Citrix XenApp Management Pack released but upgrade issues

To coincide with the release of XenApp 5.0 (the new name for Presentation Server), Citrix have released a new version of the Presentation Server/XenApp Management pack. I know a lot of people out there who are finding issues with the original Citrix Presentation Server 4.0/4.5 Management Pack and have issues with it's scripts and functionality so I thought that I would try the new version out in a lab environment. In order to replicate the environment which many of you will have I decided to import the old version of the pack and then import the new version...........BUT although the Management Pack import wizard detects the new version, on import, I get this error:

It looks like the task LaunchAMCConsole is not upgrade compatible...whoops!

So at the moment to upgrade you need to remove the old MP which means that if you have any customisations these will also need to be removed. I am sure Citrix will fix this issue soon!

Microsoft Virtualisation Launch today for marketing/sales

............but unfortunately for "techies" out there the release of both Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and the product I am waiting for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released within 30 days. More information on the launch can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-07GetVirtualNowPR.mspx

Service Level Dashboard for Operations Manager 2007

As we know Operations Manager 2007 can really help an organisation proactively monitor their infrastructure from a service point of view. One Management Pack which I definitely recommend as part of a service focused Operations Manager 2007 deployment is the Service Level Dashboard Management Pack. It is simple to deploy and links into with your existing Line of Business designs which you will have created in the Distributed Application Designer (to show them is as easy as using an Override to include them...which is good if you have already designed a few). It then allows you to generate business orientated reports which clearly show from a dashboard point of view whether core services are meeting their SLAs and whether, maybe, Service Improvement Programs (SIPs) need to be initiated. Basic overview is:

As you can see this is a great Management Pack and should be definitely in your deployment toolkit :-)

The Management Pack was originally released a couple of months ago but a new version was released at the end of August which uses summary reports based on Dundas Gauges and really makes the reports look a lot better then the early version.

It can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=67EF9823-631B-49B7-9D7F-9F125BDF27AE&displaylang=en