David St. Clair at myITforum.com

Services Renamed

2009-04-15T21:48:43Z

Operations Manager Services have been renamed Something that we have noticed, that’s a bit of an annoyance (in OpsMMgr R2), is that Microsoft has renamed the Operations Manager services. What was the OpsMgr SDK is now the System Center Data Access , OpsMgr Config is now the and the OpsMgr Health System Center Configuration Service Service is now the System Center Management Service . It’s a bit of an annoyance that admins need to be aware of. Interested in our training offerings, see http://infrontconsulting...(read more)

Ops Mgr R2 First look

2009-03-27T01:18:41Z

Operations Manager R2 RC was released today (version 6.1.7000.x). I just finished building a new Lab Environment and have seen some very interesting things I wanted to share. The first thing I wanted to share was the Overrides view in the Authoring Console. This view allows admins and authors to see overrides, without having to run an overrides report, or drilling into an overrides summary. The next interesting items, which were well publicized are the new templates that are available. As you can...(read more)

50028 - MOC - Operations Manager Course

2009-03-01T03:34:53Z

I spent last week teaching the MOC 50028 - Managing Operations Manager 2007. In all fairness I must also admit that I work for an organization that has a competing class (a 4 day custom Operations Manager BootCamp that is NOT the MOC). One of our Canadian customers asked us to deliver the MOC class specifically, so we did. What a disaster this class is. First off the Class title is Managing Operations Manager, however 60+% of the class revolves around install and config. There is a small section...(read more)

MP Authoring / Group Creation weirdness

2009-02-03T22:59:07Z

MP Authoring / Group Creation weirdness I've been creating an MP in XML and have come across a very weird problem. I was creating a static membership Group that will contain one server. Seems easy enough right.... here is part of the code I was using (the important part for this blog anyway)... Now the strange part happens after I import the MP into the console. Look at the Group Membership rules in the UI (remember this is a static entry membership group): OpsMgr sees this rule as a Dynamic...(read more)

Virtual Machine Manager MP WITH Reports released today

2009-01-28T17:01:11Z

Virtual Machine Manager MP WITH Reports released today http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d6d5cddd-4ec8-4e3c-8ab1-102ec99c257f&displaylang=en Microsoft has release a new version of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager MP for Ops Mgr. This new version includes Reports . Hopefully this MP has been better QA tested and run through than the DNS MP that has been causing customers grief. Check back later for a full review. Interested in Operations Manager training, MP Development...(read more)

Hyper-V/Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) Uninstall

2009-01-02T22:26:35Z

Hyper-V/Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) Uninstall Over the last few months we have been playing with the Beta version of Virtual Machine Manager. A few days ago I decided to uninstall the beta version and install the RTM version. Since it was in our lab I was going to wait to reinstall, since I have some other things that needed my attention first. Well I was contact by a co-worker today about the VMs running on that server not behaving. After taking a look in the Hyper-V console we realized that...(read more)

InterOp Connectors Released

2008-12-22T20:52:33Z

InterOp Connectors Released I got this following email a couple of days ago. The InterOp Connectors have been released. This should make the R2 version of Operations Manager a complete end to end solution... We are excited to announce the release of the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Interop Connectors (Beta 2) to Connect. This package contains the beta software for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Interop Connectors. The following Connectors are included: Operations Manager 2007 R2 Connector...(read more)

Savision Live Maps 3.0 has Gone Live

2008-12-18T21:51:46Z

Savision Live Maps 3.0 has Gone Live Live Maps 3.0 has gone live (pun intended). I have written about this product and how valuable I think it will be for enterprises running Operations Manager 2007. If you are interested in seeing this product or have any questions about it feel free to contact us through our website or at sales'AT'infrontconsulting.com The official announcement.... We are proud to announce the release of Live Maps v3 for Operations Manager 2007. This version opens many...(read more)

Savision 3

2008-12-09T15:28:38Z

Recently I have spent a considerable amount of time playing with Savision Live Maps 3. For those of you that aren't familiar with Live Maps, it's a great third party SCOM mapping and business workflow product. In previous versions of the software you would build a custom map of the world, country, region, state etc, add your SCOM agents and or network gear manually to build your map. The new version of the software has a new dynamic list/group feature. This feature allows you to build your...(read more)

Making Windows Live Applications work on Server 2008

2008-12-08T16:48:46Z

Making Windows Live Applications work on Server 2008 After rebuilding my laptop back to Server 2008 32bit I wanted to install Windows Live applications (just Live Writer and Messenger). However the installer for these applications fails on the OS Check, stating the OS is not supported. I tried running the installer in compatibility mode however that didn't work either. After a little research I found a few posts saying that Messenger 8.1 worked on Server, so I went and downloaded it from here...(read more)

64 bit Server 2008

2008-12-08T16:23:48Z

64 bit Server 2008 As a colleague recently wrote in his blog 64bit Woes not Wows! I wanted to add my two cents. I rebuilt my laptop (Dell XPS M1710, with 4 gigs of RAM) to run Server 2008 x64 sometime around mid summer. I did this for two reasons; 1. I wanted to use Hyper-V to run VMs for client demos and 2. I find it the best way to learn a new OS. Well after months of trying to make it work I finally rebuilt this last weekend back to 32bit. The lack of Driver and software support drove this decision...(read more)

SCOM R2 Public Beta

2008-11-20T00:47:46Z

SCOM R2 Public Beta Exciting news from the SCOM Product Team... The System Center Operations Manager team is excited to announce the availability of the Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta, which is ready for you to download through Connect today! Operations Manager 2007 R2 introduces key new and enhanced functionality, including: Enhanced application performance and availability across heterogeneous platforms . Delivers monitoring across Windows, Linux and Unix servers-all through a single console....(read more)

Running SCOM in a Virtual Environment

2008-10-11T05:27:31Z

Running SCOM in a Virtual Environment I have been a Systems Engineer in the past with quite a bit of virtualization experience. I’ve built MOM 2005 and SCOM environments in purely physical, all virtual and mixed environments, heck I have a traveling virtual lab I carry with me. Below are my recommendations and observations about running SCOM 2007 SP1 in large enterprise environments. Almost everyone runs some kind of virtualization these days. Most applications (if not all) will run virtually, SCOM...(read more)

URL Monitoring in SCOM

2008-10-11T03:37:11Z

URL Monitoring in SCOM One of our clients is a medium sized company that needed to do some pretty intense web application monitoring (or URL monitoring) in SCOM. A little background first: 1. We were running around 500+ Web Applications/URL monitors divided among roughly 10-14 MPs. 2. We were running a majority virtual environment with the RMS and DB server being the only physical (and very beefed up pieces of hardware). Some initial thoughts and observations : We had the URLs spread between 9 watcher...(read more)

Alert Descriptions

2008-10-11T03:14:49Z

Alert Descriptions Another handy tip to keep in the back pocket during your install.... The Alert description will accept HTML tags. So that means when you are creating your own MP, Rules or Monitors you can format the description to look how you want. You can add certain lines of HTML code to do things for you (i.e. open a file share via a link using the creds of the user that is working the alert etc). An example of this might be something like (thanks Zolan)... <table border="0"><tr><td...(read more)