In this final part of the eight part technical review of SCOM 2012 we’ll look at the new dashboard functionality and how they can be displayed in different environments, including SharePoint 2010 and we’ll add some final remarks around SCOM 2012.

While monitoring systems like SCOM collects vast amounts of data, it’s not a matter of collecting the data; it’s a matter of filtering and displaying the right data to the right people at the right time.

There are three primary ways of doing this, you can have alerts that tell you that something is wrong and needs attention, reports showing historical data and dashboards that show actionable, real time data in a visual fashion that can be personalised.

Whereas earlier versions of SCOM had Views and simple dashboards, SCOM 2012 takes it to a whole new level. No longer do you need to group objects before creating a view and the new wizard for creating dashboards makes it very easy to display exactly the right information in the right way. There’s no programming necessary to create your own dashboards.

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In this seventh part of the eight part technical review of SCOM 2012 we’ll look at cross platform monitoring of Unix and Linux and some welcome improvements there as well as how the new Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) application server monitoring fits in.

Unix and Linux monitoring in SCOM 2012

Monitoring Unix and Linux (*nix) machines is necessary in larger environments because there’s almost always some *nix servers; even in mostly Windows shops and SCOM 2012 brings some very important improvements. The Unix/Linux monitoring covers HP-UX 11i v2 / v3 on PA-RISC and IA64, Sun Solaris 9 on SPARC as well as 10 on SPARC and x86, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 and 6 on both x86 and x64, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on x86, 10 SP1 and 11 on both x86 and x64 along with IBM AIX 5.3, 6.1 and 7.1 on POWER.

SSCOM 2102 Linux monitoring

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In this sixth part of the SCOM 2012 review series we’ll deep dive into Application Performance Monitoring (APM), formerly known as AVIcode before Microsoft acquired the technology, how it works as well as differences between the stand-alone product and the integrated version in SCOM 2012.

Troubleshooting application performance issues is a very difficult area, often requiring intimate knowledge of the workings of a particular program. Is the problem in the code, the server hardware, the server software or in the network? Developers need deep insight and detailed logs to debug whereas IT Professionals need standard metrics across all applications and a way to easily pinpoint in which tier the problem might lie.

Microsoft acquired AVIcode in late 2010; this product is designed to look for performance problems in application code without requiring instrumentation to have been built in by the developers. The standalone AVIcode product version 5.7 will be the last as it’s now integrated into SCOM as Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

If you’re a current user of AVIcode 5.7 be aware that its management packs won’t work in SCOM 2012 (templates still work though) ; also APM will only work with .NET / web applications, not stand alone executables and it will only monitor IIS 7 / 7.5 not IIS 6. On the upside the infrastructure is totally integrated in SCOM, there’s no separate database and if it’s monitoring a Server 2008/2008 R2 machine with the IIS management pack the agent will automatically be deployed, although it’s not activated. Another improvement is that you can set an overall SLA for all web applications rather than having to configure monitoring for each individual application, the SLA can then be tweaked for particular programs as needed.

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In this fifth part of the SCOM 2012 RC review series we’ll examine the new Network Monitoring capabilities and the benefits this will bring to IT operations.

Because big organisations often separate the network administration from server operations it can sometimes be difficult to efficiently narrow down if a particular problem is due to the network, the OS, the application or hardware. The new native Network monitoring feature is designed to increase visibility and help IT admins solve problems quicker, it’s not designed to replace specialist network monitoring tools that are probably already part of the network administrator’s toolkit.

Whilst SCOM 2007 R2 offers basic network device monitoring it doesn’t extend to the port level (unless you manually do the work for each individual device based on its Object Identifier (OID)). SCOM 2012 offers support for SNMP 1.0, 2.0 and 3 (but not Netflow) and works with both IPv4 and IPv6. Initial device discovery requires IPv4 addresses on devices so if you have a pure IPv6 network with no IPv4 address allocation this will be an issue. Devices in this context can be switches, routers, load balancers and firewall as well as any other network connectivity gadget that responds to SNMP monitoring.

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In the fourth part of this SCOM 2012 review series we’ll look at the removal of the Root Management Server (RMS), it’s replacement, how to build a Highly Available SCOM infrastructure easily and acquaint ourselves with the new Resource Pool concept.

Root Management Server (RMS) in SCOM 2007

Because of the unique role that the RMS plays in SCOM 2007 R2 it’s a single point of failure. It’s the connection point for consoles / web consoles, it runs the configuration service, it handles connectors and health aggregation as well as role based access control. The way to build High Availability (HA) in SCOM 2007 R2 is to cluster the RMS server which is operationally and technically complex and also relies on an active / passive model with the associated hardware and licensing costs. There’s also the option to manual promote a secondary management server to RMS in a disaster situation but this isn’t straightforward.

SCOM 2012 high availability

SCOM 2012 changes the game by doing what Exchange and other Microsoft applications have already done by providing HA out of the box. Management servers are pooled and automatically share the load, no server is more important than any other and simply by having several of them availability is ensured. Each server runs the configuration service and they store their data in the database instead of in an XML configuration file / memory like SCOM 2007 R2 did (this file could be up to several GB in large environments), leading to quicker start-up of each management server.

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In this third part of the SCOM 2012 RC technical review we’ll look at Interoperability with other management systems and other System Center products, PowerShell v2 and v3 support in SCOM 2012 and Console enhancements.

Interoperability in SCOM 2012

Because a modern enterprise is heterogeneous SCOM sometimes needs to integrate with other monitoring solutions such as IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView and others. In SCOM 2007 R2 this is accomplished with connectors, but these are not supported in SCOM 2012. The integration between SCOM and other management systems will now be accomplished through System Center Orchestrator 2012.

The different programs in the System Center suite are essentially different applications with little integration in the current version. System Center Orchestrator 2012 is about to change this in the 2012 wave by providing Integration Packs (IP) for each of the major Systems Center applications including SCOM. The SCOM IP can create and interact with Alerts and Monitors as well as start and stop maintenance mode.

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In this second part of our eight part rerview of SCOM 2012 we’ll look at how to upgrade from Operations Manager 2007 R2, the sequence, multi-homing agents and management packs considerations.

Upgrading to Operations Manager 2012

Only SCOM 2007 R2 can be upgraded to Operations Manager 2012 so if you’re on an earlier version you have to upgrade to this level first. If you’re an early adopter and trialled the beta it can be upgraded to the current Release Candidate and it in turn is supported for upgrade to RTM. You can’t however upgrade from the beta directly to RTM, nor can you upgrade to RC from a SCOM 2012 beta that was originally upgraded from SCOM 2007 R2.

The most important prerequisite however is that all SCOM 2007 R2 management servers that you want to upgrade are 64 bit on x64 hardware and run 2008 R2 SP1 as the OS. If this isn’t the case in your environment, fear not, you can spin up a new server and start the upgrade from there. If you’re doing your upgrade this way back up your encryption keys from the current RMS and restore them on the new SCOM 2012 server.

The general sequence for an upgrade is: secondary management servers, gateways and agents first, then the Root Management Server (RMS). If any management servers or gateways are still 2007 R2 the final RMS upgrade will be blocked. If agents are still 2007 R2 this will be highlighted during the RMS upgrade but it won’t block the upgrade. Be aware that these agents won’t be able to report to SCOM until they have been upgraded to SCOM 2012 agents.

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In this first part of the SCOM 2012 (Systems Center Operations Manager) overview we’ll cover hardware and software prerequisites, database requirements and enhancements to the installation.

Long gone are the days when monitoring your IT environment meant waiting for the phone to ring and your users tell IT that something wasn’t working. Keeping an eye on your infrastructure is important for businesses of all sizes and Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) has been very good at providing that visibility for Microsoft’s platforms for many years, the current version (2007 R2) added native cross platform support for Linux and Unix.

SCOM 2012 – Main Console

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This is part two of a three part series of articles covering two great WMI tools, the first tool being Microsoft's free WMI Code Creator.

WMI Code Creator is a tiny (300KB) Microsoft tool available here. To demonstrate its features, the code snippet below is for querying a machine’s model and gives us enough info to start using the tool.

strComputer = "."
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
strQuery="SELECT * from Win32_ComputerSystem"
Set col=GetObject("WinMgmts://" & strComputer & "/root/cimv2").ExecQuery(strQuery)
For Each WMIProperty in col
PCModel = WMIProperty.Model

First, I need to select the CIMV2 namespace and then find the win32_computersystem class in the class drop-down box. Without reference to a huge book or the internet, you would struggle to discover the properties in the class without perhaps writing a script. Code creator makes this trivial, with the click of a single button which lists all properties. The model is just one property of many, as you can see in figure 2 below:

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This is the first part of a series of three articles covering two great WMI tools, introduces how System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) uses WMI in OS deployment task-sequences.

SCCM task-sequence

Recently I had to use SCCM to deploy a Windows XP image with support for seventeen models. To achieve this aim, a major requirement was to check the target hardware was indeed one of the seventeen models supported before pushing a 6GB image to it.

Briefly, SCCM performs OS deployment by preparing a blank disk, writing an image to the disk and injecting appropriate drivers using a template of commands in sequence. Microsoft cunningly calls this a task-sequence. To provide filtering logic, each step within a task-sequence has an options tab where you can add a WMI query. This allows you to use WMI queries which let you target machines very easily but you need to discover the exact model string for the query to work.

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This tutorial describes how to integrate Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) 2012 in System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012.

With the move away from Forefront Client Security to Forefront Endpoint Protection, Microsoft did away with the MOM backend and instead made use of the infrastructure available to System Center Configuration Manager to install, manage and deploy FEP.

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In part 2 of this overview of System Center Advisor we look at how SCA helps with troubleshooting, the different parts of the console, the data that’s collected and conclude with a look at the future of SCA.

Part 1 of this review gave an overview of System Center Advisor. Today, I will discuss how SCA can be integrated in your network.

A typical troubleshooting session without SCA starts when you’re tracking down a problem; when you’ve identified the symptoms and any event log / error log messages you use your favorite search engine to try to come up with a solution. This can sometimes take hours of searching and implementing different solutions until the right one is found.

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In part 1 of this two part review we look at what System Center Advisor is and how it works as well as how to deploy it.

Imagine that you’re a systems administrator troubleshooting an SQL or AD server that’s misbehaving. Now envision a gadget that could send you all the accumulated knowledge and skill contained in a senior Microsoft field engineer to sit right next to you and help you. That gadget is not System Center Advisor, at least not yet, but the vision is there.

System Center Advisor (SCA), formerly known under the codename Atlanta is a new cloud service from Microsoft that assesses server configuration and helps you proactively avoid problems. It gives you access to current and historical configuration data as well as reducing downtime by proposing improvements and notifying you of updates.

System Center Advisor Console

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In this final part we cover how Self-Service users can use SCVMM 2012 to deploy VMs to private clouds, how the new Services construct allows deployment and management of a group of VMs as a unit and we conclude with a few final thoughts.

Whilst the concept of self-service users existed in SCVMM 2008 it’s been expanded in this new version. Self-service users can now use either the web based self-service interface (for backward compatibility) or a locked down version of the SCVMM console.

Self-service empowerment in SCVMM 2012

They can create VMs across all three hypervisors through SCVMM and they deploy their VMs to private clouds. Administrators create self-service user roles and assign these to clouds with each user role having specific quotas for their resources. There’s a simple network diagram that self-service users see when they deploy their VM(s) to a cloud. Unlike SCVMM 2008 self-service users can create their own templates and profiles if given permission to do so and they can now also create VMs from building blocks such as VHDs, rather than being limited to administrator provided templates.

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In this part we take a look at how SCVMM 2012 integrates with VMware’s and Citrix’s platforms as well as the new features for patching cluster nodes in a safe way.

There are some key differences in how SCVMM 2012 integrates with VMware’s infrastructure compared to SCVMM 2008. It no longer imports, merges or synchronizes the tree structure from vCenter to SCVMM, instead you manually add ESX servers to any VMM host group.

Integrating SCVMM 2012 with VMware’s platform

When you import a VMware template to the library the .vmdk file is left in the ESX data store and only the metadata is copied to the library. HTTPS is used for all data transfers between ESX hosts and the VMM library which means there’s no longer the need to enable root Secure Shell (SSH) access to ESX hosts to support the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).

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