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.

The wizard is available in both the native console and the web console and the resulting dashboards can be displayed in the Console, the Web Console and SharePoint 2010 (see below) and they look identical in all three environments. SCOM 2012 can have nested dashboards where drilling down into particular data lead to another dashboard.

Creating custom Dashboards is not only useful, it’s also very easy with the new wizard.

There are three steps to creating a dashboard in SCOM 2012: first select a layout based on the number of cells or columns desired; then add a widget in each cell (types include Alert, Performance and State) and finally configure each widget with a particular scope and criteria as well as display preferences. The Performance widget can now display data from either the Operational or DataWarehouse databases; increasing its usefulness. Apart from the comprehensive built in dashboards third party management packs can add feature packs to support their own widgets. Both SQL Server and Hyper-V have dashboards in the works.

For each cell define what widget you want and configure it’s properties.

To extend the reach of SCOM to non-IT personnel dashboards can now be integrated into SharePoint 2010 using a web part. If the people who are going to view the dashboards aren’t SCOM users the web part can be configured to user shared credentials. The integration works with SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise as well as the free Foundation version. In the latter case you can only deploy the web part in the same domain as the web console and you won’t be able to use shared credentials.

The web part comes in the Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.SharePointIntegration.wsp and is installed using the install-OperationsManager-DashboardViewer.ps1 PowerShell script. The web part is linked to a web console so you’ll need to obtain the exact URI for the dashboard you want displayed by navigating to it in the Web console and copying it from the address bar. If you get an error message that the ticket has expired you need to synchronise the clocks on the server running the Web console and the SharePoint server, they can’t be more than five seconds apart.

The final dashboard in all its glory, best of all it looks the same in all three environments.

Personalisation of dashboards by a user are now stored in the database and thus roam with the user to different PCs and environments, in SCOM 2007 R2 they were stored in the registry on the local machine and thus didn’t follow the user. Dashboards in the web console all have a distinct URL, this also makes it easy to disseminate information to non-technical users, as they can simply bookmark particular dashboards.

The most popular built in dashboard might be the new Management Group Health Dashboard console, also known as the “coffee break”, so named by the developers because it’s designed to give SCOM operators a quick overview of the health of their environment, thus answering the question “can I take a coffee break?”. It monitors both the infrastructure and the functions delivered by the SCOM system.

Conclusion

Although there’s no native support for Windows clustering and we’d like to see deeper monitoring of clustered Java applications in JEE overall SCOM 2012 is a thorough revamp with some very useful new features. The simplified infrastructure and no-brainer High Availability will be welcome in all but the smallest environments while the network monitoring should make all IT Pros troubleshooting lives easier. The extended *nix monitoring and JEE monitoring will be handy in the right environment but perhaps the most intriguing feature will be seeing how SC Orchestrator will glue the entire Systems Center suite together.

Resources

Official SCOM blog

Operations Manager 2012 on the Connect site (Windows Live ID login required)

• Poll: Are you currently using a monitoring solution? (11)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• Notifications and Custom Commands in Nagwin/Nrpe (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 5: Network Monitoring (0)

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

Compared to SCOM 2007 R2; the 2012 version drops support for Solaris 8; Solaris 11 being very new might make it into RTM, there’s also added support for the iNode filesystem. Preliminary scaling numbers indicate that you can have up to 6000 Unix / Linux computers per management group if you have 50 consoles open, 10 000 per MG if you have 25 open consoles.

SCOM 2007 R2 uses two accounts for monitoring *nix, the Monitoring account is used for 85-90% of the monitoring and was an unprivileged account whereas the Action account that’s used for Syslog gathering and agent maintenance needs to have root credentials on managed systems. SCOM 2012 “fixes” this issue that has caused major issues for security conscious *nix administrators by adding support for sudo and SSH keys.

Sudo support means that a standard account can be setup on managed machines with exactly the required amount of permissions and the latter ensures that all agent maintenance that’s done via SSH is secure. SSH keys need to be in Putty format, if you’re using OpenSSH the keys need to be converted with PuttyGen.

SCOM 2012 also adds new templates for customized monitoring, the new Process Monitor lets you monitor by count (number of processes for instance) and identifies processes by command line arguments (instead of all processes being called “java” for instance) as well as accepting regular expression input for filtering.

Java Enterprise Edition monitoring in SCOM 2012

Brand new in SCOM 2012 is comprehensive support for monitoring Java Enterprise Edition (JEE, formerly known as J2E) application servers. The four most common platforms are supported; IBM Websphere 6.1 and 7; RedHat JBoss 4.2, 5.1 and 6; Oracle Weblogic 10g Rel3 and 11g Rel1; and the open source Apache Tomcat 5.5, 6 and 7 on both Windows and Linux with Websphere also supported on AIX and Weblogic on Solaris.

When you’ve imported the Java Management packs matching your environment the application servers will be automatically discovered and standard monitoring will let you know if the application server is running and if resource utilization is within defined thresholds.

If deeper monitoring is needed Microsoft offers an Open Source Java Management Extension (JMX) application called BeanSpy (known during the beta period as JMX Extender) that you load on the application server, it reports to SCOM via either HTTP or HTTPS, with our without basic authentication. BeanSpy being Open Source should allay fears that some companies might have about Microsoft code running on their application servers.

BeanSpy communicates with MBean counters (which are a bit like performance counters in Windows but more feature reach) to monitor individual applications running, frequency and time spent on memory garbage collection as well as over performance of the application server. Memory garbage collection is particularly important as the application is unresponsive during this period.

For custom monitoring SCOM 2012 offers two templates for building your own monitoring management packs; one for Monitoring and one for Performance; both lets you monitor any simple MBean property.

In the next part in the SCOM 2012 review series we’ll look at the vastly improved Dashboard functionality in SCOM 2012 and how to integrate DashBoards into SharePoint.

• Poll: Are you currently using a monitoring solution? (11)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• Notifications and Custom Commands in Nagwin/Nrpe (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 5: Network Monitoring (0)

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.

For corporations with many IIS web applications the power of APM might just be the feature that justifies the upgrade to SCOM 2012.

When the interceptors are activated and loaded into IIS the server will require a restart, after that, even if you add additional applications to be monitored; only the particular app pool needs to be recycled.

The beauty of the integration becomes apparent when you see network, hardware and OS monitoring right next to the application performance information, making it much easier to zero in on exactly where the problem lies. The actual monitoring is done in the Diagnostics and Advisor consoles. Similar events are grouped and it also lists Session events or “what else did the user do when this problem happened”. Performance counters are also displayed; 15 minutes of OS and hardware data leading up to the event to let you easily determine if the problem is the underlying platform or in the application code. All of this data enables the IT Pro to communicate facts when liaising with developers and DBAs.

The separate Application Diagnostics and the Application Advisor web consoles is probably where developers are going to spend their time troubleshooting, without having to deal with a full SCOM console.

APM can monitor both the server side of an application and the client side (IE only at this stage but support for other browsers is coming) which gives visibility into performance and reliability. The synthetic transaction feature already in SCOM on the other hand gives insight into availability and together the two provided excellent data on overall application performance. APM monitoring carries minimal overhead, as a rule of thumb is uses about 100 MB of memory and increases the CPU load by 5%.

Today there’s no explicit support for APM monitoring of SharePoint 2010 although that is coming and there’s no way to put Advisor reports into a dashboard as there’s no widget for it yet. What’s more concerning is that there won’t be built in support to use APM to monitor cloud applications in Azure at RTM, although this support is “on the roadmap”.

In the next part of this series we’ll examine what’s been improved in the native Unix/Linux monitoring that debuted in SCOM 2007 R2 as well as the brand new Java Application Server monitoring.

• Poll: Are you currently using a monitoring solution? (11)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• Notifications and Custom Commands in Nagwin/Nrpe (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 5: Network Monitoring (0)

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.

Make sure your discovery rule(s) is properly scoped to find all the devices you want as you can only have one rule per server.

Discovery of devices can either be explicit where you define (by IP address or ranges) the devices; or recursive in which case SCOM 2012 will glean information from one device to attempt to find other devices. During discovery all SNMP community strings you’ve entered for a Run As account are tried until a correct one is found, be aware that some devices will generate an SNMP trap if too many invalid credentials are tried. The SNMP stack is now native to SCOM 2012 in contrast to SCOM 2007 R2 which used the SNMP stack of the OS. To monitor across firewalls you need to allow SNMP (UDP) and ICMP bi-directionally and port 161 and 162 have to be open (including on the Windows Firewall on management servers). SCOM provides the required firewall rules for Windows Firewall but doesn’t enable them by default.

Beyond the basic monitoring there’s extended monitoring where processor and memory utilization and memory fragmentation along with other device specific objects are tracked if the device is supported by SCOM 2012. To date there are more than 80 vendors on the list and over 800 devices, see the Excel spread sheet here. When a device supports SNMTP traps for system changes (card added, changes to chassis configuration) SCOM 2012 will listen for them. The supported information for each interface depends on how the device manufacturer has implemented monitoring; Management Information Base (MIB) based on RFC 2863 and MIB-II RFC 1213 provides deeper information.

Deep information about each monitored device is only a mouse click away.

In strictly controlled environments where even read only SNMP monitoring is restricted you can opt for ICMP only which will let you know whether a device is responsive or not. If a node is down, all other monitoring is suppressed so that you’re not flooded with alerts about ports and links being down.

But the coolest part of Network Monitoring has to be the port stitching feature that shows which agent monitored node is connected to each port. SCOM will also discover all VLANs and what switches participate in each VLAN, note that only connected ports will be monitored unless you manually add ports to the Critical Network Adapters Group in which case it will always be monitored. For routers it will identify which Cisco Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) groups they participate in. The end result is clear network diagrams that show exactly what systems are connected to witch switch port as well as visually indicating where a problem might lie.

SCOM 2012 has over 200 new items of knowledge for network monitoring and will report on packet errors per switch port for instance. At RC the recommended scalability numbers are about 500 devices per Management Server and about 2000 devices per Management Group; however there’s a comprehensive sizing guide forthcoming. Be aware that you can only have one discovery rule per Management Server so make sure it encompasses all the devices you need to find.

There are four dashboards built in for network monitoring with the Network Vicinity Dashboard providing a visual representation of connected devices within one hop to the selected node, you can increase the number of hops up to five. Be aware that this dashboard won’t identify teamed NICs as such, nor will it show Unix / Linux computers and VMs will be associated with the same network device as the host; the Hyper-V switch does show up as an SNMP device.

The Network Summary Dashboard lets you easily spot the device with the slowest response, highest CPU or interfaces with the highest utilization, most send/receive errors or nodes with the most alerts. From this dashboard you can then pivot into the Network Node Dashboard that lets you view availability statistics for the last 24 or 48 hours, last seven days or last month; this dashboard also shows other utilization statistics for the node. The Network Interface Dashboard drills down to an individual port and lets you see packet statistics for the last 24 hours as well as alerts and interface properties.

There are also five new network monitoring reports and some new tasks in the console such as opening a Telnet session to a device, doing a quick SNMP “get” or performing an SNMP walk of a device. Note that if you’ve authored management packs for network monitoring in SCOM 2007 R2 these will need updating to work with the new functionality, see here for more information.

In the next part of this eight part SCOM 2012 RC overview we’ll look at another crucial piece of the IT puzzle that needs monitoring – applications.

• Poll: Are you currently using a monitoring solution? (11)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• Notifications and Custom Commands in Nagwin/Nrpe (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)

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.

Failover is not instantaneous and it can take up to two minutes whilst the pool reloads managed instances. All management servers should be located in the same datacentre (less than 5ms latency) and you should deploy Gateway servers in other locations. These servers connect SCOM to branch offices or untrusted domains and can also be in resource pools but you can’t mix Management and Gateway servers in the same pool.

In SCOM 2007 R2 the RMS has special characteristics and some current management packs (Exchange 2007 and 2010 are examples, a full list is forthcoming from Microsoft) rely on a RMS to report to. Since there isn’t an RMS server in SCOM 2012 one management server is assigned the RMS Emulator role to provide compatibility with these MPs. This role can be manually moved between management servers (using the PowerShell cmdlet Set-SCOMRMSEmulator) and there’s a management pack coming that will automate the failover of the role. Management Groups don’t rely on the RMS emulator; it’s there for backwards compatibility with MPs.

SCOM 2012 Resource Pool

Know that all management servers are treated as having equal capacity; differences in processors and memory capacity are not taken into account so it’s best to plan on having all servers identical. Different workloads are also not taken into account and are simply distributed amongst the available servers in a pool. There’s are three default pools ; All Management Server Resource Pool, the Notification Pool and an AD Integration pool but you can create your own pools for specific monitoring situations.

The three built in Resource Pools

Roles within a pool can be manually controlled, this is suitable for instance if you have a hardware text/SMS alerting device connected to a particular management server, there’s no point in failing that function over to a server without the hardware attached. Cross platform (Unix/Linux) monitoring and network device monitoring is also targeted at pools rather than individual management servers.

SCOM 2012 maintenance mode

An issue in SCOM 2007 R2 is when you put a management server into maintenance mode, because the workflow to take the server out of maintenance mode after the designated time is also running on that server it never automatically comes out of maintenance mode, in SCOM 2012 the workflow is moved to the All Management Servers resource pool negating the need to manually take a server out of maintenance mode.

The new Silverlight based web console is your friend when you’re away from your monitoring station.

The new home on the web for all management packs is http://systemcenter.pinpoint.microsoft.com and for those who’ve been less than impressed by the Pinpoint site and finding management packs in the past it’s good to know that the above address is focused solely on System Center.

In the next part of this SCOM 2012 RC technical review series we’ll look at my favourite new feature: Network Monitoring, what’s required and how it works.

• Poll: Are you currently using a monitoring solution? (11)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• Notifications and Custom Commands in Nagwin/Nrpe (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)

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.

There’s also IPs for System Center Service Manager (SCSM) that can create incidents automatically based on alerts in SCOM for instance; the IP for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will push information about VMs, services, private clouds and hosts into SCOM. In a future review here at 4sysops we’ll look at this approach for integrating the System Center suite and if it’ll provide the tight glue that many have asked for.

PowerShell in SCOM 2012

The good news is that SCOM now comes with full PowerShell 2.0 support and a host of new cmdlets. The less good news is that there will be a learning curve as the new cmdlet nouns have “SCOM” in their names; the old cmdlets still seem to work however. There are also new cmdlets for monitoring Unix and Linux machines (see part seven), these rely on PowerShell 3.0 (in CTP at the time of writing) for easy scripting and background operations.

To execute PowerShell cmdlets you have to establish a connection to a management group, this can either be persistent so you can run multiple cmdlets or a temporary connection allowing you to run a single command.

A new cmdlet that might come in very handy is Export-SCOMEffectiveMonitoringConfiguration that looks at a specific monitored instance (or a list), finds the monitors, rules and overrides that apply to it and exports the effective monitoring to a csv file.

The main console in SCOM 2012 follows the familiar System Center look and is easy to work with.

Consoles in SCOM 2012

Sysadmins familiar with SCOM 2007 R2 will feel right at home in the console, apart from some cosmetic changes (the “Actions” pane is now the “Tasks” pane and is split into two tabs, one for actions and one for help) it’s almost identical. The Web console on the other hand has received a major Silverlight overhaul and is now a joy to work with. Note that the Web console provides a monitoring workspace only although you can create dashboards in it with the same functionality as in the full console (see part eight) .You’ll need a 32 bit version of Word 2010 to edit custom information in the Knowledge Base, Office 2010 x64 won’t work.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at the flagship feature of SCOM 2012; built in High Availability as well as how the new Resource Pools work.

• Poll: Are you currently using a monitoring solution? (11)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• Notifications and Custom Commands in Nagwin/Nrpe (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)

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.

If yours is a smaller environment with a single SCOM 2007 R2 server you can either upgrade in place (provided your server meets the hard- and software requirements) or you can set up another management server and start the upgrade from there. If you upgrade in-place be aware that you have to upgrade all the agents before they’ll report to SCOM 2012.

To assist with your upgrade plan there are clickable flow diagrams on TechNet that clarifies what options you have, the same page also provides links to checklists with step by step instructions. There’s also an upgrade helper Management Pack (MP) that walks you through the upgrade and gives you an overview of what parts of your infrastructure has been upgraded.

Once your environment has been upgraded to Operations Manager 2012 you can take advantage of the new reporting functionality.

Further points for your upgrade planning includes backing up the databases, disabling notifications to prevent false alarms and stopping connectors to avoid false tickets being generated as well as making sure agents don’t report directly to the RMS as your upgrading it. Most importantly, check the event log for any problems, you can’t upgrade away from problems so ensure your SCOM environment is healthy before you upgrade.

If you used Operations Manager to deploy agents they will show up as pending upgrade in the console and you can push out the upgrade from SCOM; if you use an alternate method of deploying agents (such as SCCM) you have to upgrade them using your chosen deployment method but it’s simple MSI file so that should be easy. The native consoles are version specific so if you need both the old and the new console on a machine upgrade to the SCOM 2012 console and then reinstall the SCOM 2007 R2 console afterwards.

Depending on the size of your environment you may have a mix of SCOM 2007 R2 and SCOM 2012 management groups and servers in your environment for some time so be aware that the SCOM 2012 agent will communicate with SCOM 2007 R2 servers. The reverse isn’t true however so an important step in your upgrade process will be upgrading agents to the 2012 version. The new Control Panel applet makes it easy to identify which management groups an agent reports to and adding and removing of management groups from agents can now be centrally controlled via scripts.

The new scriptable control over agent assignments will be a boon in large environments as will the Control Panel applet for troubleshooting.

Management packs that work in SCOM 2007 R2 should work in Operations Manager 2012 because the MP schema is unchanged. The few exceptions are where third party management packs require new modules on the agent, new MP templates or new view types due to API changes; or if they attempt to create or update other MPs or elements within other MPs.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at PowerShell enhancements in SCOM 2012, interoperability with other platforms as well as improvements in the Console.

• Poll: Are you currently using a monitoring solution? (11)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• Notifications and Custom Commands in Nagwin/Nrpe (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)

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

The new kid on the block is SCOM 2012, currently in Release Candidate and it adds some really cool features for network monitoring, High Availability (HA), application monitoring and dashboards. In this eight part article we’ll dive into these and other improvements; giving both sysops with SCOM experience and other IT admins insight into what SCOM 2012 can bring to your environment.

Article Parts:

1. SCOM 2012 Installation
2. Upgrading to SCOM 2012
3. Interoperability, PowerShell and Consoles in SCOM 2012
4. Infrastructure improvements in SCOM 2012
5. Network Monitoring in SCOM 2012
6. Application Performance Monitoring in SCOM 2012
7. Unix and Linux monitoring and Java Enterprise Edition monitoring in SCOM 2012
8. Dashboards in SCOM 2012 and Conclusion

SCOM 2012 Installation

The overall installation experience for SCOM has been improved; the most obvious change is that the operational and data warehouse databases are created during the installation, in earlier versions they had to be created prior to the SCOM installation. The pre-requisite checker is also built into the installation wizard; this simplifies the overall installation process. Any problems during the steps in the installation wizard are highlighted and the error message is copied to the clipboard. Credentials that you define are tested from within the wizard to make sure they work before proceeding to the next screen.

SCOM 2012 – The Installation Wizard has been improved, providing for a smoother setup experience.

The installation program will assign the Administrators group on the local computer to the Operations Manager Administrators role which is a change from SCOM 2007. During installation you specify the management server action account and the Configuration service and Data Access service, and although it’s not recommended from a security standpoint you can use the same account for both roles. The former should be a domain-based account and not a domain admin account. The latter account is used to read and update information in the operational database and can either be assigned to Local System or a domain account, where the management server and the databases are on separate servers it has to be a domain based account.

Make sure you plan your accounts for SCOM 2012 correctly.

All SCOM 2012 servers (Management Servers and Gateway Servers) are supported to run as Virtual Machines with the recommendation to run the SQL server database on physical servers or virtual servers with direct attached disks for performance reasons. VM snapshots are not supported for use in conjunction with SCOM 2012. Management and gateway servers have to run on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, recommended memory is 2GB or more with a 2.8 GHz CPU. Prerequisite software is PowerShell 2.0, Windows Remote Management (WinRM), Core XML Services and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as well as .NET Framework 4.

The SQL Server backend has to run either 2008 SP1 x64 or later or 2008 R2; on a server with at least 4 GB of memory, with database collation set to SQL-Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and full text search enabled. If you need to provide high availability for the SQL Server databases both the Operational database, the Reporting data warehouse and the Audit collection database are recommended and supported on separate Active-Passive clusters as long as no other SCOM 2012 services run on these servers. Other supported configurations (but not recommended due to potential SQL performance issues) include Active-Active clusters and putting the Operational, Data Warehouse and Audit Collection databases on the same cluster, see here for more details.

The Data Warehouse database is now a required component in your SCOM environment, it was optional in SCOM 2007 R2, but it can be shared between Management Groups. The Operational database retains data for seven days by default, the Data Warehouse for 400 days by default.

The Windows agent comes in both a 32 and 64 bit version, as well as a 64 bit Itanium version, the 32 bit version can’t be installed on an x64 OS. The RC limits on objects and monitored items are 3000 agent monitored computers reporting to a management server and 2000 agent monitored computers to a gateway server but expect these figures to change for RTM.

In the next part of this SCOM 2012 RC overview we’ll look at how you can upgrade from your current SCOM environment and in which order this has to be done as well as the help available for your upgrade planning.

• Poll: Are you currently using a monitoring solution? (11)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• Notifications and Custom Commands in Nagwin/Nrpe (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)

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:

WMI Code creator showing model

I’ve clicked all three buttons on the tab simply to show you what else the tool gives you. As you can see you can use this class to write a script to join the domain, or you can do less work at let Code Creator live up to its name and write it for you, using the “Execute a method” tab. One minor feature is that the script does not appear in the right hand window until you highlight the instance, as in figure 3.

Choosing a method and generating the code

The final feature of code creator is its ability to create code to query explicit properties. You can get as many or as few of the properties as you like by control-clicking each one you want. Again the script generates on the fly on the right pane, in the next figure.

Selecting multiple properties and generating more code

As you can see Code Creator even saves you the trouble of using copy and paste with the “open in notepad” button!

Returning to the OS deployment task example, I later found I needed a full script to check certain BIOS values on the HP hardware. Browsing through Code Creator I found Win32_BIOS. This gave plenty of information, but then someone asked to change the boot order in the BIOS. As the Win32_BIOS class has no methods at all, it meant looking deeper. HP has designed a whole new namespace, “root/HP/InstrumentedBIOS” that provides access to altering various BIOS settings from within Windows. This complication called for some experimentation that Code Creator does not have – real-time custom queries. The solution is WMI explorer.

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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.

You can find this from the command prompt which a one-line command:

wmic csproduct get name

On a HP desktop this gives “HP Compaq dc7700p Convertible Minitower”.

So that’s the answer, but we need to find the question we have to ask within SCCM to get it. Basic research reveals it to be “SELECT * FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE Model LIKE “%HP Compaq dc7700p%”” (noting the double quotes). So we’re sorted then? Well, not quite. As ever, things are not quite that simple. On HP hardware this works great, but not all machines are equal. On the Lenovo I am writing this article the query gives me the result “name 4334”.

Now more experienced readers will note my deliberate mistake. The correct wmic command to get the machine name is not “name” at all, but “version” as you can see in figure 1. This led me to realise that results vary:

Using wmic to find a machine’s model name

depending on both the hardware you have, the operating system you need to target and the content of WMI. For example, another surprising quirk of WMI is the Win32_volume class. I wanted to check the free disk space and found a sample using the Win32_volume class, but later found the class is not available on XP.

I needed a tool to let me see three things:

1. What classes are available
2. What properties are in each class
3. What methods are available

I normally use WMI Studio (WMI tools) for writing any vbscripts that use WMI but I wanted to browse classes and write WQL in real-time. I also wanted the tool to be portable. So, I had a rummage around my digital toolbox and found not one but two great tools: Microsoft’s free WMI Code Creator and KS-Soft’s free WMI Explorer are two great complements to easier scripting. I will discuss both tools in my next posts in this series.

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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.

In spite of the similarities of the underlying infrastructure between SCCM 2007 and SCCM 2012, FEP 2010 does not integrate with SCCM 2012 because one of the installation prerequisites is the presence of the SCCM 2007 administrative console. From discussions with product experts within Microsoft, it seems that FEP 2010 will not be updated to install on SCCM 2012, so FEP 2012 (which is in beta at the time of writing) will be the first enterprise AV product from Microsoft which will integrate fully with SCCM 2012.

Installing Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012

Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012 is currently in beta and can be downloaded directly from Microsoft.

To install FEP 2012, you’ll need to have SCCM 2012 installed and configured. In addition, the SQL server which is acting as the SCCM site database server must also have installed/enabled:

• .NET Framework 4.0 on both the SCCM and SQL servers
• Microsoft IIS (default role properties)
• Microsoft SQL Analysis services
• Microsoft SQL Reporting services
• Reporting services point site system role installed on the SQL server via the SCCM 2012 console

Additionally, the IIS server needs an appropriate certificate to run SSL on port 443, so that the reporting services URL and the SQL TCP connection can be secured.

This installation was run in a lab environment running on Hyper-V.

From the SCCM server, run the serversetup.exe from the folder which relates to the appropriate operating system type (ie: 32-bit or 64-bit), then fill in the identification information:

Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012 Installation – Name and Organization

Then, be incredibly conscientious and read the EULA (or not):

Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012 Installation – EULA

Next, choose the installation type. The “Basic topology” option installs everything you’ll need for a full FEP environment, including server and console extensions as well as reporting services and reports. Additionally, this installation makes use of the existing SCCM environment to target the right servers (eg: SQL server). There may be times when you would want to target different SQL servers or perform a fully customised installation, but for our lab purposes the “Basic topology” option is sufficient.

Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012 – Installation Options

Next, make sure that the SQL Reporting Server URL is correct, and select an account with sufficient access to run reports. In the lab environment I used a domain admin account which isn’t recommended in an enterprise environment.

Caption: FEP 2012 Installation – SQL report execution account

It’s worth ensuring that the system is using Windows Update to automatically keep FEP 2012 up-to-date (the FEP 2012 client will also be installed on the system as part of the installation) and joining the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) is always worth it – Microsoft does actually receive the information and uses the metrics to improve current and future products.

Forefront Endpoint Protection Installation – Updates and Customer Experience Options

For the same reason, it’s worth signing up to Microsoft SpyNet:

Forefront Endpoint Protection Installation – SpyNet Configuration Policy

Before commencing the installation, serversetup.exe will run through all the prerequisites and verify that the environment is correct. If any check fails, the issue as well as the documented fix will be displayed in the console. At this point you can remediate the issue and simply re-run the checker – you don’t need to start the installation process over again.

Forefront Endpoint Protection Installation – Prerequisite Verification

Once all the prerequisites are met, installation starts.

Forefront Endpoint Protection Installation – Installation

Once complete, you’ll now have FEP 2012 functionality integrated into the SCCM 2012 console. In the Monitoring → FEP Status screen you get an overview of the health of your organization, in Reporting there is now a Forefront Endpoint Protection folder with pre-defined reports, and in Software Library the FEP 2012 client is available for deployment.

Forefront Endpoint Protection Installation- Configuration Manager Integration

In Part Two we will look at deploying the FEP client, enforcing compliance in your organization and reporting on the health of your workstations.

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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.

Using System Center Advisor

Sometimes, having gone through the above process and not fixed it you reach for the phone and call Microsoft’s support. They have a checklist of configuration items and will work through this with you. The vision of SCA is to help you avoid the trawling of forums and KB articles as well inspecting the checklist for you and simply present a solution based on your particular configuration. Each item that is surfaced in SCA has a thorough explanation of the context and why the issue might appear as well as details of how to fix it.

If you have a decentralized IT departmental structure or if you’re a consultant that uses SCA across multiple companies you can create one company per department and select each of them in a drop down menu. Users are divided into administrator roles and user roles. The only difference between the two is that users can’t close accounts or create additional users. Otherwise a normal user can do all other activities available in the console.

System Center Advisor Console Configuration

The console itself has several panes; the first gives a list of current critical and warning alerts and can be sorted by severity and / or server name. The Current Configuration pane presents all relevant data that you’d need at the time of troubleshooting in one place, whereas the Change History panel is my personal favorite. Think about it, if you’re helping someone troubleshoot, isn’t your first question – “what did you change”? And the answer is (almost always); “nothing”. So this panel keeps track of recent configuration changes that could be the cause of your current troubleshooting woes.

System Center Advisor Console History

The other difference between SCA and other monitoring products like SCOM is that the suggestions offered by SCA will change over time, as hotfixes and updates are incorporated into Service Packs and Update Rollups they will be retired from SCA when you’ve upgraded your servers.

Data collected by Systems Center Advisor

SCA looks in the registry, event logs and the SQL error logs for its data as well as using WMI calls, SQL OleDB queries to understand your environment. There’s a full list of what data is collected in an Excel spread sheet (see resources).

Data collected is stored in XML files, these are compressed into a CAB file and subsequently copied to the gateway which then uploads these to your account. For companies that are worried about what data is uploaded to Microsoft’s cloud there’s a very comprehensive privacy statement, particularly making is crystal clear that no licensing information is included. For those of a suspicious nature it’s easy to open the cab files waiting to be uploaded on the gateway server and inspect the xml files directly to see what data is involved.

Conclusion

Exchange and SharePoint support is the next obvious step and is on the roadmap for SCA but won’t appear in the first release, which is due towards the end of the year. A future improvement that I hope Microsoft considers is integrating SCA into SCOM so that a separate online console isn’t necessary.

Overall SCA is an interesting product, perhaps paving the way for other parts of the Systems Center suite to be offered as cloud services in the future. It spotted several problems in my lab environment that I definitely wouldn’t have seen without extensive research.

Resources

System Center Advisor homepage Go and sign up for the release candidate to get the feel for what SCA can do for your servers.

Microsoft Connect The RC is supported through the connect site with forums and other resources.

System Center Advisor Configuration Data Points The Excel sheet that lists all the data points that SCA collects.

Microsoft System Center Advisor Technical Overview System Center Advisor technical overview session at TechEd US last month.

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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

Overview of System Center Advisor

As mentioned there’s no server infrastructure on site, only an agent to install on every server that you’d like to oversee with SCA. One (or more depending on the size of your environment) server is designated as the gateway through which the data from the other servers flow to the cloud.

You then login to www.systemcenteradvisor.com to access your company portal. The current release candidate is free and open to all but when the final product is released it will only be offered as part of Software Assurance (SA). This means that each product you want to monitor on each server, (Windows Server, SQL Server and in the future Exchange and SharePoint) needs to be covered by SA.

The products monitored currently are SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 as well as some Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2 features, notably Active Directory (AD). This will be extended to cover additional products in the future. SCA is NOT a replacement for your current monitoring systems such as System Center Operations Manager – it doesn’t provide real time monitoring, instead collecting data every 4-8 hours, aggregating this once per day and uploading it once per day. SCA’s role is to proactively help you avoid downtime, not warn you when a server or service is already down. SCA is currently available in English only.

Installation of System Center Advisor

System Center Advisor Deployment Info

The agent is downloaded (31 MB in size) from the systemcenteradvisor.com website and installs in a minute with no reboot required. Deploying a gateway is just another check box in the wizard.

System Center Advisor Agent Installation

All data communication over the internet is protected by a digital certificate that’s generated when you sign up for SCA, during the installation of the gateway you have to point to this .pfx file. The gateway server needs outbound connectivity on port 80 and 443 while the agents only need network connectivity to the gateway server. Data volume is in the region of 100 KB per day per server.

System Center Advisor Agent Installation Certificate

SCA utilises the same agent as Operations Manager 2007 R2 so if you don’t use SCOM in your environment that agent is installed. If you do have the SCOM agent already installed it’ll be put into multi homing mode and one channel will provide the information SCA is looking for while another channel will continue to gather normal SCOM data.

As the gateway syncs data to the cloud it also checks for updates to Management Packs as additional common problems are discovered by Microsoft’s support.

You can change the frequency at which uploads takes place as well as the scheduled time and day through documented registry settings. Likewise the agent can be configured for upload frequency (every 12 or 24 hours or once per week).

System Center Advisor Registry Settings

In the next post you will read how System Center Advisor helps with troubleshooting and what kind of data is sent to Microsoft’s cloud.

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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.

Self-service users cannot see hosts, host groups, library servers and shares or network / storage configuration, they only see available capacity and quota usage within their cloud. Another improvement from earlier versions is that self-service users can now share files through a special area of the library provided they have permissions to do so.

Services deployment in SCVMM 2012

Another new concept in SCVMM 2012 is a service. A service template contains all the settings for a group of VMs that work together in one or more tiers and can also contain load balancers. The whole service can then be deployed in one fell swoop and if the load increases in the future a service can be scaled out with additional VMs automatically. If changes need to be made a service can be serviced, either in image mode where each VM is updated with a new image or in conventional mode where only the applicable changes are applied. There’s the notion of upgrade domains that controls which VMs are shut down during upgrades to minimize the impact on the availability of the service. The new VMM Service Template Designer makes the task of creating a service easy.

VM and service templates can be exported to XML files based on Open Virtualization Format (OVF), these can then be imported on other SCVMM machines and remapped to VHDs and other resources. Exported settings can optionally include sensitive data such as passwords which are then encrypted.

Conclusion

There are lots of other smaller enhancements that I haven’t mentioned in this article; custom properties can now be named and their value pairs matched in scripts (only put these VMs on hosts where brand equals “HP”). Intelligent placement from the earlier versions has been enhanced and there are now capability profiles that allow you to specify properties (RemoteFX capable for instance) and match these at VM deployment time.

If the rest of this article hasn’t convinced you of the big changes in SCVMM 2012 consider the fact that the number of available PowerShell cmdlets have gone from about 182 to 432. SCVMM 2012 is a huge leap forward in managing virtualized datacentre environments and together with Dynamic Memory in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 brings a serious challenge to VMware’s dominance. It will be interesting to see what happens in technology for server virtualization and private clouds over the next year or two.

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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).

SCVMM Services can be deployed to ESX hosts but they’re not compatible with VMware vApps, likewise ESX hosts resources can underlie a SCVMM private cloud but it’s not compatible with vCloud. SCVMM supports up to 8 virtual CPUs for VMs on ESX/ESXi 4.0 hosts and up to 255 GB of memory and also recognises VMware fault tolerant machines.

Integrating SCVMM 2012 with Citrix XenServer

Unlike VMware, XenServer hosts and pools are managed directly from SCVMM 2012 so there’s no reliance on the XenCenter server. Migrations are supported through Citrix XenMotion, the equivalent of Hyper-V Live Migration. Both hypervisor and paravirtualization in XenServer is supported. If you have XenServer vhd files stored in the library set the virtualization platform to XenServer to distinguish them from Hyper-V vhd files.

Small catches to be aware of in this beta is that your hostnames have to match exactly (including case) to the self-signed certificates that XenServer creates and all the different virtual network switches that XenServer creates are represented as one switch inside of SCVMM.

Patching cluster hosts in SCVMM 2012

One of the trickier things to manage in a clustered environment is updating the hosts. While management platforms such as Systems Center Configuration Manager can do it they’re not cluster / virtualization aware and are likely to push out patches to all hosts simultaneously, causing an outage as they all reboot. SCVMM works around the issue by integration with a dedicated 64 bit WSUS 3.0 SP2 server and orchestrating cluster patching by Live migrating VMs to other nodes, patching and rebooting the host, moving VMs back and the repeating the process on the next cluster node. The actual patch requirements are determined by Update Baselines which specify which patches are required on hosts, library servers, PXE servers and the SCVMM management server itself. Once you have assigned a baseline to a group of computers they’re scanned to determine if they’re out of compliance and patching can then take place to make them compliant. There’s also an option for exemptions if a particular patch is causing issues on one or more hosts.

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One really cool feature in System Center Virtual Manager 2012that will be popular in large environments is the concept of provisioning new host hardware without visiting each new server.

Bare Metal Configuration in System Center Virtual Manager 2012

Through integration with Base Board Management (BMC) controllers, Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and the new boot from VHD feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 this magic can happen.

The BMC on new servers need to support one of the following protocols:

1. Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) 1.5 or 2.0
2. Data Center Management Interface (DCMI) 1.0
3. Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) 1.0
4. HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) 2.0 isn’t built into the beta but available as a download

Preconfigure DNS with the names of the servers that are going to be created but don’t pre-create accounts in AD. SCVMM can integrate with the PXE server in an existing WDS server and will only respond to requests from computers that you have designated as new hosts so the WDS server can continue to service other OS deployments. Alternatively you can setup a WDS server just for SCVMM. The library has new functionality for housing drivers needed by new hosts. Creating a host profile ties together BIOS, network, disk and driver settings along with OS settings and all that remains to do is provide IP addresses of the new hardware to the wizard to allow SCVMM to discover the new hosts. Only Windows 2008 R2 is supported as the host OS for these deployments as it uses the boot from vhd feature.

SCVMM 2008 could manage clusters but these had to be created outside of SCVMM and then brought under management, this can still be done in 2012 but the ability to create a Hyper-V cluster with just a few steps in a wizard directly within SCVMM 2012 is really useful. It’s also a logical step after a bare metal installation and cements SCVMM’s position as a total solution for the virtualized data centre.

Dynamic and Power Optimization in SCVMM 2012

Perhaps the most awesome new features of SCVMM 2012 are Dynamic Optimization and Power Optimization and they’re supported across all three hypervisors. They replace the host load balancing that’s available through Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) in SCVMM 2008 R2.

By default VMs are live migrated amongst host every 10 minutes with low aggressiveness (options are low, medium and high) to balance the load across hosts in the cluster when Dynamic Optimization is enabled. You can also manually choose Optimize Hosts without configuring ongoing Dynamic Optimization for a particular host group.

For host groups that have Dynamic Optimization enabled you can also optionally enable Power Optimization. Provided SCVMM has access to hosts through BMC and can thus power them on and off this allows SCVMM to shut one or more hosts in the cluster down during times of lower load and then power them on again as the need arises. It happens 24×7 by default but you can choose to only implement the feature during certain days / hours of the week.

Any business aiming to reduce their environmental impact (and power bill) will be helped by a datacentre that turns off hosts automatically during times of lower load>

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One hassle in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Hyper-V today is the restriction of having to manage networks on a per NIC basis; SCVMM comes to the rescue with new networking features.

Logical networks in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

A logical network with one or more logical network definitions groups together IP subnets and VLANs to simplify network management in SCVMM 2012. Typical networks would be backend, frontend, management or backup. When you provision a host or VM you associate it with a logical network and it automatically receives a fixed IP address and mac address. Logical networks can span geographies with one or more logical network definitions for each location. You can also use DHCP instead of controlling IP address allocation through SCVMM if you so desire. Each NIC on a host needs to be associated with a logical network in either trunk or access mode. In the latter only a single VLAN ID is allowed whereas in trunk mode multiple VLAN IDs can be used in different VMs that share the NIC.

The logical network system allows assignment of addresses to Windows based VMs running on all three supported hypervisor environments. Both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are supported but not in the same address pool.

For anyone who’s had to manually manage networks in large Hyper-V installations the new logical network features will be a godsend

Hardware load balancers are now recognised by SCVMM and through creating one or more virtual IP (VIP) templates specific type of traffic can be controlled. A VIP template can control HTTP traffic behaviour on a BIG-IP from F5 for instance. In this beta the only load balancers that are recognised are BIG-IP from F5 and Citrix’s NetScaler but expect this list to grow, including support for Microsoft’s own Network Load Balancing in Windows Server.

Not only does SCVMM give you logical networks, it also integrates tightly with your hardware network load balancers

If you’re integrating with VMware’s environment be aware the SCVMM doesn’t automatically create port groups on ESX hosts, this has to be done in vCenter to match the SCVMM logical network definitions.

Storage Integration in SCVMM 2012

SCVMM can discover and provision remote storage on arrays in the console and available storage can be classified. An 8 Gb Fibre channel SAN could be called “platinum” whereas a slower iSCSI SAN could be known as “silver”. SCVMM uses Storage Management Initiative – Specification (SMI-S) to communicate with external arrays and a provider for your SAN vendor needs to be installed on the server to unlock this functionality. Once communication is established you can create logical units (MBR or GPT), allocate them to host groups and then assign them to individual hosts or to clusters as Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). In the beta EMC Symmetrix & CLARiiON CX, HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) and NetApp FAS are supported but many more are likely to follow.

Storage groups are a new concept; they bring together host initiators, target ports and logical units. The SAN array integration is only available for Hyper – V hosts, storage for VMware and XenServer hosts have to be provisioned outside of SCVMM.

SCVMM 2012 also supports SAN technologies for deploying VMs like snapshot and clone: simply create a template (from a new or existing VM) that’s SAN copy-capable and the SAN will duplicate the LUN that contains the source .vhd file.

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Maybe it’s just me but when there’s been SO much talk about the cloud in IT over the last year or two and when there’s a button called “Create Cloud” inside a new product it tickles my interest.

Private Cloud in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

In SCVMMs terms a cloud provide the following characteristics; self-service to allow administrators to delegate provisioning of VMs in the cloud, resource pooling and opacity because users need no knowledge of the underlying physical hardware. It’s also elastic as it’s easy to add resources to increase capacity and private clouds can contain hosts from all three supported hypervisors, you can even create a SCVMM cloud from a VMware resource pool.

Creating a private cloud in SCVMM is a matter of a simple wizard (and some planning!)

For private clouds you can specify quotas with maximum number of VMs, virtual CPUs, storage and memory. Maximum storage is based on the max size of dynamic virtual hard disks if they’re in use and maximum memory is measured against running VMs only.

The fabric in SCVMM refers to all the infrastructure pieces that are necessary to host VMs. The fabric is made up of hosts, host groups, the library, networking and storage. Grouping hosts together lets you control placement weights, dynamic optimization and power optimization, reserves, network and storage resources for the group as a whole. You can build a hierarchy of host groups where child groups inherit these settings from the parent host group.

Library services in SCVMM 2012

The library has been enhanced to support services (see part 5), sharing of resources in a private cloud; drivers for bare metal deployments, SQL data-tier apps and web deploy packages. Custom resources are now indexed and visible if you copy a folder with the .cr extension to the library share.

Another addition to the library is resource groups which allows users to group equivalent sets of resources in separate geographical locations. A Windows Server 2008 R2 .vhd file might be stored on different continents and be added to a resource group. In templates and profiles you can now reference the group rather than a specific .vhd which will make life easier for administrators in distributed enterprises.

The library also houses Application profiles and SQL profiles which is a way to deploy applications and databases to VMs after the base image is deployed; application profiles can be server App-V packages, web applications or SQL data tier installations.

The library centralizes storage of all the building blocks of your virtualized infrastructure

Managing accounts and security in SCVMM 2012

A welcome addition to SCVMM is the concept of Run As accounts and Run As profiles. These are stored credentials that allow you to delegate tasks to junior administrators and self-service users without exposing sensitive credentials. There are six different categories of Run As accounts: host computer accounts provides access to Hyper-V, ESX or XenServer hosts, BMC accounts talks to Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) on hosts for out-of-band management, external accounts are used for external systems such as Operations Manager and network device accounts connects to network load balancers. Profile accounts are used in Run As profiles for service creation, in OS and application profiles as well as SQL and host profiles.

For large environments with a multitude of administrators Run As accounts and Profiles will be extremely useful

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• SCOM 2012 review – Part 4: Infrastructure improvements (0)

I love when Microsoft takes an already good product and adds a whole lot of new features to make the next version not just better but excellent. This is what’s happening with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) in its new version: 2012, currently in beta, to be released in the second half of 2011.

The Office Ribbon interface makes its mark in SCVMM 20212

In this article series we’ll take a look at what’s new, what’s improved and introduce the new concepts and capabilities of SCVMM 2012.

Part 1 What’s New, Installation Part 2 Private Cloud, Library Services, Security and Accounts Part 3 Logical networks, Storage Integration Part 4 Bare Metal Configuration, Dynamic & Power Optimization Part 5 Integrating with VMWare, Integrating with Citrix XenServer, Cluster patching Part 6 Self Service empowerment, Service Deployment and Conclusion

What’s new in SCVMM 2012 – Not just VMs anymore

The biggest shift in SCVMM is the change from managing Virtual Machines (VMs) to managing the entire virtualized datacentre. The shift is so dramatic that “System Center Data Centre Manager” might be a more appropriate name. SCVMM can communicate with brand new machines with no OS installed and do a bare metal installation, then configure them in a Hyper-V cluster as well as talk directly to your SAN storage. This then becomes a private cloud inside of SCVMM that abstracts hosts, storage, and networking into a unified pool of computing resources.

Add to this the ability to use Server App-V to deploy applications through SCVMM as well as SQL Server profiles to deploy customised database servers and Dynamic- and Power Optimization. The latter allows SCVMM to turn off host machines when they’re not needed and then turn them back on when the load increases whereas the former allows SCVMM to automatically move VMs between hosts to balance the load. The concept of multiple virtual machines working together (web front end servers, backend database servers) is covered by a services concept where multiple machines can be provisioned in unison; if the load increases scale out with additional VMs can be executed. Network load balancer appliances are also recognised and supported directly in SCVMM.

Patching a host cluster is a difficult task as each node has to have its VMs migrated to other hosts, the system patched and rebooted before the process is repeated on the next host. SCVMM now orchestrates cluster host patching as well as integrating with Windows Server Update Services and allowing you to define baselines of patches that each host needs.

The list of managed hypervisors has grown, not only does SCVMM manage Hyper-V and VMware, it now manages Citrix Xen server as well, covering all the major hypervisors on the market.

Due to all the critical functionality of SCVMM it’s recommended to implement a highly available system if your environment is large. This means that you need a smaller cluster, separate from your production resources that will house instances of SCVMM. This cluster needs to be on Windows Server 2008 R2 and it needs to be setup before SCVMM is installed. It’s also good practise to setup a highly available SQL Server database on separate hardware as well as storing the library on highly available file servers. In this configuration the encryption keys that SCVMM use to protect data transfers need to be stored in AD (so they’re available to all SCVMM nodes) and you have to use domain accounts to run the different services.

Installation of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

When planning a System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 deployment consider the different roles. In a small environment these can all be located on the same server but as the datacentre grows it’s beneficial to split the roles across multiple hosts. The management server is the heart of SCVMM, whereas the library server stores templates, VHDs, scripts etc. The console can run on the management server as well as be installed on workstations for remote management, the self-service portal allows designated users to create and manage their own VMs and finally the database resides on an SQL Server machine.

Software that needs to be installed on the server is the usual suspects: WinRM 2.0, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, PowerShell 2.0 (for the console), IIS (for the self-service portal) and Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) for Windows 7. Supported operating systems are Windows Server 2008 SP2+ (x64 only) / 2008 R2 and the backend database needs to be either SQL Server 2008 SP2+ or 2008 R2. This means that SQL Server Express is no longer supported for the database server; it has to be a full version (Standard or Enterprise).

Supported virtual machine hosts are the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2, full installation or server core as well as the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is no longer supported. VMware’s virtualization platform is supported as it was in earlier versions through vCenter Server, now requiring version 4.1 with hosts running ESXi / ESX 4.1 and 3.5; ESX 3.0 is no longer supported. Citrix XenServer is supported with version 5.6 with Feature Pack 1; there’s an Integration Suite supplemental pack for SCVMM. The XenServer support will be useful when you want to run Linux guests as the choice is wider than what’s supported in Hyper-V.

• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 5: Network Monitoring (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 4: Infrastructure improvements (0)

There’s no in-place upgrade option for going from SCCM 2007 to v.Next. Fortunately Microsoft has built migration tools right into the console to help with the transition.

Migration

In a nutshell the process follows these steps: first your SCCM 2007 environment is evaluated, it has to be at the SP2 level, and then you install your new v.Next hierarchy. At the central site metadata is mapped from the old to the new so that each site is matched to its new counterpart (you’ll have to come up with new site codes, you can’t use the same ones you do today), this synching continues until you turn it off at the end of the migration so as to capture any changes in the SCCM 2007 environment.

All objects are then transitioned over using migration jobs that you can run straightaway, schedule for later or run manually when it suits you.

During the co-existence phase DPs are shared between both environments. Upgrading clients is an administrator initiated process; you can use any software deployment method of your choice. When your entire infrastructure has been migrated to v.Next you can decommission (which only means the synchronization of data stops) from the bottom of the hierarchy back up to the top. Computers and users can’t be in the same collection in v.Next so you’ll need to fix any such collections that you may have today.

Mobile

Microsoft has a product called Systems Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 (MDM) which puts smartphones into AD and lets sys admins manage them much like desktops and laptops. A cool technology that is limited to Windows Mobile 6.x so it’s probably safe to say it hasn’t been a best seller for Microsoft.

MDM functionality is being incorporated into v.Next whilst adding management support for Nokia Symbian devices (coming in beta2) including inventory, software deployment and settings management. Microsoft promises more platforms will follow; obvious targets are Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android. There will be limited management of these platforms at RTM via a connector for Exchange Active Sync. What won’t be there at RTM unfortunately is remote control for mobile devices.

Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

Exchange 2010 pioneered a new way of doing administrative security for large applications that are managed by many people. v.Next adopts this approach and it’s fully integrated into the new console. For instance, if you have a software deployment administrator they will only be able to see that part of the console, anything else that they don’t have rights to manipulate won’t be visible.

Security roles are groupings of tasks (in beta1 there are 13 roles available); security scopes control on which objects / sites a user can perform those tasks. You can create your own security roles and security scopes.

Verdict

This is an early beta with several bits missing or announced as changing in the next beta. It’s clear however that this is a big refurbishment of config manager with many innovations sure to please businesses and sys admins alike. The thing that’s missing is PowerShell, is it possible that a new server application from Microsoft is NOT built on PowerShell? There’s no sign of it in beta1 at least.

User Centric Management should appeal to users and administrators alike whilst the new console and RBAC are obvious crowd pleasers. Broader mobile device management and a much more flexible application deployment model are sure to win over new businesses whilst existing SCCM sites will enjoy the simplified hierarchies.

• SCOM 2012 review – Part 8: Dashboards (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 7: Linux and JEE monitoring (4)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 6: Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (1)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 5: Network Monitoring (0)
• SCOM 2012 review – Part 4: Infrastructure improvements (0)