Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012

Microsoft have demonstrated here at MMS 2011 today, some of the new features built into their new System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2012 offering.

Some brief highlights are:

• Full integration from the AviCode aquisition for monitoring and deep insights into Microsoft .NET and J2EE applications for maximum availability and performance

• New dashboarding for better service level agreement tracking and native SCOM graphics

• Network monitoring built in as standard

Microsoft System Center Advisor - Codename Atlanta

Microsoft VP Brad Anderson announced yet another new tool to assist datacenter administrators with the management of their infrastructure.

The new System Center Advisor tool  - previously codenamed 'Atlanta' is a secure cloud service that proactivley monitors your Microsoft Server deployments with a configuration assistant that utilises the full input of 90,000 Microsoft tech support staff who are contributing on a daily basis to the knowledge base that this product relys on.

It installs a low end agent onto your server and runs very similar to the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzers and provides links to support kb's and hotfixes based around recommendations that it thinks are needed to optimize your servers.

You can download this utility from the link below:

https://www.microsoftatlanta.com/

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012

It was announced today that the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 application is availble for beta download right now.

The new edition of VMM 2012 allows for a far more seamless integration of Self Service management and VM provisioning. A big positive from this is the fact that VMM 2012 now adds support for the Citrix XenServer Hypervisor making it a true cross-platform Hypervisor management tool.

SCVMM 2012 now supports bare metal provisioning of Hyper-V hosts using IPMI, DCMI, SMASH and custom provisioning which means in essence that you can now deploy a new hyper v host using SCVMM templates and the HP ILO for example, that will build the O/S, add it to your cluster and even install a SCOM agent using the pre-built SCVMM template in your library.

Cluster storage management is now possible too and you no longer need to exclusively use Failover Cluster Manager to manage your LUN's.
You can download the beta from this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/try-it.aspx#down

Microsoft Codename Concero

I had heard this product name a few weeks back from a blog post online and was intruged by the possibilities of this new cloud management solution.

During his keynote speech this morning, Microsoft VP Brad Anderson spoke about and demonstrated the new private and public self service portal that will really put it up to VMWare in the battle for systems and cloud management.

Concero allows administrators to manage multiple private and public clouds while provisioning virtual machines and services to individual business units. Using Concero with the newly announced System Center 2012 products, datacenter administrators will be able to provision not only virtual machine OS deployments, but leveraging App-V, you will be able to deploy and manage down to the application level thus minimising the amount of VHD template's that are stored in the library.

Microsoft System Center 2012

Microsoft Vice President Brad Anderson made some really cool announcements this morning during his keynote speach (it could have been a little later than an 08:30 start - we are in Vegas and most people are still either in bed or out partying!).

He announced the new version of Microsoft System Center 2012 which will include brand new updates of all of the existing System Center products over the next year along with some new products to complement the management suite.

Microsoft System Center Orchestrator

It's official - Microsoft have announced (what most of us knew already!) at MMS 2011 that Opalis will be renamed 'Microsoft System Center Orchestrator'.

I'll post more on this as I go through some of the sessions.

MMS 2011 - Las Vegas

Well, finally after 15 hours travelling -7.5 hours from Dublin to Philadelphia, 2 hour stop in Philly and then a 5.5 hour flight to Vegas - I've arrived in my hotel and am going through the full motions of jet lag!!

Went to sleep at 10.30 p.m. local time (around 04.30 a.m. Irish Time) and woke up bright eyed and bushytailed at 04.00 a.m. local time (11.00 a.m. Irish Time)!! My body still thinks it's back in Ireland and I think it's gonna take me a couple of days to get back on track!

The flight from Dublin was like an endurance test but the flight from Philadelphia to Vegas was quite interesting. I got talking to a really nice guy sitting beside me on the plane and it turns out he's going to be one of the presenters over in MMS 2011 and he had some really cool stuff to talk about during our 5 and a half hour flight! He confirmed what we were hoping for in OpsMgr 2012 that it would have much better dashboarding and reporting capabilities and also some really cool new features that I'll wait to blog about once I've attended the sessions during the week.

I also got to see some slides based around AviCode and that's another session I'm looking forward to seeing over the next few days.

There is a lot of buzz building over here too based around the new System Center offering codenamed Microsoft 'Concero'. It's a cloud management portal that will allow customers to manage both on premises Hyper V and SCVMM implementations in tandem with off premises services running on Azure and Azure appliances.

So, I have it all to look forward to over the next week, I'll keep the blog updated with all the new products and features as I hear about them!

System Center / Windows User Group Presentation - From the Desktop to the Cloud

A really good day was had by all who attended the Windows and System Center User Group Event held last Thursday 24th Feb in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin.

I had the pleasure of presenting the second session of the day as part of the 'Systems Management' track. The day was split into 3 tracks comprising 'The Cloud' (Track 1), 'Windows 7 / Office 2010 Deployment' (Track 2) and 'Systems Management' (Track 3).

There was a great turnout on the day from IT Pro's and customers alike and there was a very high caliber of speakers ranging from MVP's to Microsoft Staff. Click here to see the full range of speakers.

My presentation was titled - 'System Center Virtual Machine Manager / Operations Manager & Performance Resource Optimization (PRO)'. You can download my presentation slides from here.

Discussions have already started for a second event to be held sometime in May so I'll post any updates as I find out myself.

Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster (Part 6)

Welcome to the final blog posting in this 6 part series on 'Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster'. If you have come to this post before reading over the previous 5 posts in the series, I've included links for all 5 of them below:

Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster (Part 1)
Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster (Part 2)
Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster (Part 3)
Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster (Part 4)
Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster (Part 5)

Following the instructions detailed in my previous 5 posts, you should now have your SQL 2008 R2 Cluster built and your SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Cluster built and tested. This post will outline some troubleshooting steps to take in the event of an issue with your newly built SCOM 2007 RMS Cluster and also explain how to install SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting into an SQL 2008 R2 environment.

Preparing an Inaccessible Management Server

The following procedure is required only if, in bringing the cluster group online, the output stated that you are required to run the ManagementServerConfigTool.exe tool by using the AddRMSNode action on any of the non-root management server cluster nodes. This is most likely caused by a cluster node that is not accessible when the InstallCluster action was executed or you are adding a new node to the cluster.

1. Log on to the computer that hosts the management server as a member of the Administrators group.

2. Open the services snap-in and if the startup type for the System Center Data Access Service is set to Disabled, change it to Manual.

3. As an administrator, open a Command Prompt window , change directories to the installation folder, and type the following:

ManagementServerConfigTool.exe AddRMSNode /vs:<VirtualServerNetbiosName> /Disk:<VirtualServer Disk Resource>

VirtualServerNetbiosName is the Network Name resource allocated to the same cluster group. The value you enter for VirtualServerNetbiosName must be the value that appears in the Name box on the General tab of the Properties dialog box for the Network Name Cluster resource.

VirtualServerDiskResource is the disk resource allocated to the cluster group being used to create this Virtual root management server. The Disk location can be found in the results pane of the properties for the RMS application.

Installing SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting into an SQL 2008 R2 Environment

If you are installing the SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting Services into an SQL 2008 R2 environment, ensure you have renamed the local SQL group by removing the _50 section from its name on the SCOM server as outlined near the start of this document (see below for a reminder):

• On the SQL Server Reporting Services server, rename the local group SQLServerReportServerUserlt;hostname>$MSSRS10_50.<SQLInstanceName> to SQLServerReportServerUserlt;hostname>$MSSRS10.<SQLInstanceName> 

Once the SCOM 2007 Console installation is completed, re-run the installer again and select the ‘Install Operations Manager 2007 R2 Reporting’ option

Within the ‘Operations Manager 2007 Reporting Setup’ window, when selecting components to install, DO NOT install the ‘Data Warehouse’ component if you are installing into a Windows SQL 2008 R2 instance, if installing into an older version of SQL, then leave all components selected and continue on

When prompted, enter the credentials for the ‘Data Warehouse Write Account’ (srv_scom_datawrite) and select ‘Next’

When prompted, enter the credentials for the ‘Data Warehouse Read Account’ (srv_scom_dataread) and select ‘Next’

Move through the remaining menu’s selecting the default options until you see the ‘Install’ button and then press this to initiate the reporting services installation

When the installation of SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting Services is completed, you then need to rename the local group modified at the start of this page back to what it was beforehand (example below):

• SQLServerReportServerUserlt;hostname>$MSSRS10.<SQLInstanceName> back to original name SQLServerReportServerUserlt;hostname>$MSSRS10_50.<SQLInstanceName

This completes the installation of SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting Services into an SQL 2008 R2 environment and also brings to an end the final chapter of my 6 part series on 'Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster'.

Hopefully somebody will find this series helpful and it will assist you in working through the numerous pitfalls of carrying out this type of installation.

Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster (Part 5)

We're into the penultimate post of this series on 'Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster'. In this part, I will detail how to create the actual RMS Cluster and once it is created, I will outline some basic tests to ensure you're configuration is working as it should do.

Before you read through this section, please make sure you've read Part 1, Part 2 ,Part 3 and Part 4 of this series first to ensure you have your environment ready to create the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS cluster.

Creating the RMS Cluster 

In this procedure, you distribute the RMS Key to the secondary management servers and create the RMS cluster. At the end of this procedure, all nodes in a cluster can host the RMS.

Before you start

Ensure that the file share with the encryption key is accessible by all cluster nodes. This is used for distributing the RMS Key.

Creating the Virtual RMS

1. Log on to the computer that owns the RMS application with an account that is a member of the Administrators group. 2. If you successfully backed up the encryption key at the end of RMS setup, you can skip to step 5. 3. On the RMS owning node, as an Administrator, open a Command Prompt window and change current directory to the Operations Manager installation folder; for example, cd\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007. 4. To back up the RMS Key, type the following, where <fileshare> is a share accessible to all cluster nodes: SecureStorageBackup.exe Backup \\<fileshare>\<filename>.bin. Note This will launch the Encryption Key Backup or Restore Wizard. A password will be requested. It must be at least eight characters long and must include at least one symbol. You must confirm the password to create the encryption key file. 5. Log on to each secondary management server computer with an account that is a member of the Administrators group. 6. On each secondary management server, navigate to the Operations Manager installation directory and launch SecureStorageBackup.exe as an administrator. 7. This will launch the Encryption Key Backup or Restore Wizard. On the Introduction page, click Next and then select the ‘Restore’ option. 8. On the Provide a Location page, type in the path or browse to the encryption key file and click Next. 9. On the Provide a Password page type in the password that you used when you backed up the encryption key and click Next. 10. Click Finish. 11. Log on to the RMS computer with an account that is a member of the Administrators group. 12. In Failover Cluster Management, expand the cluster, and ensure that the RMS application is owned by node 1. 13. On the SQL Server-based computer that hosts the OperationsManager database, open the SQL Server Management Studio tool, open the Databases folder, and select the OperationsManager database. Right-click to open the context sensitive menu and select Tasks, Back Up to initiate a backup. On the Back Up Database - OperationsManager page, ensure that the Backup type value is set to Full, give the Backup set an appropriate name, and set the Backup set will expire value to a date in the distant future. In the Destination box, for the Back up to value, select Disk and add an appropriate disk location to hold the backup, if one is not already present, and then click OK. Important When you run the ManagementServerConfigTool to create the RMS cluster, you are advised to back up the OperationsManager database because irrecoverable damage can be done by creating the RMS cluster if something is done incorrectly. 14. On the RMS server, as an Administrator, browse to the installation media for SCOM 2007 R2 and in the ‘Support Tools’ folder, you will find the ‘ManagementServerConfigTool.exe’ file. Copy this file to the same location on the C drive that you ran the ‘SecureStorageBackup.exe’ tool from (this location is generally a default of ‘C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007’) Once you have copied the tool to the location as above, open an Elevated Command Prompt window, type cd <path to Operations Manager installation directory>, and then press ENTER. 15. To instantiate the RMS cluster group as a cluster, type the following, where G is the disk resource that is allocated to the cluster group that is being used to create this virtual Root Management Server and where <VirtualServerNetbiosName> is the network name resource allocated to the same cluster group: ManagementServerConfigTool.exe InstallCluster /vs:<VirtualServerNetbiosName> /Disk:G The value you enter for <VirtualServerNetbiosName> must be the value that appears in the Name box on the General tab of the Properties dialog box. Note ManagementServerConfigTool.exe InstallCluster will install the RMS as a clustered service on every available node in the cluster. Note When you run the ManagementServerConfigTool, the output might display instructions for running the SetSPN command; these instructions can be ignored. 16. In Failover Cluster Management, right-click the RMS application to open the context menu and select Bring Online to bring all the RMS applications online. 17. Open Failover Cluster Management and right-click the RMS application to open the context menu. Select Move this service or application to another node and select the next node in the cluster. Repeat this so that the RMS application is moved to each node of the cluster. Important The RMS application must be moved and come online successfully on each cluster node to set the state of the services correctly on each node at this time. Do not skip this step. Clustered RMS setup is complete.

Testing the Cluster Installation

Use the following procedure to test the cluster installation.

1. In the Operations console, click Administration.

Note
When you run the Operations console on a computer that is not a management server, the Connect To Server dialog box appears. In the Server name text box, type the name of the RMS Server (the cluster virtual server name) that you want the Operations console to connect to. 

2. In the Administration pane, point to Administration, point to Device Management, and then click Management Server.

3. In the management servers pane, the RMS Server Network Name should appear with a health state of Healthy.

4. In the Administration pane, click Agentless Managed.

5. In the Agentless Managed pane, the entry for each node in the cluster should appear with a health state of Healthy.

This concludes Part 5 of my 'Clustering the SCOM 2007 R2 RMS Role on a Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Cluster' series of posts. In the final post of this series, I will explain how to install SCOM 2007 R2 Reporting into an SQL 2008 R2 environment and also some troubleshooting steps if you are having issues with your newly created RMS Cluster.