Archives for: February 2009, 10

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!