Tag: Operations Manager

Results & Report on The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011

FIND THE RESULTS & REPORT HERE

I am pleased to present the results and a report on The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011, that was conducted by myself, Hans Vredvoort, and Damian Flynn.  We conducted this report over the last few weeks, asking people from around the world to answer 80 questions on:

  • Their Hyper-V project
  • Their Hyper-V installations
  • Systems management
  • Private cloud
  • Their future plans

Note that this survey had no outside influences.  Microsoft found out about this survey by reading blog or twitter posts at the same time as the respondents.  I have deliberately chosed not to try get a sponsor for my report to further illustrate its independence.

Some of the results were as expected, and some of them were quiet an education.  Thank you to all who completed the survey, and to all who helped to spread the word.  And now, here’s what you have been waiting for:

  • Here is a report that I have written over the last 2 days.  I dig into each of the 80 questions, analysing the results of each and every question that we asked.
  • For those of you who want to dig a little deeper, here is a zip file with all of the raw data from the survey.  You will find reports and spread sheets with different views and selections of data.  I also created an additional spread sheet that was used to create the report.

Whether you are a sales person, a Hyper-V customer, a potential customer, or an enthusiast, I think there is something here for you.

Now the conversations and debates can begin.  Have a read of the report and then go over to see what Hans Vredvoort, and Damian Flynn thought of the data.  We have deliberately not shared our opinions with each other; this means we can all have unique view points, and possibly see something that others don’t.  For example, I work in the software sales channel with a background in consulting and engineering, Damian is an enterprise systems administrator/engineer, and Hans is an enterprise consultant.  We each have a different view of the IT world.  And after you read their opinions, it’ll be your turn: we want to hear what you think.  Post comments, tweet (#GBHVS2011), blog, or whatever.

Great Big Hyper-V Survey 2011 Is Now Closed

I closed the Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011 this morning at 10:05 (Dublin time, 11:05 CET, 5:05 EST).  Thank you to all who completed the survey.  Myself, Damian Flynn (another Hyper-V MVP), and Hans Vredevoort (Failover Clustering MVP) will be sharing the results on this Wednesday (7th September, 2011) at 10:00 Dublin time, 11:00 Amsterdam time (05:00 EST, 19:00 Sydney).

Monitoring the Hybrid Microsoft Cloud

The Microsoft Hybrid cloud, as it stands currently, is a mixture of a Hyper-V private cloud with an Azure public cloud, managed by System Center App Controller (formerly Concero).  One of the key pieces of the Microsoft solution is monitoring the health of the application (that the business really cares about) using System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr).

Management packs make monitoring of Hyper-V, Windows, SQL, Exchange, CRM, hardware, storage, etc, easy.  You can put together end user perspective monitoring from the basic ping test to the advanced synthetic transaction, build service-centric distributed application models, and provide SLA monitoring of the LOB applications.  That’s got the private cloud covered.

There is also a management pack for Azure.  This allows you to monitor the availability, health, and performance of your public cloud services.  Let’s face it – even if Microsoft does/did provide a monitoring solution within Azure – can you really use a monitoring solution that is a part of the thing you are monitoring, i.e. the Microsoft public cloud?  I say no – and that’s the first reason why you should use OpsMgr and this management pack.  The second reason is that it allows you to integrate your monitoring of public and private clouds, giving you that mythical single pane of glass for monitoring.

  • The features of this management pack are:
  • Discovers Windows Azure applications.
  • Provides status of each role instance.
  • Collects and monitors performance information.
  • Collects and monitors Windows events.
  • Collects and monitors the .NET Framework trace messages from each role instance.
  • Grooms performance, event, and the .NET Framework trace data from Windows Azure storage account.
  • Changes the number of role instances via a task.

The prerequisites of it are:

  • The management group must be running Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cumulative Update 3.
  • The Windows Azure role must be published with full trust level. For more information about Windows Azure trust levels, see Windows Azure Partial Trust Policy Reference.
  • Windows Azure Diagnostics must be enabled. For more information about Windows Azure Diagnostics, see Implementing Windows Azure Diagnostics.
  • Windows Azure Diagnostics must be configured to forward diagnostic data to a Windows Azure storage account. For more information about configuring Windows Azure Diagnostics, see Transferring Diagnostic Data to Windows Azure Storage.
  • Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 or newer must be installed on the computer that you designate as the proxy agent when you configure the Monitoring Pack for Windows Azure Applications.

Before You Install System Center … Clean Up Those Computer Accounts

First, I hope you’ve done some planning/architecture/proof of concept.  Next, clean up the environment.  Products that deploy agents, such as System Center Essentials (SCE), Configuration Manager (SCCM/ConfigMgr), and Operations Manager (SCOM/OpsMgr), will allow you to track the success of agent deployment.  And if your network is like most others I’ve encountered over the years, nobody has bothered to clean up the inactive/obsolete computer accounts.  The computer discovery process will use some sort of discovery process, most likely based on computer accounts found in Active Directory.  It may find computer accounts that have been there since 2000 and no longer are valid.  It may find 50% more computer accounts than actually exist.

Before you deploy agents you need to do some spring cleaning.

Computer Accounts

My favourite tool for this in the past was oldcmp.  The page doesn’t list Windows 2008 or 2008 R2.  I last used it with Windows Server 2008 in a lab and it worked fine.  It allowed you to work with user and computer accounts:

  • Report only
  • Disable
  • Move and disable (to a “disabled” OU)
  • Delete

The last time I was an admin of a large environment I was very fussy about inactive accounts.  We used to run oldcmp as a scheduled task on a monthly basis.

If you want something that is supported then try this.  Identify & disable computer accounts that were inactive for the last 4 weeks:

dsquery computer -inactive 4 | dsmod computer -disabled yes

Then you can identify and delete computer account that have been inactive for the last 8 weeks:

dsquery computer -inactive 8 | dsrm computer

Put that in a script and run it every month and you’ll automate the cleanup nicely.  Inactive machines for the last 4 weeks will be disabled and you can re-enable them if a user complains.  After 8 weeks, they get completely removed.  If you have people away for longer periods then you can extend this, e.g. disable after 26 weeks and delete after 52 weeks.  Or you might bundle that caution about deleting with a secure mindset, e.g. disable after 4 weeks and delete after 52 weeks.

Note: dsquery, dsmod, and dsrm can be easily used for lots more, e.g. user accounts. Check the help (at command prompt) and test-test-test before putting it into use.  You probably can do all of this with PowerShell and the useful –whatif flag.

DNS Records

I hate stale DNS records because they can lead to all sorts of false positives when there is IP address re-use, especially when trying to remotely manage/connect to PCs in a DHCP environment.  You can configure DNS scavenging of stale records on a DHCP server (for all zones) or on a per zone basis.

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Be careful with this one.  I’ve been especially careful with the intervals since the 2003 days when I had a Premier support call open.  Scavenging didn’t like me using smaller intervals, even if they were correctly configured.

Once you have the environment cleaned up, you can start deploying agents.  Now when you see a “failed” message, you know you can take it seriously and schedule a human visit.

Note: I don’t think I’ve ever used ConfigMgr to build collections of users.  Users roam and I don’t want to install software needlessly.  But ConfigMgr 2012 will have a more reliable user-centric approach that detects a user’s primary PC.  Therefore, you’ll want to do a user clean up before deploying it … and that should be standard security practice anyway.

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Downloads – RHEL 6 Support

Cumulative Update 5 for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM/OpsMgr) 2007 R2 was released last night.

And now RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 is supported (catching up with Hyper-V)!

There are more details on the CU5 support page.

A new Cross-Platforms management pack was also released.  Oddly, the download page mentions RHEL4 and 5 as supported but not the newly CU5 supported RHEL 6.  Don’t worry, the MP’s word document does mention that RHEL6 is actually supported by the new MP version.  It also mentions a few other fixes and new features of the MP.

Microsoft Still Serious About Continuing the Linux Journey

It’s clear from Hyper-V’s Linux support developments over the last year that Microsoft is serious about supporting and managing Linux.  The IC’s were submitted to the Linux kernel, making Microsoft a top 5 contributor.  Then we had CentOS distro support – making a lot of people very happy.  And now we have a new 3.1 version of the IC’s that adds newer OS version support and more Hyper-V features.

Over in OpsMgr world, guidance for installing Linux agents is placed right up there with guidance for installing Windows agents.  I’ve made it no secret that I actually like how the OpsMgr team did OpsMgr 2007 Linux agents (self-serviced cross certification) way more than how they did Windows workgroup agents (flaky MOMCERTIMPORT based on custom x.509 certificate templates).

Microsoft are really taking cross-platform or heterogeneous environments seriously.

Here’s hoping for a Microsoft-written DPM agent for LAMP, and maybe a Microsoft-written ConfigMgr client/agents for Linux too!  That would complete the stack and probably help System Center Management Suite sales in those beloved Fortune 1000’s.

System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta

OpsMgr/SCOM 2012 beta has been launched.  It will …

“… help you manage your data centre and cloud environments by:

  • Delivering flexible and cost effective enterprise-class monitoring and diagnostics while reducing the total cost of ownership by leveraging commodity hardware, with standard configurations to monitor heterogeneous environments.
  • Helping to ensure the availability of business-critical applications and services through market-leading .NET application performance monitoring and diagnostics plus JEE application health monitoring.
  • Providing a comprehensive view of data centres, and private and public clouds.

Feature Summary

  • Predictable performance and availability of critical applications
    • End-to-end views of application health and topology
    • Establishment of application service-level delivery (SLAs)
    • Precise identification of application errors

    Flexible and cost-effective infrastructure monitoring

    • In-depth monitoring, diagnostics, and reporting for heterogeneous environments
    • Integrated network device monitoring and alerts
    • Simplified management infrastructure
  • Comprehensive monitoring for your data centre and cloud—on your terms
    • Integrated physical, virtual, and cloud management
    • Common console across data centre and clouds
    • Rich reporting”

The things that look most interesting to me from the TechNet videos that I’ve watched are the more fault tolerant/simplified management server groups, and built-in network monitoring.  The second product I ever worked with in my career was a networking product that my then employer started to sell (but stopped soon after we started training sales people).  OpsMgr appears to work similarly: feed in a bunch of network device credentials, point it at one “seed” device, and let OpsMgr discover the rest of the network from there based on what it finds.  And after that you have port and protocol level fault and performance monitoring.  I guess we’ll find out more once we get the beta installed.

Veeam ESX Monitoring for SCOM

At yesterday’s VMware event, I wandered over to the Veeam stand to get myself a demo of their nworks Management Pack for VMware.  This allows OpsMgr (System Center Operations Manager 2007) to natively monitor ESX(i) without installing an agent on the host, with or without vSphere.  They fired up an RDP session and gave me a guided tour.  I was impressed with the solution.  It had all you would expect from an OpsMgr monitored object: alerts, knowledge base, diagrams, and reports.

This reinforces the fact that even if you do deploy ESXi then this does not rule out the use of what I believe to be the best monitoring solution out there (even if it is my job to convince you of that!).  With the nworks management pack and OpsMgr, you can include the mainframe-important-like virtualisation layer in the management of your hardware, operating system, services, application, and SLA stack.

BTW, if you are an SME then you can also use this management pack with System Center Essentials.

Operations Manager 2007 R2 Resource Kit

OK, it’s only 2 years too late and OpsMgr 2012 is around the corner, but it’s out and let’s just enjoy that.  Microsoft has just released a resource kit including tools for OpsMgr 2007 R2.  Best of all, it includes the ability to schedule maintenance mode for a group!  Yay!  No more hack-scripting to get this done during automated patching windows.

Visio 2010 Add-Ins – Pay Attention System Center People!

You may have wondered how to crate pretty pictures to share on a big screen that depict some health information about stuff that you manage using System Center.  Here’s how …

I was mucking around with the Visio plug-ins for Operations Manager for the first time today, adding monitored objects from SCE 2010 (plus their health status) into Visio.  The cool thing with this is that it refreshes the objects’ health in Visio!  And then you can save your diagram into SharePoint 2010 with live health refreshing.  In other words, you can create nice and friendly views of the services that IT provides and share them with service owners and/or users via diagrams on SharePoint sites.

VisioOpsMgrAddinExample

But it doesn’t stop there.

There are a lot of these plug-ins.  Why I’ve not heard/paid attention to most of these before, I have no idea.  There’s one for Exchange, allowing you a friendly view of your Exchange Server 2007 environment.  There is a cool one that drags in alerts from OpsMgr and update status from ConfigMgr if you are running a dynamic datacenter. 

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Seriously, take a look at this stuff if you are running System Center, or if you’re a systems integrator looking for cool new upsell services.