Scott Moss at myITforum.com

The Live meeting recording of System Center Virtual User Group Meeting #9 can be downloaded here

http://cid-4b30376adfa42884.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/SCVUG/Meeting%20^39/SCVUG^_9.zip

I would like to thank our three presenters Simon Skinner Jeremiah Beckett, and Jonathan Jordan.

Meeting #10 will be scheduled shortly for March. I'll post the date time and agenda when it is available.

Thank you for your continued support of the System Center Virtual User Group!

Scott Moss
Microsoft MVP (Operations Manager)
Vice President Atlanta SMUG http://www.atlsmug.org
President System Center Virtual user Group  http://systemcenterusergroup.org

The System Center Operations Manager blog has posted a request for folks to take a Management Pack Authoring Survey. It takes about 10 minutes to fill out. Help the team and give some good feed back about Management Pack Authoring.

You can find the survey here http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/mpauthoring

First meeting of the year for 2010! I'll have to find some swag to give away!

Agenda (Central Time Zone)

Registration
We have an excellent line up for this meeting so join us by registering here.

http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=144719

Presenter Bios
Simon Skinner
Simon Skinner is the principal engineer for SecQuorum in France. SecQuorum is a System Center specialist hosting Ops Mgr R2, AVIcode Intercept studio and SCCM (education only). He is a regular blogger on System Center Central as well as a technical planner for a large global Public Relations company. Simon in the past has done Microsoft Technical pre sales for a large Microsoft Gold Partner as well many implementations of Ops Mgr and SCCM.

Jeremiah Beckett
Jeremiah Beckett is the founder and president of Secure Vantage Technologies, Inc. (SVT) a Microsoft Gold partner that specialized in security and compliance auditing software for System Center technologies. Jeremiah is a recognized industry expert in IT security and compliance bringing over 10 years expertise in enterprise management. Jeremiah is a regular guest speaker at Microsoft events and author of the ACS Master Class Series, ACS Wiki on System Center Central plus contributing author in SCOM R2 Unleashed ebook.

Jonathan Jordan - SME | SEE | MCITP-EA | SCVMM | Hyper-V
Jonathan Jordan is a Senior Support Engineer in the Enterprise Platforms Support Group. He currently supports SCVMM, and just completed Beta work on SCVMM 2008 R2. Since then he has delivered training on site in NC and TX, and via LiveMeeting to Europe, China and Japan. He recently returned from a delivery engagement in India. Prior to focus on SCVMM he was a member of the Setup/Cluster group where he supported all versions of Windows, with issues ranging from non-boot scenarios, to backup, setup and deployment, virtualization, and of course cluster. Currently as a member of the Manageability group he is learning OpsMgr in preparation for the next release of SCVMM. Jonathan has been with Microsoft for a total of 4 years. Jonathan resides in downtown Charlotte with his wife three dogs and two cats.

Thank you for your continued support!

Scott Moss
Microsoft MVP (Operations Manager)
Vice President Atlanta SMUG http://www.atlsmug.org
President System Center Virtual user Group  http://systemcenterusergroup.org

This is a heck of a way to start the new year!

I got an email this morning that I had received the Operations Manager MVP Award for 2010.

I look forward to working with the Operations Manager MVP team in 2010.

As requested I dug up some of the System Center Virtual User Group recordings from this year. I located meetings 5 thru 7 easily, so I’m posting links to them so they can be found.

Meeting #5

Jason Sandys - Desired Configuration Management (DCM): Objectives and Strategies
Harold Dyck - Extending DCM in ConfigMgr 2007
Marco Shaw - Powershell v2
Kevin Holman - Improving Console Performance in Operations Manager 2007

Meeting #6

Steve Rachui (SCCM Topic)                      start to 50:43:00
break/poll/technical problems                    50:43 - 1:06:00
Baelson Duque (OpsMgr R2)                       1:06:00 - 2:14:07

Meeting #7

Introduction           2:50
Hyper-V                  2:50 41:20
Bridgeways           41:20 1:16:00
MP Authoring      1:16:50 2:17:41
Q&A                    2:18:00 2:37:45

As I find more meeting recordings I’ll post them and make sure they are available to everyone.

Enjoy!

The new management pack for SQL 2005/2008 can be found here. Download link.

Please see the management pack documentation as there are minimum requirements that need to be made prior to deploying this service pack.

Overview

The SQL Server Management Pack provides the capabilities for Operations Manager 2007 to discover SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 installations and components and to monitor them, primarily from the perspective of availability and performance. The availability and performance monitoring is done using a combination of scripts and native Operations Manager capabilities.
Important Pre-Requisite Notes:
Clusters: In order to ensure that all monitoring works correctly for clustered instances of SQL Server ensure that your OpsMgr agents on the physical nodes of the cluster are running either OpsMgr 2007 R2 or OpsMgr 2007 SP1 with the patch installed from KB959865.
SQL-DMO: Scripts in the SQL Server 2008 management pack rely on SQL Data Management Objects (SQL-DMO) to query information from the SQL Server. SQL-DMO is now deprecated and is not shipped as a part of SQL Server 2008. Every system with SQL Server 2008 that will be monitored must have SQL-DMO installed from the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components. For instructions on how to download and install the SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components refer to the management pack guide.
Feature Bullet Summary:
The following list gives an overview of the features of the SQL Server management pack. Refer to the SQL Server management pack guide for more detail.

• Support for Enterprise, Standard and Express editions of SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 and 32bit, 64bit and ia64 architectures.
• Support for both simple and complex SQL configurations such as clustered installations, multiple instances and 32bit roles running on a 64bit OS. For full details on supported configurations refer to the guide included with the management pack.
• Discovery and monitoring of SQL Server roles such as DB Engine, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Integrations Services.
• Discovery of SQL components such as databases, the SQL Agent and SQL jobs.
• Over 20 views covering areas such as database free space, SQL related performance, SQL related alerts, and lists of the various SQL roles and components which are discovered and their related state.
• Reports for longer-term analysis of common problem areas related to SQL Server such as SQL Server lock analysis and top deadlocked databases, SQL Server service pack levels across discovered roles, user connection activity. Likewise the generic reports from the Microsoft Generic Report Library can be used against the roles and components discovered by the SQL MPs to review availability and performance across many systems and over longer periods of time.
• Role and component specific tasks which provide access to common tools, triage information, or corrective actions without needing to leave the Operations Console in most cases.
• Monitoring of databases covers database status, database free space, log shipping monitoring for both the source and destination, and transaction log free space.
• Monitoring of key SQL related services.
• Monitoring for persistent SPID blocking.
• Monitoring of numerous SQL events and performance data points. Alerts bring the issue to your attention and provide knowledge on the impact and possible resolutions.

Its that time of year again, to begin preparing MMS 2010 content, so Microsoft is looking for feed back in the areas of what Products your interested in what level of technical depth you would like for that product. The survey is open till Dec 22 2009 and they will draw two names from the respondents who will win a Portable Media Player. So if your planning on going to MMS 2010, make sure you take the survey.

http://www.mms-2010.com/wizard/content_survey/wp1.aspx

A few updates to the System Center > Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack Development Kit tab on the MSDN network. Updates to the Elements Reference, Data Types Reference, Module Types Reference, and the Schema Types Reference.

They can all be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee533840.aspx

The long awaited Windows Power Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is not available for download. This MP will monitor power usage on Windows 2008 R2 systems, and will give visibility into Power consumption, control of power policy, ability to lower power consumption during non-business hours to reduce overall power consumption, limit power consumption, and ability to detect excessive power consumption.

For more documentation and management pack download see: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6f147c1f-e190-4dbe-a3c7-9b9a19de8f93&displaylang=en

Last night I heard about a cool FREE Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer that is available on the internet at https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/Default.aspx

Its an Online Wizard that will allow you to configure various test conditions. The options are several

Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync Connectivity Tests

Exchange ActiveSync

ActiveSync AutoDiscover

Microsoft Exchange Web Services Connectivity Tests

Synchronization, Notification, Availability, and OOF

Service Account Access (Developers)

Microsoft Office Outlook Connectivity Tests

Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP)

Outlook AutoDiscover

Internet Email Tests

Inbound SMTP Email

Outbound SMTP Email

just wanted to pass along another free tool!

Enjoy!

Listing of late October 2009 MP Updates. New client OS MP, that inculdes Windows 7 MP.

Windows Client 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 Operating System Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F55F1803-EAE6-4ED5-B2D2-9E1ADF98E325&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Overview
The Windows Client Monitoring Management Pack is built to detects, diagnose, and resolve hardware and software problems pertaining to Client 2000, XP, and Vista operating systems. Information and analysis on the issues that the system detected are collected by the MPs through an agent on the client machine, and sent to OpsMgr where this data is converted into health state, alerts (if need be) and processed for business critical and aggregate reports. The MP gives a clear picture of catastrophic failures in your mission critical machines, trend-based alerts of significant changes to computer groups, in-depth views of health of individual machines, and reports that provide a landscape view of the health of all monitored clients.

Feature Summary
Key Processor Performance Indicators
Logical and Physical disk performance and free space
Memory utilization
Network health
Health monitoring of key Windows Operating System services
Comprehensive performance collections
Availability and event reports

Release History

3/23/2007 - Original release of the English version of Client 2000/XP management packs, version 6.0.5000.0
5/11/2007 - Original release of the English version of Vista management pack, version 1.0
1/15/2008 - Guide update of Client 2000/XP management packs, version 6.0.5000.0
2/22/2008 - Updated release of Client 2000/XP management packs, version 6.0.6278.0
5/27/2008 - Release onto Microsoft Download Center of Client 2000/XP management packs, version 6.0.6278.0
2/16/2009 - Update release that includes business Critical monitoring for Vista and bug fixes for performance and aggregate monitoring, version 6.0.6520.0
10/26/2009 - Updated release, version 6.0.6729.0, with bug fixes for Vista MP and support for monitoring Windows 7

Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Management Pack

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5fcc1917-7ba6-4b35-a38a-5d37fcbc9ef7&displaylang=en

Overview
The Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Management Pack alerts you to problems with components such as agents, management servers, the Operations Manager database, agents, modules used by workflows and services so that you can continue to monitor the servers and clients that your business depends on.

The management pack includes tasks that you can automate to get easy access to common diagnostic tools, such as restarting a health service or reloading an agent configuration.

Feature Summary
The Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Management Packs includes the following features:

Local and Remote Monitoring of an Agent’s Health
Operations Manager agents monitor themselves for events and performance indicators that signal an issue with the agent’s health.
Management servers also maintain an external perspective of an agent’s health via the Health Service Watcher.
The ‘Agent Health State’ view provides a side-by-side dashboard of both perspectives on the agent.

Optional, Automatic Agent Remediation Capabilities
If the Health Service Watcher determines that an agent is unhealthy, a series of diagnostics and recoveries can be enabled to further diagnose the problem and event take actions to attempt to fix the problem (e.g. Ping the server to see if it is completely offline, start a stopped agent, trigger a reinstall, etc.). Refer to the management pack guide for more details.
Agents are monitoring their own process to ensure that memory utilization is not sustained at unacceptable levels. If this condition is detected then the agent will automatically restart itself to force the freeing up of memory.

Detection of Problems and Misconfigurations with Run As Accounts and Profiles
Checks are run on a regular basis to detect if any of the management group’s “Windows” type Run As Accounts have credentials which are about to expire. Alerts will be raised, and where possible this will be done in advance of the credentials expiring to avoid outages.
Alerts will be raised if any errors are encountered during the distribution of Run As Accounts.

Monitoring of problems with Running Workflows in Management Packs
Numerous rules are provided to detect if workflows within management packs are failing. Examples of workflows include discoveries, rules, monitors, etc. Failures can range from bad configurations on the workflows themselves, script failures, permissions problems, etc.

Release History

8/6/2007 – Version 6.0.5000.0, Initial release of the English version installed with the product
2/22/2008 – Version 6.0.6278.0, Updated the management pack as a part of the Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 update (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/cc280350.aspx).
10/26/2009 - Version 6.0.6709.0.0 – Updated the management packs and the guide. Refer to the management pack guide for a detailed change log.

Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dc17e093-bdd7-4cb3-9981-853776ed90be&displaylang=en

Overview
The Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing (NLB) Management Pack provides discoveries, monitors, alerts, and warnings to help the operator understand the state of NLB clusters and NLB servers running Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The Windows Server 2008 NLB Management Pack can provide early warnings that an operator can use to proactively monitor the state of the NLB servers in the computing environment.

Feature Summary

Monitor the NLB Node status.
Based on the status of individual cluster nodes, determine the overall state of the cluster.
Where an integration management pack exists, determine the health state of a cluster node by looking at the health state of the load balanced application, such as IIS.
Alert on errors and warnings that are reported by the NLB driver, such as an incorrectly configured NLB cluster.
Take the node out of the NLB cluster if the underlying load-balanced application becomes unhealthy, and add the node back to the cluster when the application becomes healthy again.

Release History

4/27/2009 - Initial release of the English version, version 6.0.6573.0
10/22/2009 - Updated release, version 6.0.6726.0, with added support for Windows 2008 R2. Please see the Management Pack Guide for details.

Microsoft Windows Server Cluster Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AC7F42F5-33E9-453D-A923-171C8E1E8E55&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Overview
The Windows Server Failover Cluster Management Pack provides both proactive and reactive monitoring of your Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster deployments. It monitors Cluster services components—such as nodes, networks, and resource groups—to report issues that can cause downtime or poor performance.

Feature Summary
Some of the conditions monitored by this management pack are as follows:

Configuration or hardware issues that interfere with starting the Cluster service
Connectivity problems that affect communication between cluster nodes or between a node and a domain controller
Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) settings that affect the cluster; for example, permissions needed by the computer account that is used by the cluster
Configuration issues with the network infrastructure needed by the cluster; for example, issues with Domain Name System (DNS)
Issues with the availability of a cluster resource, such as a clustered file share
Issues with the cluster storage

Release History:

3/6/2008 - Version 6.0.6277.0 - Original English release
4/2/2008 - Version 6.0.6277.1 - Updated version, see MP guide for details
2/12/2009 - Version 6.0.6505.0 - Introduced support for Windows Server 2008 clusters and addressed some issues from the previous release.
4/9/2009 – Version 6.0.6568.0 – Updated Management Pack and Management Pack Guide. Please refer to the Management Pack Guide for details.
10/21/2009 - Version 6.0.6720.0 – Added support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and addressed some issues from the previous release. Please refer to the Management Pack Guide for details.

DFS Replication Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c97b22a1-1fd6-426f-94ab-2a6e6db4aed0&displaylang=en

Overview
The DFS Replication Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 monitors the health of the DFS Replication service on Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008 computers. This management pack monitors events generated by the DFS Replication service. These events provide an insight into the health of the service and folders replicated on monitored computers. This management pack includes a dashboard view which can be used to monitor replication backlogs.

The management pack also features consolidation rules that monitor computers for frequent occurrences of certain operational conditions such as staging cleanups, sharing violations, replication conflicts etc.

Feature Summary
The following features are new in this release of the DFS Replication Management Pack:

Alerts indicating outages of the DFS Replication service on monitored computers.
Alerts indicating configuration issues that require administrative intervention.
Dashboard view that enables tracking of replication backlogs on monitored computers.
Tracking of intermittent operational conditions. These conditions are tracked by the management pack and show up either as warnings/errors. Transient warnings/errors flagged for conditions that are resolved over time are automatically corrected by the management pack, once those conditions are resolved.
Intuitive state view indicating red, yellow and green states of the service, replication groups, and replicated folders configured on monitored computers.
Monitoring of important service parameters such as staging area usage and replication conflicts generated.

Release History

10/19/2009 - Version 6.0.6321.0, original release of the English version.

The Atlanta Southeast Management User Group invites you to attend the next SMUG meeting scheduled for October 9th, 2009 for a day of great presentations, discussions, and networking.

Registration Link: Register Here!!!

SWAG will be given away at the end of the meeting. You must be present to win!

DATE & TIME

October 9th, 2009
10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Lunch provided courtesy of SAVision!!

PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES

Garth Maynard

Garth Maynard recently joined Siemens Corp. as a SMS\SCCM engineer. He is responsible for the day-to-day SMS operations and infrastructure across North America, and is assisting in the SCCM roll out for North America. He has more than 16 years of experience in the IT field, and has supported a variety of client and server platforms in a modern enterprise environment. Some of his more notable projects have been in the arena of scripting automation which included Perl, Java, VBScript, and Powershell.

Greg Cameron

Greg Cameron is a Senior Technology Specialist with Microsoft working in the Communications Sector. He has been with Microsoft for over 6 years and has been involved with technical sales of Virtualization, Server Operating System and Management solutions. Greg has been in the Technology industry for 10 years, working at a Fortune 10 company working with Server Operations/Architecture Management and Technical Sales/Consulting consulting. Prior to entering the Technology industry he served as an Officer in the United States Navy and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He currently lives in Atlanta,GA.

Ted Sendler

Prior to joining the System Center Support specialty in March of 2008, Ted enlisted and served in the United States Marine Corp from 1992-1996.
He first worked at Microsoft as a contingent hire in the Directory Services group in June of 2004. At the end of contract he chose a position with Lowes on the Intel Engineering team.
After Lowes, Ted  joined the Wachovia’s Corporate Information Security team with the main task of redesigning Wachovia’s security monitoring implementation of MOM 2005.
Since March 2008, Ted has worked in his current position and is a SME in many areas of the MON vertical.

Brian Huneycutt

Brian is currently a developer (more a jack-of-all-trades really) on the Configuration Manager Sustained Engineering team. He started as a Support Engineer handling consumer desktop support issues at Microsoft in 1999. After having his fill of "No, there is no double right click, just a double left click" and "I'm sorry sir, I cannot help you with your ISP's login password issue" he escaped transitioned to the SMS team, where he quickly learned the value of the SMS logs. Once firmly entrenched in the SMS world, he worked through all levels of support, ending up as an Escalation Engineer ("What do you want to debug today?") prior to moving to the product team. These days he still partners with CSS (current acronym for Support) on problem investigations, along with development work on hotfixes, service packs, and generally anything that needs either fixing or a very long email. Those fleeting moments of free time are split between family, tooling around town in a little Triumph Spitfire, or making sawdust in the garage / workshop.

Thank you for your continued Support!

Scott Moss
President - System Center Virtual Users Group
Vice President - Atlanta SMUG http://www.atlsmug.org

The next System Center Virtual User Group meeting #8 will be October 15th, 12 noon central start time. We have a great mix with presentations from AVICode, to Security Auditing SP2 for ACS a technical overview, as well as a technical demo of Creating Linked Reports in the R2 Authoring Console.

Agenda (Central Time Zone)

Registration

We have an excellent line up for this meeting so join us by registering here.

PC Audio only for Attendees

Audio will only be available through Live Meeting

Presenter Bios

Simon Skinner

Simon Skinner is the principal engineer for SecQuorum in France. SecQuorum is a System Center specialist hosting Ops Mgr R2, AVIcode Intercept studio and SCCM (education only). He is a regular blogger on System Center Central as well as a technical planner for a large global Public Relations company. Simon in the past has done Microsoft Technical pre sales for a large Microsoft Gold Partner as well many implementations of  Ops Mgr and SCCM.

Jeremiah Beckett

Jeremiah Beckett is the founder and president of Secure Vantage Technologies, Inc. (SVT) a Microsoft Gold partner that specialized in security and compliance auditing software for System Center technologies. Jeremiah is a recognized industry expert in IT security and compliance bringing over 10 years expertise in enterprise management. Jeremiah is a regular guest speaker at Microsoft events and author of the ACS Master Class Series, ACS Wiki on System Center Central plus contributing author in SCOM R2 Unleashed ebook.

Pete Zerger (MVP)

Pete Zerger is a consulting partner with AKOS Technology Services and has nine years of experience in the IT industry. He focuses on design and deployment of enterprise operations management, directory services, and messaging solutions. Pete holds an MCSE for Messaging, an MCTS for SQL Server 2005, and he is a Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Operations Manager. He is founder of System Center Forum, a popular community site covering Operations Manager 2007, Essentials 2007 and the System Center Suite.

Thank you for your continued support!

Scott Moss

president - System Center Virtual User Group

vice president - Atlanta Systems Management User Group

available here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3529D233-5E3E-4B51-8F66-5D6F27005EC3&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Overview

The Windows Server Operating System Management Pack consists of the following five management packs: Microsoft Windows Server Library, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Discovery, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Monitoring, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. The Microsoft Windows Server management packs monitor the performance, health, and availability of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000 Server.
By detecting, alerting on, and automatically responding to critical events and performance indicators, management packs reduce resolution times for issues and increase the overall availability and performance of your Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000 Server operating systems, thereby helping to reduce the total cost of ownership.
NOTE: You need to install the English MP before you import localized language packs.
Feature Summary

• Availability
  • Key Operating System Services: Required services are checked for status (for example, running, not running, or paused).
  • Storage: Logical hard drives are checked for availability, sufficient free space, and integrity of the NTFS partition.
  • Network: Network adapters are checked for connection health, name and IP address conflicts.
• Performance
  • Processor: System processor(s) performance is checked system-wide. Processors can optionally be monitored on a per processor basis.
  • Memory: Memory consisting of physical memory and virtual memory (also known as page files) is monitored using the following performance indicators:
    • Available memory (in MB)
    • Pages per second
    • Page file percent usage
  • Disks and Partitions: Logical disks/partitions and physical disks are monitored, and performance data is collected for average disk seconds per read, disk seconds per write, and disk seconds per transfer. Depending on which version of the operating system is being monitored, either logical or physical monitoring is enabled by default. Refer to the MP guide for more detail.
  • Network Adapter: Network adapters are monitored for the number of bytes received per second, the number of bytes sent per second, and the total bytes per second. In addition, the health state of the network adapter is evaluated and is set to Healthy if connected and Critical if disconnected.

I've been collecting links to resources for learning or learning more about Operations Manager. Expect more updates in the next month or two.

AuthorMPs

AuthorMPs - Site dedicated to Authoring MPs.

http://www.authormps.com/dnn/

OpsManJam

Microsoft Sharepoint site with a few goodies on it.

http://www.opsmanjam.com/default.aspx

Management Pack University Videos

Management Pack University can be found at
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/cc671407.aspx
click on the Management Pack University Videos.

Management Pack University Videos is a collection of 14 videos from Microsoft that go deep into the Operations Manager product.
They are broken down into two tracks.

Track 1

Getting Manageability Right
Nishtha Soni, Program Manager
32 minutes

Operations Manager Fast Fly Thru
Nishtha Soni, Program Manager
7 minutes

Planning your Management Pack
Dan Rogers, Principal Program Manager Lead
59 minutes

Implementing the Facade
Lucy Raikova, Software Development Engineer in Test
24 minutes

Discovery
Baelson Duque, Senior Program Manager
34 minutes

Implementing Monitoring
Rajeev Sudhakar, Software Development Engineer in Test
9 minutes

Reporting
Daniel Savage, Program Manager
36 minutes

Track 2

Composition
Steve Wilson, Senior Program Manager Lead
56 minutes

Event-Based Discoveries
Baelson Duque, Senior Program Manager
40 minutes

Diagnostics and Recoveries
Baelson Duque, Senior Program Manager
27 minutes

Scenario-Based Deployment
Dan Rogers, Principal Program Manager Lead
35 minutes

Noise Management
Ake Pettersson, Program Manager
28 minutes

Tasks and Advanced Views
Scott Butler, Senior Technical Writer
31 minutes

Advanced Knowledge and Localization
Roger Vaughn, Program Manager
16 minutes

Another great meeting last week. I wanted to thank the Speakers Omid Abdollahpour for his Hyper-V talk, Morgan Holm for his insight to the Bridgways Virtual Machine MP, and finally, Raphael Burri and Pete Zerger for the Advanced MP Authoring in the R2 Console talk.

The live meeting recording is now available for download.

Time stamps:

Facebook Group: System Center Virtual User Group
Linked-In  Group: System Center Virtual User Group

If you would like to present to the group drop me a line at jscottmossatgmaildotcom

Thank you for your continued support!

Scott Moss

president - System Center Virtual User Group
vice president - Atlanta Systems Management User Group

Download Link for SQL MP

Overview

Read the Important Pre-Requisite Notes as well as other supporting documentation

The SQL Server Management Pack provides the capabilities for Operations Manager 2007 to discover SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 installations and components and to monitor them, primarily from the perspective of availability and performance. The availability and performance monitoring is done using a combination of scripts and native Operations Manager capabilities.
Important Pre-Requisite Notes:
Clusters: In order to ensure that all monitoring works correctly for clustered instances of SQL Server ensure that your OpsMgr agents on the physical nodes of the cluster are running either OpsMgr 2007 R2 or OpsMgr 2007 SP1 with the patch installed from KB959865.
SQL-DMO: Scripts in the SQL Server 2008 management pack rely on SQL Data Management Objects (SQL-DMO) to query information from the SQL Server. SQL-DMO is now deprecated and is not shipped as a part of SQL Server 2008. Every system with SQL Server 2008 that will be monitored must have SQL-DMO installed from the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components. For instructions on how to download and install the SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components refer to the management pack guide.
Feature Bullet Summary:
The following list gives an overview of the features of the SQL Server management pack. Refer to the SQL Server management pack guide for more detail.

• Support for Enterprise, Standard and Express editions of SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 and 32bit, 64bit and ia64 architectures.
• Support for both simple and complex SQL configurations such as clustered installations, multiple instances and 32bit roles running on a 64bit OS. For full details on supported configurations refer to the guide included with the management pack.
• Discovery and monitoring of SQL Server roles such as DB Engine, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, Integrations Services.
• Discovery of SQL components such as databases, the SQL Agent and SQL jobs.
• Over 20 views covering areas such as database free space, SQL related performance, SQL related alerts, and lists of the various SQL roles and components which are discovered and their related state.
• Reports for longer-term analysis of common problem areas related to SQL Server such as SQL Server lock analysis and top deadlocked databases, SQL Server service pack levels across discovered roles, user connection activity. Likewise the generic reports from the Microsoft Generic Report Library can be used against the roles and components discovered by the SQL MPs to review availability and performance across many systems and over longer periods of time.
• Role and component specific tasks which provide access to common tools, triage information, or corrective actions without needing to leave the Operations Console in most cases.
• Monitoring of databases covers database status, database free space, log shipping monitoring for both the source and destination, and transaction log free space.
• Monitoring of key SQL related services.
• Monitoring for persistent SPID blocking.
• Monitoring of numerous SQL events and performance data points. Alerts bring the issue to your attention and provide knowledge on the impact and possible resolutions.

The next System Center Virtual User Group meeting #7 will be July 23rd, 12 noon central start time. We have a great mix of Windows 2008 R2 hyper-V, monitoring Virtual Machines with Bridgeways products, and Advanced MP Authoring in the R2 Console, R2 Authoring console create custom datasource, custom monitor type to go with it, illustrate how to use Cookdown, and a few other gems, as well as a Swag Drawing at the end.

Agenda (Central Time Zone)

Registration

We have an excellent line up for this meeting so join us by registering here!

PC Audio only for Attendees

Audio will only be available through Live Meeting

Presenter Bios

Omid Abdollahpour

Is currently working at a Sweden based company called Xperta AB as Virtualization Specialist (primary focus on Hyper-V and SCVMM). Had the chance to test Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V early in beta phase and held seminars about Hyper-V & SCVMM 2008. I became MCT this year, held two courses about Hyper-V (MOC 6422) and preparing to hold SCVMM (MOC 6331).

Morgan Holm

Morgan has more than fifteen years of technology experience with a focus on enterprise applications and systems management.  He has held key roles in product management and marketing, technology alliances and evangelism.  Prior to joining Xandros, Morgan was at NetPro Computing managing a line of infrastructure management, security and compliance solutions for Microsoft environments. 

Raphael Burri

Lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland. In the last 9 years Raphael has been designing, implementing and operating various network, system and service management suites. Raphael is currently an independent consultant working with Operations Manager. Raphael Burri's blog: http://rburri.wordpress.com

Pete Zerger (MVP)

Pete Zerger is a consulting partner with AKOS Technology Services and has nine years of experience in the IT industry. He focuses on design and deployment of enterprise operations management, directory services, and messaging solutions. Pete holds an MCSE for Messaging, an MCTS for SQL Server 2005, and he is a Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Operations Manager. He is founder of System Center Forum, a popular community site covering Operations Manager 2007, Essentials 2007 and the System Center Suite.

Swag Drawing

At the end of the meeting, there will be a drawing for some technical swag.

Thank you for your continued support!

Scott Moss

president - System Center Virtual User Group

vice president - Atlanta Systems Management User Group

Just got my MMS 2009 DVDs in the mail. Looking forward to seeing the sessions that I was double booked on! Also the Microsoft Technet web site now has Management Pack University. Check it out there is some great new stuff out there!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/cc671407.aspx

The Atlanta Southeast Management User Group invites you to attend the next SMUG meeting scheduled for June 26th, 2009 for a day of great presentations, discussions, and networking.

Registration Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032417796&IO=uUah7g34dDfimqriNH71Jg%3d%3d

DATE & TIME

June 26th, 2009
10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Lunch provided courtesy of Dell! Thanks Randy!

PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES

Denny Ramsey

Denny is a Datacenter Technology Specialist at Microsoft who focuses on working with enterprise customers in the southeast geography. Denny has been with Microsoft for 4 years and has spent the bulk of his time focused on core infrastructure and collaboration technologies. Most recently, Denny has focused on Datacenter Virtualization technologies including Server, Desktop and Presentation virtualization as well as remote connectivity into these systems. Before joining Microsoft, Denny spent 7 years at a large MSO where he filled several roles including Enterprise Architect and Windows Core Infrastructure manager.

Phillip Gibson

Phillip Gibson is a senior consultant with Microsoft working in the Communications Sector for North America. Phillip has over 10 years of experience in professional services specializing in systems management, monitoring operations, and system deployment. Certified in Microsoft’s entire System Center product suite, Phillip has lead and/or participated in numerous System Center projects engagements implementing some of the most complex and advanced features.

Brian Huneycutt

Brian is currently a developer (more a jack-of-all-trades really) on the Configuration Manager Sustained Engineering team. He started as a Support Engineer handling consumer desktop support issues at Microsoft in 1999. After having his fill of "No, there is no double right click, just a double left click" and "I'm sorry sir, I cannot help you with your ISP's login password issue" he escaped transitioned to the SMS team, where he quickly learned the value of the SMS logs. Once firmly entrenched in the SMS world, he worked through all levels of support, ending up as an Escalation Engineer ("What do you want to debug today?") prior to moving to the product team. These days he still partners with CSS (current acronym for Support) on problem investigations, along with development work on hotfixes, service packs, and generally anything that needs either fixing or a very long email. Those fleeting moments of free time are split between family, tooling around town in a little Triumph Spitfire, or making sawdust in the garage / workshop.

Greg Cameron

Greg Cameron is a Senior Technology Specialist with Microsoft working in the Communications Sector. He has been with Microsoft for over 6 years and has been involved with technical sales of Virtualization, Server Operating System and Management solutions. Greg has been in the Technology industry for 10 years, working at a Fortune 10 company working with Server Operations/Architecture Management and Technical Sales/Consulting consulting. Prior to entering the Technology industry he served as an Officer in the United States Navy and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He currently lives in Atlanta,GA.

Thank you for your continued Support!

Scott Moss
President - System Center Virtual Users Group
Vice President - Southeast Management Users Group

Another update for the OpsMgr team, the old news group forums have moved to Technet Forums!

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

Some tools that have been released recently that should be checked out.

Notification Test Tool

I've been waiting for this on, look forward to playing with it in the lab.

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/05/19/notifications-test-tool.aspx

Notifications Update Alert History Tool
This tool was previewed at MMS 2008, but was not released till last month. It does not test command channel, which is the only improvement I could ask for in this tool.

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/05/08/notifications-update-alert-history-tool.aspx

Visio Add-in for Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta released

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/04/24/visio-add-in-for-operations-manager-2007-r2-beta-released.aspx

Video about the Visio Add-in

http://edge.technet.com/Media/Visio-Integration-with-Operations-Manager-R2/

Brian Wren's Store Application Management Pack

Brian Wren has been busy with the Sample Application MP. Recent updates are, Sample Application For SP1, Powershell scripts
in the Sample Application MP.

http://blogs.technet.com/brianwren/default.aspx

Original Store Application Sample MP and Document are available here

http://www.opsmanjam.com/Lists/OpsManJam%20Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=13

Is available for download at this url.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=e9f3cd3f-9bc0-45cd-b10f-120e937ee4c4

This management pack is only supported on the R2 platform.

Brief Description
This Management Pack includes an extensive set of monitoring including synthetic transactions to effectively monitor Exchange 2007 and report on performance, availability, and reliability of its server roles.

Quick Details
File Name: Exchange Server 2007 Operations Manager 2007 R2 MP.msi
Version: 6.0.6623.0
Date Published: 6/12/2009
Language: English
Download Size: 18 KB - 3.2 MB*

Some of the features, have been a long time coming for the exchange management pack, I'm looking forward to seeing them in action. Synthetic transactions are maintenance-mode aware, a significant number of rules and monitors that are not actionable or may be noisy are disabled (standing ovation), full support for Microsoft clustered configurations (read MP guide for more details).

Feature Summary

A number of synthetic transactions ensure the Exchange servers are available and responding in a timely manner. The synthetic transactions are maintenance-mode aware, so that if the target of a transaction is in maintenance mode, the source will not run the transaction, and not alert unnecessarily.
This Management Pack includes a Management Pack template that provides a wizard-like interface for configuring synthetic transactions against Outlook Web Access (OWA), Exchange ActiveSync, Web Services, POP3, and IMAP.
This Management Pack includes a Management Pack template that provides a wizard-like interface for configuring mail flow synthetic transactions between agent-managed Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers.
This Management Pack provides 30+ reports specific to Exchange 2007 that track availability and performance compared to service level objectives. For the list of reports and for more information about the reports, see the Management Pack Guide.
All the synthetic transactions in this Management Pack use an Operations Manager 2007 R2 hosting feature for Windows PowerShell technology that provides a performance improvement when running synthetic transactions.
A significant number of rules and monitors that are not actionable or may be noisy are disabled. Note that many of these rules are still in the Management Pack so that you can enable them if necessary.
Support for monitoring any number of Exchange organizations using a single Operations Manager 2007 management group.
Full support for Microsoft clustered configurations. For more details, see the Management Pack Guide.
Discovery of Exchange 2007 server roles is disabled by default, and no Exchange 2007 monitoring is applied by default. This allows you to discover and monitor your servers gradually, as well as tune the Management Pack as you bring more agent-managed Exchange 2007 servers into the Operations Manager environment.

During a recent IIS 7 MP tune up, I noticed in MP Viewer 1.7 was only showing 6 discoveries with time frequencies, which seemed odd because I had just made overrides for more than 20 Object Discoveries.

The object discoveries have two time tags in XML, one which shows the frequency in seconds <IntervalSeconds>, the second XML tag that MP Viewer does not show the frequency is <PeriodInSeconds>. MP Studio Lite, from Silect Software has the same problem. This must be a new feature. ;)

The Atlanta Southeast Management User Group invites you to attend the next SMUG meeting scheduled for June 26th, 2009 for a day of great presentations, discussions, and networking.

We are putting out an incomplete Agenda early to allow time for folks to plan to make it to the meeting. I'll post schedule updates as needed.

Registration Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032417796&IO=uUah7g34dDfimqriNH71Jg%3d%3d

DATE & TIME

June 26th, 2009
10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Lunch provided courtesy of Dell! Thanks Randy!

We look forward to seeing you there!

Scott Moss
President - System Center Virtual Users Group
Vice President - Southeast Management Users Group

The Live Meeting Recording for System Center Virtual User Group Meeting #6 May 21nd, 2009 is available for download. Get it Here!

Run Time:
Steve Rachui (SCCM Topic)                      start to 50:43:00
break/poll/technical problems                    50:43 - 1:06:00
Baelson Duque (OpsMgr R2)                   1:06:00 - 2:14:07

Thank you,

Scott Moss
President - System Center Virtual Users Group
Vice President - Southeast Management Users Group

Check out the R2 Web Site!

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/operationsmanager/en/us/default.aspx

R2 can also be found on Connect.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

The next System Center Virtual User Group meeting #6 will be May 21st, 12 noon central start time. We have a good mix of SCCM and Operations Manager presentations.

Agenda (Central Time Zone)

Registration

We have an excellent line up for this meeting so join us by registering here.

PC Audio only

Audio will only be available through Live Meeting.

Presenter Bios

Steve Rachui - Microsoft

Steve Rachui is a Manageability Support Escalation Engineer in the Product Support Services group at Microsoft. Steve was also a tech reviewer for the upcoming 'SCCM Unleashed' book. He has supported SMS since version 1.2. Steve can be reached via his supportability blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/steverac/.

Baelson Duque - Senior Program Manager - Microsoft 
Baelson Duque started at Microsoft as an Operations Analyst performing common Tier 1 Operations work. He then became a Systems Engineer and shortly thereafter, became a Tools Engineer building tools for Microsoft Game Studios Internet Operations team. There he owned the Monitoring Infrastructure where Baelson pioneered MOM 2000 as the Operations Monitoring Platform. Baelson is now a proud member of the Operations Manager Program Management team for the last 6 years and brings with him over 5 years of Operational Expertise from many levels in the IT Operations stack.

Thank you for your continued support!

Scott Moss

president - System Center Virtual User Group

vice president - Atlanta Systems Management User Group

The next System Center Virtual User Group meeting #6 will be May 21st, 12 noon central start time. I'm in the process of confirming speakers so look for a good mix of Operations Manager and SCCM in the Agenda.

Look for an update soon.

Scott Moss

president - System Center Virtual User Group

vice president - Atlanta Systems Management User Group

Another great Microsoft Management Summit. So many news items I'll try and sum it up in a few lines.

Pre-MMS News:

Visio Add-in for Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta, is available for download on connect. Check out the momteam blog for more specifics on this tool.

MMS News:

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 will be released in the next 30 days. I'm hoping for a nice round of R2 Resource Kit utilities to follow the release of R2.

Connectors for R2 will be available 30 Days after R2 release. The following connectors will be available in the first release available, Universal Connector, BMC Remedy ARS, HP OpenView Operations For Unix, HP OpenView Operations For Windows, and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC). Over the next year expect the following additional connectors from Microsoft, HP Service Manager, IBM OMNIBus/Netcool, Universal "Inbound". I was hoping the Netcool connector would be available sooner but oh well.

One of the best series of this past MMS was "Scripting in Operations Manager 2007" presented by Brian Wren. I'm looking forward to reviewing the videos of these presentations, as so much information was thrown at you in during the 5 hour blitz of information.

There were several hundred announcements at MMS, I'll only cover two. The System Center Influencers Program. The System Center Influencers Program is a new community program that will give influencers—user group leads, MVPs, popular bloggers, and others recognized as influential in the community around System Center—the technical training content, people connections, and general guidance they need to enhance their credibility and impact in the community. (for more info on this new program see link)

The other announcement was for SystemCenterCentral.com. I will be using this site for both of the user group I run. I'm the President of the System Center Virtual User Group, and vice president of the Atlanta Systems Management User Group.

Personal Notes from MMS:

I've been added to the System Center Influencers program.

Pete Zerger handed over the System Center Virtual User Group for me to run.

I was once again triple booked the night of the myitforum Party, unfortunately I did not get a email telling me to come by because I got an award. I did not even know till the following day when I got it from Rod Trent. I was awarded the "Operations Manager guru and newshound and lasting contributor" award. Thank you for this award!

Future MMS News:

I've only seen one post on where and when MMS 2010 will be in Vegas, April 19 - 23 @ the Venetian. I hope this information holds out.