SCOM 2012 - The Upgrade Helper Management Pack

Following on from my last post on creating a custom RDP alert task in SCOM2012, this is a quick post to demonstrate the new SCOM 2012 Upgrade Helper Management Pack that assists in the in-place upgrade of your SCOM 2007 R2 environment to SCOM 2012.

The in-place upgrade process is real easy but it's important that a number of installation steps are carried out in an exact sequence, otherwise you end up making a whole lot of extra work for yourself!

This is where the SCOM 2012 Upgrade Helper Management Pack comes in handy. Once it's installed onto your SCOM 2007 R2 RMS, you can then open it up and review which servers and agents are next to be upgraded to SCOM 2012 as per the upgrade best practices.

To install the Upgrade Helper Management Pack, firstly download the SCOM 2012 Release Candidate from the link below:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ie/evalcenter/hh505660.aspx

Once you have downloaded the Release Candidate, run the 'SCOM2012.exe' file and expand the contents to a location of your choosing.

Now browse to the location that you expanded the files to and double click on the 'Management Packs' folder as in the screen below

When you go into the 'Management Packs' folder, you should see the 'OperationsManager.Upgrade.mp' file inside. This is the file that we will be importing into SCOM 2007R2 to assist with the upgrade process.

To import the Management Pack, on your SCOM 2007R2 Root Management Server (RMS), go to the 'Administration' tab and then right mouse click on the 'Management Packs' link in the window on the left hand side. From the drop down menu, select 'Import Management Packs' to open the wizard

In the 'Import Management Packs' wizard, click on the 'Add' button and then select 'Add from disk'

Browse to the location that you exported your SCOM2012 media to and ensure you open up the 'Management Packs' folder. When here, locate and then double click on the 'OperationsManager.Upgrade.mp' file

Back in the wizard, ensure that the management pack is ready to import and then click on the 'Install' button to begin the short installation process

Once the Management Pack install is complete, you should see a status of 'Imported' in the window. Click on the 'Close' button to complete the import process.

Now, go back to the 'Monitoring' tab and you should see a new folder called 'Operation Manager Upgrade MP'. When you expand this folder, you will see 5 steps listed that will show the relevant management servers, gateway servers, Windows agents, Unix/Linux agents and RMS and databases that need to be upgraded and the order that the upgrade needs to be carried out in.

If your server/agent has a yellow exclamation symbol beside it within one of the steps, then this server or agent hasn't yet been upgraded to SCOM2012 and needs to be done. If the server/agent shows a green symbol beside it, then it has already been upgraded to SCOM2012 and you can move onto the next step of the upgrade process.

In a small environment, this MP may not be of much use as the step by step process is easier, the less servers and agents you have. However, in a large environment such as the one I just upgraded last weekend where you have a number of different SCOM Management Servers, Gateway Servers, Cross Platform and Windows agents, then you will definitely get some benefit from first deploying it as an assistant to your upgrade.