April 2008 - Posts
Summary: this is the first serious day, and it went well.
The BobMu keynote was inspirational, and while intersting was very datacenter-centric. I suspect I'll relate to tomorrow's keynote more. The State of the Union is always one of my favorite sessions, but there wasn't a lot of news to share, and (I hate to say it Bill) the top 10 list was not as funny as usual. The Brady Richardson demo was definitely a conference highpoint.
My client health presentation went smoothly. It led to lots of great conversations and questions, both at the end of the event and later. The evaluation scores were middling - not bad but not great. Clearly I should have figured out how to do some kind of demos. But I really want to see where the client health discipline goes from here - my ultimate goal is to stimulate its evolution.
Later we had a discussion of issues that affect large customers, and that was very interesting. It was intentionally free-form, and ended up covering a lot of topics with participation from everyone. There was a lot of passion on various topics. We'll have to see what we can do to keep the momentum going...
The myITforum party was wonderful, as always. A little smaller than I expected, but it was great to see everyone.
Dinner was a very enjoyable eclectic event. Great in many ways, with wonderful conversation, but the washrooms were the most out-of-the-box experience I've had in awhile.
Summary: activities got a little more 'official', and the community events were great.
Now that we're all settled, I had a few private meetings. All were very constructive and gave good food for thought.
The freshman orientation was good and gave a chance to say Hi to some newbies (which are something like 60% or 70% of the attendees). Welcoming new members is key to keeping the community strong, so we should all make an effort to say Hi to them. Apparently Denmark has about 220 attendees alone (with wonderful red jackets). My home country of Canada had about 200. I believe I heard that Sweden had even more than Denmark.
The welcome reception was the highlight of the day, other than there were so many great conversations that there was no time for swag or food. And given the number of attendees I may not find any good swag this year. Fortunately I have some friends who may take mercy on me...
The 1/4 mile lineup to rush for myITforum party buttons is the best evidence that all other vendors should pay some kind of commission to myITforum for bringing people into the Exposition area.
And breakfast was basic, lunch was light but good, and dinner was wonderful - a fine Italian meal. Intersting vegetables, followed by fine clams and spaghetti-like noodles that worked very well with the wine. Then finished with a delicate quale. Conferences are hard work, but there are rewards...
Summary: we're off to a great start. We're ready to get serious...
The whole point of arriving Sunday is to get settled and catch up with old friends. Both were done in grand fashion. The trip from door to door went according to plan. The only problem was when registering - because the event sold out, none of us Microsofties get a bag. So I don't have a picture for you this year (the first time in 11 years, but maybe I can correct that problem later). It's backpack style, which is unique, and seems to be large enough and good quality. I have no details on the contents either, of course.
The first (informal) community event (La Scena) was booked with a tournament, so we met at Zeffirino a little early, which was almost as good. Twitter proved to be valuable in getting the word out. The main community event at Zeffirino was very nice - thanks to SCCM Expert and Adaptiva.
All told I probably saw 30 friends. We didn't have much time to get into serious conversations, but there's plenty of time in the week for that.
In addition I got out for a couple of light meals. Lunch was 5 interesting Italian cheeses with 3 sauces. 2 of the cheeses stood alone well and a third cheese was wonderful with one of the sauces. The rest were ok. Dinner was DIY Kobe beef slices. That was a new experience for me and exquisite. I'm a huge fan of beef but this took beef to a new level for me. That's part of the fun of Vegas - new experiences.
Summary: a new ConfigMgr DCM module is available for beta testing. It's supposed to be packed with goodness to ensure your Windows computers are secure (and compliant with relevant standards).
The Security Compliance Management toolkit provides you with best practices from Microsoft about how to plan, set, get and remediate a security baseline, along with tools that you can use to verify the implementation of recommended security baselines from Microsoft for Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.
 |
|
| Security Compliance Management – Beta Now Available! | |
|
I haven't tried it myself, but I figure at least some of you will find this useful. More details are included in the download. And we'd like your feedback to make it even better.
p.s. AFAIK it doesn't work with SMS 2003 DCM.
Summary: MMS 2008 is less than a week away! It's time to finalize the preparations.
The excitement is palpable around here. We've got 13 people coming from my team this year (what might be thought of as the service provider for 'Microsoft IT'). If you think of us as a customer (which we largely are), we are probably the best represented customer of all. And yes, we do have to pay the full cost like any other customer. That's up from 6 people last year, which I thought was quite good. So we highly value this opportunity, especially because it gives us a chance to talk to you (yes, I'm serious).
I did my annual internal briefing today on how to get the most from the conference. It's essentially the same as last year, so I refer you to those postings:
During my briefing I add a few points for Microsofties, but the only point I would generally add is: use your biggest piece of luggage. You shouldn't need it on the way there, but on the way back it will be stuffed full of swag, hand-outs, the conference bag, etc. So you'll need the space.
Rod Trent always does a wonderful job of preparing everyone for MMS, so I encourage you to check out his blog for the last few months. That especially includes: http://www.myitforum.com/absolutenl/nls/myITforum_MMS2008.htm
Summary: the SMS Client Health Tool (CHT) is being updated in the upcoming ConfigMgr 2007 R2 release, and renamed as Client Status Reporting (CSR). There are improvements big and small that you should consider.
Rob Stack, one of the ConfigMgr product group technical writers reviewed the CSR a few weeks ago. That's a great summary, so there's no point in me doing a similar summary here. But there are a couple of subtleties that Rob alludes to but are worth highlighting:
-
The tables now include complete client activity history - I've always been an advocate of judging client health in the context of 'normal' activity. Historic data makes that possible.
-
the history data is at the hierarchy level, so my earlier posting on
saving your own historic data will still apply if you want site-level client activity reporting
-
FSP data - FSP data is great in its own right, as is client activity data - combining the two is wonderful. The CSR service does that, so that way we have richer client health data.
And there other points worth making:
-
CSR is implemented very differently from the CHT, so you can readily run them in parallel. You can run CHT for your existing SMS 2003 and ConfigMgr hierarchies, and CSR for your ConfigMgr SP1 hierarchies from the same server. (of course that assumes you have multiple hierarchies, and a single server that you would like to be both your CHT and CSR server)
-
when you're done with CHT, you can simply de-install it. In fact, if you don't, both will continue to run, unnecessarily. When you install CSR it will not remove CHT.
-
Once your central site is upgraded to ConfigMgr SP1, you can use the CSR for all the sites in the hierarchy, even if some are still SMS 2003 sites or ConfigMgr sites without SP1. The core functionality is the same for both tools, so CSR can access the same MP logs and clients that CHT would, regardless of site or client version.
-
The new CSR database views are v_CH_ClientSummary and v_CH_ClientSummaryHistory (there's also v_CH_PolicyRequestHistory). There's some common ground with the CHT tables, but there's enough differences that if you've created reports based on the CHT tables then you'll have to rewrite them to run against the CSR views.
-
Even though the CSR data is stored in the ConfigMgr database, that doesn't mean you can create collections based on it.
- One of the ongoing challenges of the client health art is terminology. I like "client activity" for client health data that is collected at the SMS/ConfigMgr servers to show which clients are able to reporting client-side activity all the way through to the servers. That excludes clients that are broken at the ccmexec level, the client-side level generally, the environmental level (networking, basically), or the server-side level (broken MPs, etc.). So "activity" is the best we can see with such server-side solutions - we can't say anything about the health of the clients themselves. And "status" is a multi-purpose word, so it doesn't clearly say what CSR is reporting, IMHO. So I think of CSR as actually providing "client activity reporting"
- ConfigMgr R2 enables SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS) reporting. I'm optimistic that CSR data will be readily reportable via SRS.
There are other subtlites to CSR, but I'll save those for when R2 releases, or is close to releasing. That level of subtlety can change as the product is finalized.
Overall, CSR is much easier and much more meaningful than CHT for client activity reporting, and the upgrade path is quite easy. So you should use Client Status Reporting as soon as you can.
p.s. While we're talking client health, I like this recent Jason Milley myITforum posting on DCOM issues (particularly as they relate to CPI, but I would consider that a client health issue).
Note that the rooms for my presentations at MMS have been upgraded. We now have capacity for 1,130 people in each session!
So rather than being in Titian 2303 and Murano 3201A respectively, we're now in Veronese 2401B for both. Update your calendars accordingly, but if you're using the scheduling tool at the MMS-2008 website then I'm sure it will automatically reflect the change.
Be sure to schedule your sessions. It's a handy way for you to plan your week, but it also helps the conference organizers to adjust room capacity as needed. It's also an unofficial way to cast your vote for what's important. I like to think client health is especially on that list!
Summary: organizations with large numbers of SMS or ConfigMgr clients have special challenges. Why don't we talk at MMS, informally and confidentially, to share our solutions to those challenges?
My group's main customer is Microsoft IT, with 250,000 clients. I know there are plenty of other big SMS and ConfigMgr customers - that's one of the great strengths of SMS and ConfigMgr. I'm pleased to share our experiences (and often do), and I hope you would as well (if you're a large customer, or plan to be).
This suggestion is inspired by a thread on myITforum's forums: http://www.myitforum.com/forums/m.asp?m=176737.
I'm not sure how many people would like to participate, when they're available, how much there is to discuss, etc. So for now please e-mail me if you're interested, and I'll coordinate something based on the responses. That's at pthomsen@microsoft.com. In particular, let me know:
-
your organization and number of clients
-
when you're available at MMS 2008 (Sunday afternoon through to Friday noon)
-
whether an NDA or similar agreement is important to you (formalized confidentiality)
-
what topics you would like to discuss
-
how many people from your organization would like to attend our get-together
-
what kind of venue you would prefer (bar, lunch, dinner, meeting room, etc.)
And don't forget my Friday morning session on using ConfigMgr on our 250,000 clients at Microsoft IT, as described in this blog posting.
p.s. How large is "large"? I'm flexible on the point. My guess is above 50,000 clients, and certainly above 100,000 clients. Especially if at least one of the physical locations is large (well above 25,000 clients). For now we can self-select on this question.
Summary: here's a technique for collecting details about the HAL used by your computers. Do you need to know which Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) your clients are using? For example, you may wish to ensure you're using all features (such as multiprocessors).
This solution is from a couple of years ago, and I don’t know if I had the optimal method (or whether it’s still optimal), but research at that time indicated that the following was necessary, and I don't have reason to think there's a better solution:
1. Do a binary file open of %windir%\system32\hal.dll
2. Find the original HAL name in the file
3. (optionally) translate that into a meaningful name (if I remember right, there were only a couple that were common, and of course things may have changed over the last couple of years) (code snippet below)
4. Write the results to a custom WMI data class (or a registry entry)
5. Collect the results using typical SMS/ConfigMgr hardware inventory extension methods
Tricky, but not bad.
'HAL descriptive name
if HALname="halmacpi.dll" then HALdescr = "ACPI Multiprocessor PC"
if HALname="halaacpi.dll" then HALdescr = "ACPI Uniprocessor PC"
if HALname="halacpi.dll" then HALdescr = "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC"
if HALname="halsp.dll" then HALdescr = "Compaq SystemPro Multiprocessor or 100% Compatible"
if HALname="halapic.dll" then HALdescr = "MPS Uniprocessor PC"
if HALname="halmps.dll" then HALdescr = "MPS Multiprocessor PC"
if HALname="hal.dll" then HALdescr = "Standard PC"
if HALname="halborg.dll" then HALdescr = "SGI mp"
p.s. Here’s some resources on the topic:
• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q237/5/56.ASP&NoWebContent=1
• A script class to read file version information: http://www.jsware.net/jsware/scripts.php3 (under File Version Information Class) (I don’t know if there are licensing issues)
• http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/all/deployguide/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/all/deployguide/en-us/acicc_ris_jfxo.asp (you’ll have to dig a bit)