Microsoft Virtualisation official launch

A date has been set for the official launch of the Microsoft Virtualisation products! It will be on Monday 8th September 2008 and the following products will be officially launched:

• Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V
• Microsoft Desktop Virtualisation (Softgrid)

and.....

• Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008

Hopefully it will be the full release of VMM 2008 and not a workgroup release or something similar.

Microsoft's official launch page can be found here https://www.getvirtualnow.com/Main.aspx?

At the moment there seems to be no official launch by Microsoft UK but watch this space for any updates. Also something that should be of interest to everyone involved technically in the virtualisation space, especially those interested in Microsoft's Virtualisation offerings, is the launch of the Microsoft Virtualisation user group in the UK http://www.mvug.co.uk/

Their first meet is on Wednesday 24th September 2008, 18:00 - 21:00. These meetings are free to attend and are great for networking, learning and talking to people with actual deployment experience. Agenda will be the following:

Location:
Microsoft, Victoria, London
100 Victoria Street
Auditorium No 1

Date and Time:
Wednesday 24th September 2008
1800 – 2100

Agenda:
As this is our first meeting the intention is to present a roadmap of Microsoft virtualization technologies, finally we will have a open discussion on what you would like out of this user group.

1800 - 1900
Desktop virtualisation
Application virtualisation

1900 – 1915
Food

1915 - 2100
Server virtualisation
Presentation virtualisation
Microsoft SCVMM

Final 10-15mins
Open discussion (ask the audience
what future subjects we should cover)

Registration is possible via http://www.mvug.co.uk/

Certificate Generation Wizard for Operations Manager 2007

Hands up - Who has had 'fun' with certificates and monitoring agents in non trusted domains with Operations Manager 2007? I know I have....especially on some of the first deployments which I did.

Good news though as the Operations Manager product team have released a certificate generation wizard (CertGenWizard) which is really good especially when requesting multiple certificates.

CertGenWizard.exe is a wizard tool which will take your CA information as input (it isn't required if you are running the wizard on the box with the CA), take in the computer names (has to be FQDNs), and send out a request for the certificates you need. Now, you no longer have to fill out the Certificate Request form or enter parameters or connect to the web enrollment service. Once the certificates are approved, there is a Retrieve button in the CertGenWizard which will allow you to retrieve the certificates that you have requested. On top of the personal certificates, the wizard will retrieve the root CA certificate.

The biggest benefit to this tool is the added ability to request multiple certificates at once. If you have 100 non-domain joined agents that you need to set up cert auth for, you can simply request all 100 machine certificates at once, retrieve them all, and manually bring them over to your other machines.

Once you have brought them to your other machines, CertInstaller.exe is a second tool that will install the certificates into the local machine store of your computer and run MOMCertImport.exe for you. Note: Install OpsMgr Agent FIRST and then run the tool!

More information can be found at: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2008/08/22/obtaining-certificates-for-non-domain-joined-agents-made-easy.aspx

MPViewer 1.7 - View sealed Management Packs

This week I have been delivering another Operations Manager 2007 course in London and as part of it we look at some of the tools which Operations Manager administrators could use to help them.

If you have not come across MPViewer 1.7 before it should be part of your Operations Manager 2007 tool kit as it allows you to view the various components of a sealed or unsealed management packs. So you can see its discoveries, monitors, rules etc etc. Another great thing is that we can see the actual xml code used by the management pack so it can help you trouble shoot why, for example, a discovery script is not working or even help you to start looking at designing management packs in xml. Another feature is that you can export the management pack to html so you have a ready made report of it's contents for documentation.

It can be found via Boris Yanushpolsky's blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2008/06/25/mpviewer-1-7-now-works-with-latest-e12-mp.aspx

Update - Updated Dell Management Pack Version 3.1, A01 - New bug?!

Last week I wrote about the update to the Dell Management Pack. Reading Kevin Holman's blog http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2008/08/11/updated-dell-mp-released-3-1-a01.aspx it looks he has had a bit of "fun" deploying it and this article is definitely worth a read before you deploy as it looks like he has discovered a new bug with Version 3.1, A01. The bug is in relation to the discovery scripts and it looks like this new version will only detect servers with Dell OpenManage 5.3 and not the newer version 5.4...so version 5.4 servers get dumped into the unknown group in the Monitoring view in the console. I am sure Dell will rectify this with an updated release in the coming days or I hope so ...in the mean time I will be checking Kevin's blog for updates.

As I always say, however much you think reading the management pack guides is as exciting as watching paint dry you should do it as they do contain useful information in the marketing fluff which can save you a lot of scratching your head! :-)

Please display Management Packs in the System Center Catalog

This is note to vendors who are producing their own Management Pack's. Please, please, please can you list them via the Management Pack Catalog -http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/scp/opsmgr07.aspx?SCPProdID=3

This week I have come across two which are not listed:

The Sun Servers Integration 1.0 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 provides the tools and utilities needed to completely integrate Sun servers into the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 environment.

The systems it can manage are:

• Sun Fire
• X2100 M2, X2200 M2
• Sun Fire X4100, X4100 M2, X4200, X4200 M2
• Sun Fire X4500, X4600, X4600 M2
• Sun Blade X6220, X6250 Server Modules
• Sun Blade X8400, X8420, X8440 Server Modules

More info at: http://www.sun.com/systemmanagement/tools.jsp#Microsoft_SCOM

Also I came across the SolarWinds Management pack for integrating SolarWinds Orion with OpsMgr 2007:

The Orion Management Pack works with Microsoft System Center to pull detailed network fault and performance data from Orion, including network device utilisation and precise traffic analysis data, directly into Microsoft System Center.

More information can be found at: https://www.solarwinds.com/company/PressReleases/release.aspx?id=1078

Download at:

http://www.solarwinds.com/register/index.aspx?Program=846&c=70150000000Dlc6

Please, please, please list on the System Center Catalog.

Great posts on Cross Platform (Xplat) extensions

Anyone who attended MMS 2008 this year and keeps up to date with OpsMgr news will have seen all the info about Cross Platform extensions or Xplat which will mean it will be possible to monitor non microsoft systems easier such as Linux, Solaris etc. Ian Blyth who I met recently at the WMUG event in July has done some great work with the beta versions of this product. Have a read - http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/xplat-part-2-the-install/

Regards,

Momski

Good deployment guides for Operations Manager 2007

Having been slightly disappointed with the release of System Center Capacity Planner models for OpsMgr this year, Microsoft have a released a good infrastructure and design document for planning Operations Manager 2007 deployments. The deployment guidelines and concepts are similar to what I cover in the Operations Manager 2007 course and the planning/deployment workshops which I deliver. The Infrastructure and Design documents can be downloaded here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AD3921FB-8224-4681-9064-075FDF042B0C&displaylang=en.

I really like the powerpoint slide deck which could be used to aid architects in writing a High Level Design document or help out in a Project Initiation Meeting. It's really good to see that in the project scope there is focus on service monitoring as that is a key element of any good Operations Manager 2007 deployment.

It's easy to say :-) but for a good Operations Manager 2007 deployment adequate time must be spent on defining project scope so that all stakeholders know both the business and technical deliverables as that will change how you deploy Operations Manager 2007 and how you define the success criteria. Good project management and understanding of Operations Manager 2007 or any service monitoring technology really is key.

Deploying Operations Manager 2007 means that you "touch" every key service the organisation is currently running and it can't be deployed in isolation. Your stakeholder list is likely to be quite large depending on the organisation i.e. Active Directory teams, Solaris teams, network teams, messaging teams. Depending on this list other key questions arise such as what is the change management procedure for these teams? If you are going to produce Line of Business service views using the distributed application designer (every good deployment should make use of this) then who is the audience? To what level of detail does monitoring information need to be provided? For example if you create a Line of Business view for key website ordering service then if the end user is the audience then the level of detail needed in the view may just be synthetic transaction and availability monitors i.e. is the website up, can a user log on in under 20 seconds etc. If the audience is a technical team then other information will probably need to be provided i.e. website security information, server performance information etc.

Before you even decide on these views the key question is whether the organisation understands its key services and how the various components function. End to end service monitoring means that you should be looking to model all components within the Line of Business views but that is easier said than done....can Operations Manager 2007 really replace existing network management tools such as Cisco Works? Well, technically maybe yes with a lot of effort and development but feasibly the answer should be no and the question is how to we integrate Operations Manager 2007 with these tools and manage the change so that the support teams know how to use Operations Manager 2007 in conjunction with network management tools.

Anyway that's enough for now...sorry another long post but I hope you understand what I am trying to say :-) Scope, planning and management is key in a successful Operations Manager 2007 deployment!

Updated Dell Management Packs - Version 3.1, A01

Dell last week released updated versions of their hardware management packs with seperate packs now available for:

• Dell Server and Printers
• Dell Clients including Optiplex, Precision and Latitude
• Dell Storage Array

Please remember that the managment packs effectively "plug-in" via the Dell OpenManage (v5.4 and above) software via SNMP and so this must be configured correctly or you might not get the correct alert information.

Updated MP's can be found here - http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R194919&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=269302

IMPORTANT - There have been issues with the Dell Management Pack and the native SNMP modules withing Operations Manager 2007 SP1. The Dell Management Pack uses SNMP discovery and so before you deploy these management pack(s) you must install the latest SNMP related hotfix for Operations Manager 2007 SP1 or Essentials 2007 SP1 or you might find that your RMS becomes unstable. This hotfix can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951526

XenDesktop and VMM 2007/2008

Here is a video which was passed to me from a colleague which takes you through the steps of getting XenDesktop working with VMM 2007/2008

http://citrix.utipu.com/app/tip/id/2072/

Cheers,

Momski

Authoring your own Management Packs?

Then check out this good new site http://www.opsmanjam.com/default.aspx

On this site you will find unofficial management packs, management pack authoring tutorials and guidance, featured articles on everything OpsManager 2007, command shell scripts, and more.
The content on this site comes from Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft IT and the Operations Manager Product team. While the content that you will find here is not supported by Microsoft, it has been used in the field and is used everyday inside of Microsoft.

When will VMM 2008 be released?

...that's the million dollar question at the moment.

Yesterday I came across a quite interesting article http://virtualization.com/news/2008/07/16/microsoft-scvmm-2008/

According to this VMM 2008 will be released in September and not at the end of the year :-)

The section of this article which is worth taking note of is:

“Microsoft has also said that VMM 2008 would be offered as a standalone product for the first time. It will be unbundled from the System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE), which was introduced late last year”

This would be a bit of a shame if they go down that route as I feel VMM 2008 being included in the Enterprise licensing would help push OpsMgr and ConfigMgr adoption overall. Having said that other articles say that it will be included in System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise Edition....so it will be interesting to see the final pricing model :-)

Which virtualisation flavour will you choose?????

Two years ago if someone said to me "We are looking at virtualisation, what options do I have?" Well the answer was simple VMware, job done, thank you very much, the cheque can be made payable to......blah, blah

In the words of Ferris Bueller "Time moves pretty fast" and now the answer is not that simple. The first question will ultimately be "What is your budget?" then "What are you looking to virtualise?" storage, desktops, servers, the whole lot??? The virtualisation market is probably hotter then it is ever been at the moment with the majority of the big players having some sort of hypervisor Microsoft - Hyper V, Citrix - XenServer, VMware -Vi3.5, ESXi. There is no doubt at the moment that VMware is ahead overall with its technology and so it should be as its had a massive head start but the other offerings are appealing depending on what you want to do.

So...why am I blabbering on about this?...well I believe that Microsoft may not have all the ticks in the boxes at the moment with Hyper V but it does have a real opportunity in the overall management of virtualisation platforms with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM 2008) when it is released.....why? well VMM 2008 will have the ability to manage the major hypervisor platforms including VMware (through VirtualCenter) and Xen based platforms plus guess what? It will integrate with OpsMgr 2007 using a management pack and something called "vpro" technology which will let OpsMgr 2007 manage VMM 2008 at the sdk level. So, tell me the benefits? Well in a nutshell, we know that OpsMgr 2007 allows proactive monitoring from a business service perspective meaning by integrating with VMM 2008 we will get proactive virtualisation management from a service perspective.

Let me explain a bit further...at the moment if you have VMware in a production environment you will use VirtualCenter for its management and it does this really well - resource pools, vmotion etc etc but tell me whether VirtualCenter has an understanding of your key services and applications??? Does it know that you have a two key trading applications which are in a certain resource pool? Does it know that on Monday mornings these applications or business critical services will be busy...in short not as it stands at the moment....so it is what I would term as a 'hard' management solution as opposed to a 'soft' service based solution. We already know OpsMgr 2007 can monitor from a service perspective and so integrated with VMM 2008 we will have proactive virtualisation management down to the hypervisor layer...something that the other vendors can't do at the moment......

VMM 2008 will be a big (or should be) product in the virtualisation market and will make it possible to manage your virtualisation platform from a service perspective.

My ramblings here are inspired by this article - http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid1_gci1322706,00.html

Have a read.

Thanks,

Momski

Operations Manager 2007 on Windows Server 2008!

The Microsoft product team announced last week that OpsMgr 2007 and Essentials 2007 is now supported on Windows Server 2008 via a series of hotfixes that need to be applied. In the next month I am due to start a deployment project of OpsMgr 2007 on Windows 2008 so if I find any issues I will be sure to post here first.

Further details can found at the following KB article -

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953141

Cheers.

Momski

Firstly...sorry for my lack of updates

Firstly, sorry for not blogging for a bit but it has been quite busy these last couple of weeks. The Operations Manager 2007 course is proving a real hit and its really encouraging to see so many companies and individuals now deploying Operations Manager 2007 from a service perspective.

I am instructing another course on the 18th August 2008 for 5 days and the next one scheduled for the 6th October 2008. If you are interested in attending any one of these courses or want any further information then drop me an email at sc.opsmgr@gmail.com or see http://www.dilgenter.com/SystemsManagement/OperationsManager2007Training/tabid/120/Default.aspx

I also teach an Operators course which lasts for 1 day with the objective of teaching Operator's how to use console(s) properly and to be aware what OpsMgr can do for their environments. Finally, my last plug I promise :-), I also regularly hold OpsMgr planning and deployment workshops which can help formalise OpsMgr designs for service based management based on a particular environment. These workshops last typically last for 1 day depending on environment size and address both the technical and project management aspects.

In the next month I will doing an Operations Manager 2007 project which involves deploying on Windows Server 2008 and hopefully using Virtual Machine manager 2008 to manage their Vi3 farm. I will aim to keep you updated.....