Archives for: February 2009

Today Dell released there Deployment Pack at Dell Tech Center To download the pack directly click here.

The Deployment Kit consists of a number of items, each one interrelated and playing a part in the overall action of deploying OEM hardware.

The pack contains the following:

Configuration Manager Console Extensions / Custom Task Sequence Actions
These user interface elements provide the custom actions available in the Task Sequence Editor as well as custom forms for creating sample task sequence templates.

OEM-Specific Updates
Each OEM provides additional items specific to their server hardware, such as drivers, updates to WinPE boot images, custom task sequences, sample driver packages, categories, and OEM server configuration toolkits.

Client Task Scripts
As part of the task sequence sent to the client, a series of configuration commands are sent in the form of XML, which is interpreted and executed by a comprehensive VBScript. Environment variables can be queried or set, variables in the task or the files associated with the task can be replaced on the fly, and task commands are executed with great flexibility.

Documentation
Of course, every product needs some form of documentation, which is exactly what you’re reading now.

Installer
To simplify the installation of the various components of the kit, the contents are wrapped in an installation program that imports your interface components into the administrator console, and imports the packages, drivers, and other components into the Configuration Manager site system.

Following is added in the console of ConfigMgr:

Yesterday Microsoft released the new Windows Server 2008 cluster Management Pack. This Management Pack provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of your Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 cluster deployments. It monitors the Cluster services components such as nodes, networks, resources, and resource groups—to report issues that can cause downtime or poor performance.

The MP provides:

• Configuration or hardware issues that interfere with starting the Cluster service
• Connectivity problems that affect communication between cluster nodes or between a node and a domain controller

• Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) settings that affect the cluster; for example, permissions needed by the computer account that is used by the cluster

• Configuration issues with the network infrastructure needed by the cluster; for example, issues with Domain Name System (DNS)

• Issues with the availability of a cluster resource, such as a clustered file share
• Issues with the cluster storage

You can download it here.

I’m just back in the Netherlands for a couple of hours after a 4 day stay in Seattle and Redmond. Last 2 days I worked very close with the Microsoft OpsMgr 2007 product team for the second release (R2) of OpsMgr 2007.
I can share a couple of things that are currently in beta 1 which is publicly available for download.

The key investments of Microsoft for this second release are:
• Cross platform monitoring
• Service level tracking
• Better Usability
• Performance and scalability

Regarding usability the performance of the console has been improved a lot. Other thing regarding this investment is that the workflow of configuration notification channel and subscribers is changed and much easier. Note the extensions in the administrator console:

Other new feature regarding notification is that you can subscribe to an alert right from the monitoring pane:

This was in MOM2005, removed in OpsMgr and OpsMgr Sp1 but now is back.

Other thing that is improved is that you can now download the latest management pack from the Microsoft online catalog through the console and that a dependency like missing library are noted and can be resolved automatically by adding them as well.

With the cross-platform features you see the following extensions in the console:

The Unix/Linux logfile and service mentioned above are new monitoring templates.

Let’s look at the UNIX/Linux logfile monitoring template wizard:

With this monitor you can monitor for text that occur in a logfile. In this example my logfile is in the /tmp/testlogdirectory and with the expression; .*test.* I say look for anything which has the word test in it.
To test that your expression is successfully configured you have the Expression test feature. So I tested it with a sample !!!123 test 123 !!! in this case but it will also work with !!!123test123!!!.

Unfortunately this test option is not available with basic Windows log monitoring. In my previous post I mentioned that the prerequisite checker is a bit confused because of SQL 2005 and the hotfix warning you have while running SQL 2008. This is not likely to change in the RTM.

That’s it for now; watch my blog for future posts. We keep in touch!

Introduction
Earlier I announced that Microsoft will release R2 of System Center Operations Manager 2007.
Main new features are cross platform- and service level monitoring. With INOVATIV we are involved in the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) with Microsoft Corp. and my customer in the Netherlands.

With a RDP the pre-code is tested in customer environments. The feedback given by me and the customer helps Microsoft to build the Release To Manufacturer (RTM) at the end.
Upcoming days I will be at Microsoft Redmond spending two days about this new release which is currently still beta, the RTM is scheduled for May 2009.

OpsMgr R2 on Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008
For my customer we will design and implement a high availability environment for monitoring around 1000 servers with OpsMgr R2.
All servers which will be used for the OpsMgr R2 solution will be installed with Microsoft latest operating system Windows Server 2008.
With the R2 release, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is now supported for OpsMgr and we will using it to host the OperationsManager- and Data Warehouse databases.

I already tested OpsMgr R2 with beta 1 on Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a virtual environment. The installation of the first management server (Root Management Server) went fine. The prerequisites I had to make where installing IIS 7 with ASP the installation of ASP AJAX extension required for the health explorer in the web console and SQL Server 2008 with Database- and Reporting Services.

Funny to see is that the prerequisite checker is passing the SQL 2005 requirement and service pack and is warning for a update that is required for SQL 2005 Reporting Services.

In Redmond I will ask the product team if anything will be changed in this checker.

Like said above the installation of the Root Management Server went fine. Unfortunately that was not the case for OpsMgr R2 Reporting.
I could complete the setup wizard but after the ‘Enabling my reports’ step it performed a rollback action and the setup failed.

When checking the log I found the following errors:
2009-02-06T13:52:51.4703524+01:00 Warn: Message:SRSPolicySetter WebException Exception: The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable

When navigating to the default Reporting Services webpage I found the same error:

I checked the same page before the installation of OpsMgr R2 reporting and it was running healthy before.

I forwarded the issue to the product team and hope to have more answers this week. My thought is that IIS 7, required for SQL Reporting Services is causing the problem. IIS 7 is much more hardened then IIS 6 and my guess is that the default security settings are blocking the installation.

I’ll keep you all posted in this very interesting project! If you want to test OpsMgr R2 for yourself please download the beta code here and provide your feedback as well to the OpsMgr R2 product team!