Month: December 2009

Audit Collection Services Adds Cross-Platform Support

I first heard about Audit Collection Services (ACS) at TechEd in 2004.  It was going to be a free download like WSUS.  The idea is that it would be an intelligent alternative to SYSLOG for Microsoft platforms/applications, gathering security logs into a central database.  Instead of gathering everything, it would gather the important alerts/events only.

Time went by and no beta appeared.  Then ACS appeared as a feature in System Center Operations Manager 2007.  OpsMgr 2007 evolved in OpsMgr 2007 R2 to add cross platform support, i.e. MS written native agents and management packs for Linux and UNIX.

Microsoft has now added an extension to this cross platform support to offer ACS to Linux and UNIX:

“System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Audit Collection Services enables the collection and audit of events from UNIX and Linux Servers. Using Cross Platform ACS, events are collected from the desired Unix/Linux servers and stored in the Audit Collections Services Database. Audit reports for UNIX/Linux Server collected events are included.

Feature Summary

Collection of Audit events from UNIX/Linux server, including:

  • AIX 5.3 (Power), 6.1 (Power)
  • HP-UX 11iv2 (IA64/PA-RISC), 11iv3 (IA64/PA-RISC)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Server 4 (x86/x64), 5 (x86/x64)
  • Solaris 8 (SPARC), 9 (SPARC), 10 (SPARC/x86)
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (x86), 10 (x86/x64), 11 (x86/x64)

Built in Audit Reports including:

  • Access violations – unsuccessful logon attempts
  • Account creation/deletion/password change
  • Administrator activity – su, sudo
  • Forensic – all events for a computer/event ID
  • User logons”
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Microsoft Releases Hyper-V Walkthrough Guide

Microsoft has released a document to help you get to know Hyper-V in a lab or pilot test environment.

“This guide provides detailed step-by-step walkthroughs for testing Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2 in a preproduction environment. You can use this guide to become familiar with Hyper-V and the process of creating and managing virtual machines. This guide also includes scenarios that you can test to better understand how Hyper-V can address the business goals of your organization”.

Worldwide PC Shipments Increase

Siliconrepublic is reporting that the worldwide sales numbers of PC’s has grown in the 3rd quarter of 2009.  Consumer laptops and netbooks have driven the growth numbers.  The “back to school” factor has probably played a big role.  College students have needed laptops for some time now and it’s becoming a necessary piece of equipment for school kids too.  There are predictions of good sales in 2010.  How reliable that is, I don’t know.  It’s hard to see much positivity when you live in a country on the precipice of an economic black hole and it’s managed by rejects from the Muppet show.  However, the news has me believing that much of the rest of the world is starting to recover.

I wonder how much Windows 7 has played a role in these new sales.  I think it will have had some importance in people’s decisions to purchase.  There is genuine excitement out there and I think the normal TV advertising that MS has done will raise consumer awareness.  When they asked their neighbourhood/family IT experts for opinions then the feedback was probably quite positive.

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Getting The XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress Working on Windows

This blog is running using WordPress on Windows hosting (Windows 2008 & IIS7) on a shared hosting platform.  The control panel is Plesk.  The WordPress application was installed from the control panel rather than the usual manual installation.

For SEO reasons you need a sitemap.xml file to tell search engine crawlers about your site and it’s content.  There is a very handy Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress.  I installed it when I set up the blog last month but I kept getting errors that it could not create neither the sitemap.xml nor the sitemap.xml.gz files.  When I tried manual executions of the build process then the page would fail to load.  I did a tonne of searching and found two solutions:

  1. You have to create 2 empty files in the root folder of your WordPress site for each of the files.  The generator will not create these files, only edit existing files.  Empty notepad files will do on Windows.  Linux folks can “touch” them.
  2. The next thing was permissions.  This is where it became obvious to me that most WordPress folks are on Linux hosting.  The advice was to use chmod or FTP to set the permissions to 777, i.e. all rights to all users, on the two files.

I’d done the first step.  The control panel doesn’t allow us to modify permissions on CP installed application files/folders.  I also couldn’t set the 777 rights via an FTP tool for this reason.  I viewed the permissions and donned my traditional least privileges approach.  The website runs using the application pool identity.  So if I grant that account write permissions on the files all should be OK.  Turns out that wasn’t true.  The plug-in was running as something else. 

I was unwilling to test more on my production site so I set up a dummy site and did a manual install of WordPress and the plug-in.  Now I had rights to set permissions.  I granted write permissions to web users (the only remaining group in the control panel).  Now I ran the job manually.  It worked!

I got the hoster helpdesk to set the permissions on the two files on this production site.  I re-ran the job manually.  Now it worked and my sitemap was created.  Excellent.  I’d been doing some other SEO stuff to bring search engines here and it has been starting to work.  But the sitemap should help greatly.

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HP Updates Sizing Tool For W2008 Hyper-V

HP has released an updated version of their Hyper-V sizing tool to include Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

“The HP Sizer for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 is an automated, downloadable tool that provides quick and helpful sizing guidance for “best-fit” HP server and storage configurations running in a Hyper-V R2 environment. The tool is intended to assist with the planning of a Hyper-V R2 virtual server deployment project. It enables the user to quickly compare different solution configurations and produces a customizable server and storage solution complete with a detail Bill of Materials (BOM) that includes part numbers and prices.

The HP Sizer for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 allows users to create new solutions, open already existing solutions, or use other types of performance data collecting tools, such as the Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool (MAP), to build rich Hyper-V R2 configurations based on HP server and storage technology. The tool allows rapid comparison of Hyper-V R2 characterizations using various HP server and storage choices”.

It is available for download now.  An older version for Windows Server 2008 is still available.

Controlling Windows 7 and W2008 R2 Internet Communications

Microsoft has released a paper called “Using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 – Controlling Communication with the Internet”.

“Provides steps that administrators can take to limit, control, or prevent the communication that flows between the features in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and sites on the Internet.

This document provides information about the communication that flows between the features in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and sites on the Internet. It describes steps to take to limit, control, or prevent that communication in an organization with many users. This document is designed to assist administrators in planning strategies for deploying and maintaining Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 in a way that helps provide an appropriate level of security and privacy for an organization’s networked assets”.

KB974909: Heavy Outgoing Network Traffic Causes Hyper-V Network Outages

Microsoft released a patch for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V host servers.  It fixes a problem where VM’s are experiencing heavy outgoing network traffic loads.  This can cause the virtual NIC to fail and the only way to fix it (otherwise) is to restart the VM.

“Consider the following scenario:

  • You install the Hyper-V role on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2.
  • You run a virtual machine on the computer.
  • You use a network adapter on the virtual machine to access a network.
  • You establish many concurrent network connections, or there is heavy outgoing network traffic.
  • In this scenario, the network connection on the virtual machine may be lost. Additionally, the network adapter is disabled.

Note: You have to restart the virtual machine to recover from this issue.”

This hotfix applies to

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard

It requires the host to be rebooted.

VMM Reporting

System Center Virtual Machine Manager can be integrated into System Center Operations Manager.  Using the information gathered by OpsMgr agents on hosts, virtual and physical machines you can gather information that is relevant to VMM:

image You can see the reports above that are available when you are using Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.

Host utilization is a report you will run to see what the current resource usage is on that host.  Host utilization growth is similar.  What you will do with that report is specify two time frames.  The utilisation of the host in the second time frame will be compared with that of the first.

Virtual Machine Allocation is a summary report of the total resources used by virtual machines on your managed hosts.  Virtual Machine utilisation give you more detail.

imageYou can see in this screenshot the utilisation of resources by specific virtual machines.  Note that I have blacked out the VM names and the host names.  Some of the VM’s also do not have OpsMgr agents and therefore are not producing performance stats that can be used in this report.

Finally you have the report that’s going to be popular with most virtualisation implementations.  If I was doing a traditional internal deployment of Hyper-V I would first deploy OpsMgr 2007 R2 and it’s agents to gather Windows Server performance information.  Next I would deploy VMM 2008 R2.  I would let them stew on information for a week before sizing the hosts.  Then I would run the last of the reports: Virtualization Candidates. 

imageWith this report you specify a time frame and a set of criteria.  I’ve blacked out the names of the physical machines in this report.  You’ll use these performance criteria to dictate what is acceptable for a virtual machine candidate:

  • Number of processors (Hyper-V supports a max of 4 virtual CPU’s in a VM)
  • Processor speed
  • Maximum CPU usage
  • Average CPU usage
  • Total RAM
  • Average RAM usage

From this report you can ID your P2V candidates and then use VMM to convert those physical machines to virtual machines.

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