First look and review of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008

As you are probably all aware System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 got released last week and is available for evaluation although I can't see it on MSDN yet.

So here is my independent review....please note that this is based on my first thoughts as I have only used the product for a day!

In the adapted words of a Fast show sketch... “Today I have mostly been eating....SC VMM 2008” and does it taste good?

Firstly, in short SC VMM 2008, has been geared up to be THE centralised virtualisation management platform. Today many organisations rely on VMware but in the future you can expect to see a whole mix of virtualisation platforms (Hyper V, Xen etc) potentially in an organisation. All of these have their own management interfaces, some more mature than others but this means potentially ‘disjointed’ support of essentially the key base technology layer for many organisations. This is not good and it’s clear to see the problems that this could present in regards to both the support function and the business overall. SC VMM 2008 is designed to solve this and take it one step further with ‘VPRO’ (performance and resource optimisation) which basically means that through integration with OpsMgr and VPRO management packs i.e. Exchange 2007 MP with VPRO, your proactive virtualisation management will be service aware. SC VMM 2008 will be know that a server in a resource pool is actually a critical Exchange bridgehead server and will make recommendations on VM placement, resource optimisation based on the existing setup of the virtualisation farm. As of 1st November 2008 VMM 2008 will be formally released to manufacturing with support out of the box for VMware 3.x, Virtual Center 2.0.1 or above and of course Hyper V (no Xen yet).

Well here is my simple review:

VMM 2008 at the moment is a bit like walking into one of those many chain gastro pubs. The menu (product) on paper looks excellent; it potentially has everything and more. The descriptions of the dishes (features) leave you salivating and even though you only really want a main course (service monitoring of your virtualisation infrastructure) your now thinking about the appetisers, desserts and veritable feast of side orders. You call the waitress/waiter over....and then the problems begin and your culinary dream is brought down to reality (for now). Firstly, even though the menu (features) look good, your informed that they are waiting on suppliers (vpro partners will generate vpro enabled management packs, some new Microsoft management packs will be vpro enabled) but there does not seem to be a clear release date. So you are basically left sitting in a flashy restaurant (SC VMM 2008) with a good looking menu but can’t order anything so you might as well have gone to your local favourite takeaway (Virtual Center).

So in summary VMM 2008 stills looks good but the hype, marketing and road map is better than the product at the moment. The VPRO function is currently simple and does not do anything which Virtual Center can’t do currently. It will recommend that VMs are moved to hosts with more resources but do you really need a ~ £700 product to tell you that when you already have Virtual Center? Its integration with Virtual Center is good (yes you still need virtual center because VMM plugs in via the SDK) and VPRO utilises V-motion to move running VMs around on the fly (something Hyper V can’t do until Win2k8 R2). It also lets you create snapshots from the VMM 2008 console which is quite good and yes the console does look nice.

It’s integration with OpsMgr is seamless which is good because it’s in the System Center family and it WILL make use of the OpsMgr reporting element but I can't find no reports yet. Through OpsMgr 2007 you can now see the health of machines from the virtual perspective but this is basic availability and optimisation monitoring at the moment until more VPRO packs are released, you can though, run tasks such as creating snapshots etc...but products like Veeam nWorks seem to monitor more at the moment. The VMM console allows you to V2V VMware VMs to Hyper V and will let you (looks pretty good) P2V a machine quickly to a Hyper V platform. Another good feature is that you can create new VMs on a VMWare or Hyper V platform and the wizard for doing this is very good with a simple star rating for placement.

The other feature which I have not tried yet is the self service portal which basically lets users provision their own VMs and assigns quotas to user groups. When they create a new VM a ‘points’ charge is deducted from their quota. This does look good but chances are large organisations have this already with VMware and this portal is only for Hyper V provisioning. So in summary VMM 2008 is still a good product on paper but we are left waiting for its really tasty features. Here is my points break down at the moment:

Good

• Great interface, probably the best virtualisation layer management interface I have seen (Citrix please take note). Makes the process of virtualisation (P2V etc) accessible to all IT professionals.
• Create new VMware and Hyper V VMs all from one centralised platform.
• Seems very stable for an RTM product (Good work Microsoft).
• Hyper V with VMM 2008 looks like being the easiest to use virtualisation technology with user self service provisioning being easiy with a simple charging mechanism.
• See your VMware farms and Hyper V farms from one console.
• Setup is quite easy and Win2k8 aware in terms of its firewall ports etc.
• Integration with OpsMgr 2007 is seamless which is the way it should be.
• Makes great use of PowerShell and all cmdlets and scripts are shown.
  

Negative (reluctant to say this because the roadmap is good)

• VPRO features at the moment limited.
• No OpsMgr reports out yet.
• Need firm release dates for VPRO enabled Management Packs

In conclusion, would you buy this today if you have Virtual Center set up, configured and your support teams like using it?...I doubt it but this is a case of “watch this space” in relation to VPRO. Would you buy this today if you are adopting Hyper V? - Definitely yes. Would you buy this today if you have OpsMgr or looking to implement OpsMgr and one of your key monitoring areas is the virtualisation layer - I would, as the road map looks like bringing the feast which has been promised on the menu and until that time it gives your support teams chance to get used to VMM and its integration with OpsMgr!

Well that's me done for now...time for me to head down to my local gastro pub!

System Center Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 support for Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Well we know that Operations Manager 2007 SP1 is supported on Windows Server 2008 but what about whether it is supported on SQL Server 2008? Well official supportability can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb309428.aspx so no official support yet.....

BUT

the official response on when OpsMgr 2007 will support SQL 2008 can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958170 So official word is:

"Currently, it is not a supported scenario to run SQL Server 2008 together with System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1. Additionally, there is no planned support for scenarios where you run SQL Server 2008 together with the original release version of System Center Operations Manager 2007.We are investigating the merits of providing support for upgrading SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 database roles. A statement about this potential support will be forthcoming within 90 days of the SQL Server 2008 RTM date (August 6, 2008 plus 90 days)."

Currently under evaluation:

• Microsoft are currently evaluating support for performing a clean install of SQL Server 2008 on a system that is running System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1.

• Because the SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services infrastructure has changed to no longer include a dependency on Internet Information Services (IIS), support for the Operations Manager Reporting feature in SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services is also under evaluation.

A management pack for monitoring SQL Server 2008 is currently scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of the 2008 calendar year.

Installing Operations Manager 2007 on Windows Server 2008

Over the last couple of days I have had a few queries in regards to installing Operations Manager 2007 on Windows Server 2008. As you may be are this is definitely possible and on a project which I am working on at the moment this is the configuration which they require. I found it straight forward but there are a number of gotchas:

• Everything (as you would expect) is completely locked down in terms of security
• You must be are of key ports that OpsMgr uses as these will need configuring on the Windows Server 2008 firewall
• Remember that all Operations Manager 2007 web components require IIS 6.0 when you are installing the IIS server role

There is quite a bit of information on the forums at the moment in regards to installing Operations Manager 2007 on Windows Server 2008. Some of the best resources I have come across are:

Creating a Windows Server 2008 POC environment for OpsMgr 2007

(1) Creating a Windows Server 2008 domain - http://ops-mgr.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3D3B8489FCAA9B51!695.entry

(2) Installing the Operations Manager 2007 databases component - http://ops-mgr.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3D3B8489FCAA9B51!710.entry

(3) Installing the Root Management Server - http://ops-mgr.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3D3B8489FCAA9B51!719.entry

(4) Installing the Data Warehouse - http://ops-mgr.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3D3B8489FCAA9B51!728.entry

(5) Installing the OpsMgr Reporting Services Component - http://ops-mgr.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3D3B8489FCAA9B51!768.entry

Installing the Reporting Services Component with Windows Server 2008

http://www.opsmanjam.com/default.aspx - Check the featured content.

OpsMgr 07 Remote Maintenance Mode Scheduler 2.0

As you may be aware, one of the little annoyances with Operations Manager 2007 is that through the Operator console you can't schedule maintenance mode through the default menu. So when you want to put a component into maintenance then it is in this state as soon as you click ok. Now this is a problem if you work in support and have to leave at 6pm but the maintenance window is at 2am in the morning. Hopefully a future version of OpsMgr we may be able to set maintenance windows to groups by default.

In the meantime what can you ? Well there is lots of information on various forums about using a Powershell scrip to schedule a maintenance window but one of the best tools that I have come across which should be in your OpsMgr kit bag is the Remote Maintenance Mode Scheduler. Version 2 has just been released and can be downloaded from http://www.scom2k7.com/scom-remote-maintenance-mode-scheduler-20/. This really is a great tool by Tim McFadden - great work.

The Remote Maintenance Mode Scheduler is a GUI based tool that lets administrators easily schedule maintenance mode for a server or group of servers inside System Center Operations Manager 2007.

New Features in version 2.0 include:

• Ability to schedule a daily maintenance mode.
• New Show Scheduled Tasks Dialog.
• Added feature to see all details for scheduled jobs.
• Added feature to delete scheduled jobs

General diagnostics and tuning Management Pack

I get a lot of questions similar to "I think my OpsMgr deployment is healthy but how do I make sure?". Well usually I would say start with the Operations Manager event log on the RMS for any obvious errors, check that no errors are showing in relation to database communication problems, on the agent side check that agent proxying is set for those agents which require it etc....but reading Ian Blyth's blog the other day http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/ I came across a management pack from Walter Chomak which can be used to check an environment for general health and Management Pack Tuning. In summary it will check for

• Agent Failover Events
• Agent Proxying Needs to be Enabled
• Data Warehouse Connectivity Issues
• Database connectivity lost
• Failed to connect to computer
• Health Service Heartbeat Failure
• Missed Heartbeats
• Missing Perfmon Counters
• Processing Backlogged Event Taking a Long Time
• Script or Executable Failed to run
• Services or Drivers failed to start
• System Shutdown detected
• Unexpected Service Terminations

Find out more and download at http://blogs.technet.com/wchomak/archive/2008/09/30/general-diagnostics-management-pack-1-0.aspx

Changing the data retention in the OpsMgr datawarehouse

Ok, imagine the scenario, you are doing a POC of OpsMgr 07 for an organisation and because they only want to evaluate 'fit' of all OpsMgr components within their environment they do not want to provide you lots of space for the data warehouse. Well, what can you do? If it was the Operations Manager database then it would be possible to change retention days in the Administration section of the console but this is not possible with the data warehouse. So you could:

(1) Change the default data retention by altering the MaintenanceSetting table in the data warehouse. the table is split into two sections; "config space” (management packs, rules they contain,overrides created, etc) and “instance space” (objects discovered,their properties and relationships, etc.) The columns of interest are:

Instance Space settings

• LastInstanceGroomingDateTime - the last time grooming operations were performed.
• InstanceGroomingFrequencyMinutes - frequency of the grooming processstart (default: 480)
• (most important) InstanceMaxAgeDays - maximum age (since the day instancewas deleted) for the instance space objects (default: 400)
• InstanceMaxRowsToGroom - maximum number of objects to delete in one run(default: 5000).

Config space settings

• LastConfigGroomingDateTime - the last time grooming operations were performed
• ConfigGroomingFrequencyMinutes - frequency of the grooming process start(default: 60
• ManagementPackMaxAgeDays - maximum age for the management pack (since theday MP was uninstalled) (default: 400)
• NonSealedManagementPackMaxVersionCount - maximum # of non-sealed MPversions to preserve (independent of the age) (default: 3)

OR alternatively you could use the Data Warehouse Retention Policy tool (DWDATARP.exe) available from the Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 product team - http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2008/05/14/data-warehouse-data-retention-policy-dwdatarp-exe.aspx.

To use:

• To view current Data Retention settings run:
• dwdatarp.exe –s “dw servername” –d “dw databasename”
  example: C:\dwdatarp>dwdatarp -s opsmgrsp1 -d OperationsManagerDW
• To set Data Retention for a particular dataset run:
  dwdatarp.exe –s “dw servername” –d “dw databasename” – ds “dataset name” –a “aggregation name” –m “days”
  example: C:\dwdatarp>dwdatarp -s opsmgrsp1 -d OperationsManagerDW – ds “Performance data set” –a “Hourly aggregations” –m 399

Maybe with Operations Manager 2007 SP2 will see this functionality inbuilt within the Operations Manager 2007 console?

Managing file count with OpsMgr 2007

Hello,

Sorry for the lack of updates during September but I was on holiday. This year I went to Vietnam and I have to say it was great. We did the whole of Vietnam from Halong Bay in north (near Hanoi) all the way to the Mekong Delta in the south. It is a great country and really up and coming with hotels being built every where. If you are thinking of going I highly recommend it as in a few years I fear it will be over run with tourists.

Anyway back to business. When I was away I had a question about how to manage a file count in a folder. I have been asked this a few times before and the answer is that it is easy because.........their is a file management pack available from systemcenterforum.org at http://www.systemcenterforum.org/updated-file-system-management-pack-v600134-now-available/ It can monitor file count and a whole lot more:

• File Count Monitor
• File Count by Extension Monitor
• File Extension Modified Time Monitor
• File Modified in X Time
• File Size Monitor
• Folder Size Monitor

Thanks for this great Management Pack can go to Jaime Correia.

Check it out!