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Monitoring your Exchange Servers is an absolutely essential task in order to guarantee that the messaging environment is operating reliably. Depending on the complexity of your IT infrastructure, there may be a huge effort involved in monitoring and operations.
The Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack (MP) for Operations Manager 2007 contains rules to monitor a significant subset of server health indicators and create alerts when problems are detected, or when reasonable thresholds are exceeded.(
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Shitanshu: SCCM site server database is one of the only supported site role in clustered configuration in SCCM 2007. Though I have not configured clustered DB in production so far, as we did not have critical business requirement for having clustered SCCM site server DB and having extra hardware for the same, but since it is supported and may be needed for other customer so sharing some references and to do list for considering this in production which will increase high availability and reduce single point of failures.(
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Pete Zerger: We’d talked a few weeks ago about creating a
Top Alerts Report in Powershell to improve upon the Top Alerts Report. So here are variations on that provides an additional elements versus the
Top Alerts report (in the Microsoft ODR Report Library) by displaying based on the repeat count and the object for which the alert was logged. When I run the Top Alerts Report, the repeat count seems to be missing in the report logic.
After a bit of working with this, I think these meet the need. These should make it easy to determine which computers are logging the most errors and which rules or monitors are the most problematic.(
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J.C. Hornbeck: Below is a small utility I wrote that I think you may find helpful. This is a small utility that can be used to view Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Server/Agent Event Logs on a remote computer. For example, this could be a computer at a remote location or one that does not have the OpsMgr 2007 Agent or Server Installed.
There have been a number of ways we've tried to get around this issue, such as opening the event logs on the computer which actually has the Sever or Agent installed, or if it’s a remote computer without any OpsMgr components installed we could install the agent, but one of the issues with that is once you install the OpsMgr Agent you might not be able to parse events related to below components:
* DataAccessLayer
* OpsMgr Config Service
* Opsmgr Root Connector
* Opsmgr SDK Client
* Opsmgr SDK Service
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Event Viewer Utility
Peter Fitzsimon: SCVMM 2008 is the next version of SCVMM that allows the management of multiple virtualization platforms including Hyper-V, Virtual Server and VMware ESX.
Microsoft have just released a beta version of SCVMM 2008 via
http://connect.microsoft.com
Grab it and have a play. I know a site that already has it in "production" side by side with their Virtual Center console to manage their VMware ESX environment.
Stefan Stranger: Operations Manager 2007 comes with several standard management pack templates. You can use these templates to create a new management pack and then customize that management pack to your requirements. This approach provides an alternative to creating a new management pack to store the overrides for a sealed management pack.
One of the available MP templates is the OLE DB Data Source Template. Use the connection string properties to specify the instance to which you want to connect. You can find more information on how to construct OLE DB connection strings, on MSDN
Connection String Syntax.
When we write rules and monitors to look at events in the event log.... typically the most common criteria are Event ID and Source. We also have a list of other common event properties to choose from.
However, this list doesn't always work. For instance - if we add someone to a Global Group in AD.... this might create a Event ID 632 in the security event log on a DC - but possibly we only want to alert on this when the group being modified is "Domain Admins". Somewhere in that event description is the word "Domain Admins". (
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Rory McCaw: All the MP guides used to be located at
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/bb498235.aspx and this will still take you to the Ops Mgr product documentation but you will not find the MP Guides any longer.
The guides have been removed from that page. The guides are typically available in the .msi for the MP, and are supposed to be available (soon!) online in the TechCenter at (
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310604.aspx).
As you have likely noticed, only some of the guides were listed previously on
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/bb498235.aspx. You may have also noticed that the MPs released with SP1 did not have updated guides. This is something that Microsoft is aware and is working to fix.
Nils van Schaik: The last couple of days I’ve been playing around with the SCCM 2007 SP1/R2 beta. I wanted to try out the NAP (network access protection) features, which require Windows Server 2008 on the SCCM server. So I went ahead and created some virtual machines, a domain controller and a SCCM server. I wanted to do it right, so I decided to install Windows Server 2008 on the domain controller as well.(
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When you deploy a Windows XP client with Configuration Manager OSD, and the user hits CTRL+ALT+DELETE, the user gets the usual logon screen, but with the target set to the machine name, and not the domain the computer is joined to. This is not the biggest problem on the planet, but why deal with it the problem could go away?(
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Installing and configuring the new Beta Service Level Dashboard I first had to download and install the Microsoft .NET framework 3.5. In contrast to the .NET framework 3.0 it only takes a few minutes to install but it requires a reboot.
You need to run SCOM 2007 SP1 with reporting and the latest Management pack versions of:
* Microsoft.SystemCenter.Library Version 6.0.6278.0
* Microsoft.Windows.Library Version 6.0.6278.0
* System.Health.Library Version 6.0.6278.0
* System.Library Version 6.0.6278.0
A normal SP1 installation will already have these MP's with the correct version. (
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System Center Operations Manager 2007 enables the ability to create custom scripts to monitor a system for a specified value, and react accordingly based on your requirements. In order to successfully accomplish this goal, we need to complete three basic steps:
1. Create a .vbs script to monitor the values that we're interested in and return that data to System Center Operations Manager.
2. Create an appropriately scoped Monitor Management Pack Object to leverage the newly created script.
3. Test the Monitor Object for the desired results.
Creating a .vbs script that can interface with System Center Operations Manager 2007 requires adding only a couple of additional steps to your script :(
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A question that seems to popup from time to time, is how to import HDC Storage drivers in Configuration Manager.
When importing storage drivers into Configuration Manager 2007, not all types (Class), can be used (selected) from the Task Sequence wizard. This is a known bug. At the time ConfigMgr 07 shipped, Microsoft were not aware of any mass storage drivers that used the HDC class, so only SCSIAdapters were flagged as boot critical. To workaround this issue you need to do the following: (
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Steve Rachui: A question came up today regarding heartbeating in OpsMgr 2007 - specifically, whether we can easily group systems and deliver missing heartbeat notifications based on specific computers and teams that manage those computers. The answer is yes - but the process of heartbeating and setting this up is different in OpsMgr 2007.
Watcher node - In OpsMgr you have the agent node and the watcher node. The agent node is the system with the installed OpsMgr agent that performs data collection, evaluation, etc. The watcher node is a designated system external to the agent that can perform monitoring to ensure the actual agent of interest is healthy. A good example would be an IIS server. An agent running on the IIS server is fully able to monitor providing the IIS server is running. If the IIS server goes down there would be no way to continue monitoring web page availability, etc. Enter the watcher node. A system can be designated to 'watch' the IIS server to ensure it is up and running. The same can apply in other examples too - such as the Health Service (the agent). (
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Stefan Stranger: During some
commandline installation testing I accidentally installed the OpsMgr Data Warehouse in a wrong directory, so I wanted to uninstall the database and used the GUI setup in an effort to delete the Data Warehouse (OperationsManagerDW).
Luckily I did my testing on my demo systems because I saw some frightening screens during my uninstall of the Data Warehouse
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| 29 May '08 - 07:24 | kenneth van surksum | 
no comments | news source ~ Operations Manager Product Team Blog 
