System Center Guide

David Williams, Analyst with Gartner, has published an in-depth examination of System Center Operations Manager 2007. In his report, Williams states that “Operations Manager 2007 has moved to rival many of the capabilities provided by more-established and more-expensive [tools].”

To read the full report (no Gartner account needed), visit the Gartner site at:

http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol10/article2and3/article2and3.html

The System Center Professional User Group of Jacksonville will hold their 4th quarter meeting on November 19, 2008 at 6:30 P.M.  It will take place at New Horizons Learning Center, 7020 A.C Skinner Parkway Suite #180, Jacksonville, FL, 32256.
 
A meet and greet period is scheduled for 6:30 to 7:30 with food and drinks provided.  This will be followed by a presentation from sponsor SecureVantage Technologies entitled “Security Auditing with System Center Operations Manager and the Audit Collection Service.”  All System Center Professionals in North Florida are invited.
 
SPUGJax was created to connect I.T. professionals working in the Microsoft System Center ecosystem with products such as SMS, SCCM, MOM, SCOM, Microsoft virtualization technologies, SoftGrid and the many third-party tools that support System Center.
 
Please forward this post along to anyone you know working with Microsoft server applications.  Thank you.
 
A special thanks to all of those that attended the first meeting.  It was a great success.  1E, Inc. presented their suite of applications and provided sandwiches, drinks, sides and cookies by Jason’s Deli.
 
 
Respectfully yours,
 
Dan Taylor and Ivan Lindenfeld
http://spugjax.tech.officelive.com

Last Month was quite busy around here with the holidays and such, but Microsoft kept themselves busy as well. The following management packs were released or updated in the month of December 2007:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005 Management Pack (v6.0.6247.5)

12/21/2007 - The SQL Server 2000/2005 Management Pack monitors Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 MP for SC Operations Manager 2007 (v1.0)

12/14/2007 - With the DPM Management Pack, an administrator can centrally monitor the state of data protection and recovery for multiple DPM servers and protected computers. The Management Pack also monitors key health and performance indicators on DPM servers.

SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit (v.2.0)

12/7/2007 - The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit helps you manage Microsoft® SharePoint® environments of all sizes with two new management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007: Windows® SharePoint Services 3.0 Management Pack and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack.

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 (v2.0)

12/7/2007 - This management pack is part of the Sharepoint Monitoring Toolkit. The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit helps you manage Microsoft® SharePoint® environments of all sizes with two new management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 (v2.0)

12/7/2007 - This management pack is part of the Sharepoint Monitoring Toolkit. The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit helps you manage Microsoft® SharePoint® environments of all sizes with two new management packs for System Center Operations Manager 2007.

Clive Eastwood discusses the first Solution Accelerator to be released for System Center Operations Manager. The SharePoint Monitoring Toolkit includes more rules, new and improved reports and comprehensive coverage of the two management packs utilised by this toolkit.

Clive goes into more detail on his blog. More after the jump.

Read Clive Eastwood’s Blog Entry

There are some confusing elements to the new System Center licensing structure – particularly for Operations Manager. The most common question is when does a customer require the Enterprise Operations Management License (OML) instead of the Standard OML? This is a valid question since the Enterprise OML price is equal to approximately three times the cost of the Standard OML.

The “How to Buy” webpage doesn’t help to explain the matter much:

Standard OML

Monitoring, troubleshooting, audit collection, and reporting for servers, including Storage/File/Print and Networking workloads, the base operating system, system hardware, and other management agents on the system

Enterprise OML

Monitoring, troubleshooting, audit collection and reporting for any server workload or application, including the base operating system, system hardware, and other management agents on the system

However, upon reviewing the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Licensing Brief, I was able to determine from the Managed Workloads section that the Enterprise version is required for anything beyond monitoring of the following:

• System Resource Manager
• Password Change Notification
• Baseline Security Analyzer
• Reliability and Availability Services
• Print Server
• Distributed File System (DFS)
• File Replication Service (FRS)
• Network File System (NFS)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Windows SharePoint® Services
• Distributed Naming Service (DNS)
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
• Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS)

Whereas the Enterprise OML also permits the following usage scenarios:

• Business Applications
• Database
• Identity Management
• Messaging
• Collaboration
• Web
• Security
• Management
• Remote Access
• Terminal Emulation
• Other

So, clearly if you want to take full advantage of Operations Manager 2007 and its ability to manage distributed applications or core infrastructure products an Enterprise OML is required.

The OpsMgr product groups has provided a blog entry of every executable/MSI associated with OpsMgr 2007. Trust me, this is worth bookmarking!

View the Article

Well, some of you may have noticed my activity level drop off this week. That was due to the overwhelming pressures of having to prepare for the Brandon Consulting System Center Practice Launch at the Guinness Store House on Thursday. I had visited the locale on several previous visits to Ireland, but never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined coming back to the Store House to launch the practice that I would be managing while living here.

Most visitors to the Store House would completely overlook the 3rd floor business centre that has a number of rooms available to rent for private occassions. Similarly, the 7th floor Gravity Bar (a glass-enclosed circular bar that provides a 360-degree view of Dublin and the end-point for the Store House tour) is also available for letting during the evening. This provided an excellent view of the city at night.

The launch event included 5 sessions held throughout the day, with myself delivering the lion’s share of 3 sessions. We kicked off with Bill O’Brien, Business Group Lead - Server and Tools for Microsoft Ireland, discussing Core Infrastructure Optimisation. This was followed by my three presentations on System Center Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Essentials. We wrapped up with a brief discussion about the System Center licensing, presented by our licensing partner, Micro Warehouse.

In all, we had fantastic attendance and overhelming responses to our offer for a whiteboard session with prospective customers. At the end of the day, I sat exhaustively in awe of what had just transpired: I had just finished launching my new practice at the Guinness Store House. How amazing is that?

I often times will find myself needing to spike CPU utilisation while demonstrating the ability of System Center Operations Manager 2007 to detect and alert on the CPU monitoring threshold. While opening numerous copies of Internet Explore is one means of doing it, the results can be unpredictable depending on the system configuration and whether it can perform the required tasks without impacting the CPU performance enough to exceed the threshold.

However, I’ve found a foolproof way of being able to spike the CPU to 100% utilisation. Simply follow the steps below.

1. Open Task Manager and select the tab for Performance. Note your current CPU utilisation percentage.
2. Open Calculator from the start menu by typing CALC, then press ENTER
3. Maneuver your windows so Task Manager and Calculator are both within view.
4. From the menu bar, select  VIEW | SCIENTIFIC
5. Next,  type 123456789
6. Press the n! button

This will immediately result in your processor utilisation peaking at 100% and remaining there until a dialog box is displayed stating “The requested operation may take a very long time to complete. Do you want to let the calculation continue, or stop the operation now.” After a few moments, I would suggest clicking Stop.

This is a highly effective means of being able to test your Management Packs with Operations Manager 2007.

Several months back I posted the availability of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 virtual labs on Microsoft’s website. However, after recently revisiting the site I noticed that the product groups have been very busy preparing additional labs for the entire System Center suite. In addition to a slew of labs available for SMS 2003, there are a few others available for Configuration Manager 2007, plus three for Operations Manager 2007, two for Softgrid and one each for Capacity Planner and Essentials.

Check out the full array of offerings at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb539977.aspx

On this page you’ll find online and downloadable tools and utilities for Operations Manager 2007 and its components.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/bb625978.aspx