BICTT

 

There is a small update to the BizTalk management pack for BizTalk 2006 and 2009.

Version: 6.0.6703.0
Date Published: 2/2/2010

The 6.0.6703 version of the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 includes the following changes
• Fix for errors in discovery of Host Instances. Host Instance discovery has been modified to discover only the created Host Instances rather than all possible combinations of available Runtime Servers and Hosts.

Bob Cornelissen

 

Updated System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2 Documentation has been released to the Microsoft download site.

It looks like the Scripting Guide has been updated yesterday as can be seen from the VMM 2008 R2 documentation overview. You can find links to the other VMM 2008 documentatio there as well. There are also online versions of this documentation available on that page.

Happy virtualizing!

Bob Cornelissen

 

A new SCOM management has been released:

DFS Namespaces Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007

Version: 6.0.6321.0
Date Published: 2/2/2010

Overview
The DFS Namespaces Management Pack monitors servers running Windows Server® 2008, Windows Server 2003 R2, and Windows Server 2003. It can also be configured to monitor the health of DFS Namespaces from client computers running Windows Vista® or Windows® XP. This management pack monitors events that are recorded in the System event log by DFS Namespaces. It also monitors the overall health of DFS Namespaces and alerts you to critical issues.

Feature Summary
The DFS Namespaces Management Pack is designed to provide valuable monitoring information about the health of DFS Namespaces by monitoring the following:

• Namespace health
• DFS service health
• Namespace server health
• DFS folder health
• Folder target health
• Namespace server Active Directory communication
• Namespace root directory health
• DFS client-based monitoring

 

From Silect comes this update:

MP Studio v4.1 Now Available

We're pleased to announce the availability of our latest release of MP Studio available for upgrade now for all MP Studio customers currently on maintenance. MP Studio v4.1 has now added additional capabilities to help you further decrease complexity, speed implementation, eliminate risk and increase productivity with System Center Operations Manager:

MP Studio Enhancements Included in this Release:

New Column Creation Wizard for more flexible custom Management Pack Documentation reporting. MP Studio’s already powerful MP documentation capabilities have been enhanced to include an easy-to-use column creation wizard, where users can extract a subset of data such as Event ID or Frequency and have the data neatly displayed in a dedicated column.

Override Management has become even more flexible with added support for targeting of Groups. Bulk override management has also been extended to allow users to modify the targets for the block of overrides they are creating.

The MP Development Center now supports offline creation of management pack contents such as Targets, Event Rules and Service Monitors. This new operation provides enhanced flexibility when developing an MP where access to a server hosting the line of business application may not be available.

Additional Installation and Administrative Features have also been enhanced in this new version.

 

This was another very interesting meeting.

Here is a short step by step of the contents:

Leslie Kits - Program Manager on System Center - started by giving us the agenda of course and some introductory words. This gives a framework to give an idea of the importance to actually manage Sharepoint farms as they become more and more prevalent and complex.

SharePoint 2007 was the fastest growing application in Microsoft history from a user perspective with more than a milion users. First it was mainly used as a departmental tool for sharing documents. Later more and more team collaboration sites sprang up and versioning was leveraged. More and more sensitive data gets stored on Sharepoint sites. In most cases the IT department was not really in control because of lack of knowledge of all the inner workings of the product and mostly power users were creating and working with the sites. Problem is when something goes wrong. Sensitive and critical data can get lost.

If a SharePoint farm is maintained and managed in a good way this is proving to very cost effective. IT needs tooling to centrally manage products and the System Center line is most suited for the job of bringing things together. The most used seems to be automated backup as a cost saver on labor. Automated patch deployment is a possible big cost saver as well.

System Center brings us proactive monitoring and reporting, managing of capability and provisioning, rapid data backup, optimal configuration of SharePoint, auto deployment of patches, automated compliance framework, manage virtual and physical environments, manage globally spread components, consistent user interface across multiple applications.

Next on was Durgesh Nandan - a program manager on the Office Internet Platform. Talking on the SCOM management pack for SharePoint 2010.

The focus of the new MP was to improve design monitoring with the larger architecture of SharePoint itself. Monitoring for SharePoint 2010 is about logical monitoring. This links from the physical layer to the logical layer to determine the effects on the logical components when a physical component stops working.
A big improvement is SharePoint Health Analyzer rules (SPHA). These show up in the central monitor and system center monitor. It looks like it works like a best practises analyzer equivalent.
The new management pack is a unified MP. First it was distributed across multiple MP's. This would create a lot of MP's for each component. Now it is offered as one MP. It discovers what is running. This will auto adjust to the number of services running. It shows the physical topology view and the logical topology. For instance - one web app can be supported by multiple instances. So if one goes down the service as such is still running. The SLA objectives will need to reflect this and the right targeting for this objective can be set.

SPHA integration
All the rules surface in the SPME rules state view. This helps sort and it will show the Sharepoint health analyzer rules that give errors or warnings in an easy way.

Durgesh showed a graph that shows how monitoring is improved. The number of classes, monitors and discoveries have grown a lot. for example from 10 classes to 133. This improves the granularity of monitoring a lot.
Also the new SPHA rules and some technet knowledge has been added. Technet knowledge was included in the MP at first. Now all knowledge is located on technet, so it can be updated constantly. For 150 cases of problems a technet article is linked already. This will help a lot as well.

Number of general rules and reports have decreased. This was because a number of them were redundant because they were already included in other management packs, such as SQL. This reduced noise a lot. The SP 2010 management pack assumes that the SQL MP is installed. Some SQL related monitors are in the MP but are disabled by default.

There are also less reports because of double entries with the SQL MP's etc.

Jason Buffington - our data protection hero was next on DPM 2010.

The Release Candidate is due next week and the RTM is expected in the spring of 2010. So go and get the RC when it gets out next week

So specifically to the SharePoint parts:
SP 2003 does not have VSS writer. So SQL is backed up and STSADM can dump the SP config and can get backed up.

For SP2007 and windows sharepoint services 3.0 the VSS writer is used. As long as agents are installed on all servers in farm you can point DPM to one of the front-ends in the farm. DPM will find the components in the farm, like sql content servers, enterprise search, farm config database, system state of frontends. Using other products was difficult because of the distributed nature of SP. A lot of components placed everywhere. DPM is designed for this.

If topology changes in the farm - just add new server + deploy dpm agent. Next time a scheduled backup is run the farm will notify the change to DPM. The DPM admin needs to acknowledge by clicking in an OK box for this to become active in order to acknowledge that the admin knows that additional space on dpm server is needed for this addition.

Demo - Looks like a demo of the RC ;-)
A short demo was given on protecting the SharePoint farm. This is easy as long as all servers involved have a DPM agent installed. Selecting the Sharepoint farm on one of the frontend servers will make DPM find the rest automatically.

A feature is highlighted. Self healing. Automatically perform consistency check if the replica is inconsistent. This rules!

On the topic of recovery. Well for SP 2003 the separate parts need to be restored. For SP 2007 restoring requires a recovery farm. Normally a single server. Take the content db and bring the data back to production.
For the new SP 2010 no recovery farm is needed anymore. Restoring single items directly from DPM to SP 2010 is now possible.

Leslie Kitz came back for more:

sharepoint virtualization best practises. In short most front end services, such as web services can be virtualized very well and performance and high availability can be improved by scaling out. Backend functions can be virtualized, but the heavier loads will probably go towards more physical components. Of course this can be combined.

DPM 2010 for sharepoint white paper will be coming up.
300 level webcast is coming up as well, but expected in March.
Working on customer case studies.
For customer evidence contact Leslie Kitz (dpm 2010, SCOM mp's), customer evidence, case study or technet edge videos and blogs, references.

The next meeting will be on March 9 on Essentials and DPM (I bet we are going to see Jason again!).

So on a personal note from myself:
It is no secret that I just love the System Center line of products and have been working with these a lot. I believe the added possibilities in the SharePoint 2010 management pack for SCOM will make the product much better manageable and give some control back to IT personnel that is less specialized in SharePoint. I have been working with DPM 2010 Beta for some time now and am very happy with its workings and self healing possibilities. And the coming additional features in the release candidate will bring even more enthusiasm. More to come soon...

Bob Cornelissen

 

Special for the System Center Influencers:
In a good hour a new live meeting will start. This time the topic is Sharepoint and System Center. 2 feb at 10 am PST. For the Netherlands where I am this is at 19:00.
Topics within the topic will of course point towards monitoring with SCOM and backup with DPM. These products actually compliment the product in a way that is mostly invisible for the end user, but the IT department will notice for sure.

System Center Influencers can check at the connect sharepoint site for the login details for the meeting.

I will probably post after the meeting as well with some comments on the contents.

Bob Cornelissen

 

A long awaited cumulative update CU1 for SCOM 2007 R2 has been released.

First of all it can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05d30779-2ddc-48dc-aa91-a23167ee2cad&displaylang=en.

Make sure to read the readme's and the KB article over here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974144.

Make sure you make an upgrade plan for the components installed everywhere.

I have already upgraded a few installations now, so some things to take into account when deploying this update:

When you get a popup asking you to restart now, just click NO first even it appears to be in the removing backup files stages already.
After looking through Kevin Holman's install notes it appears the installer is not yet done when this popup occurs. I also see the installer still running and taking processor time in the background and after a minute suddenly the hotfixes appear in the agentdeployment directories as well. So click NO when asked to reboot and give the server a minute more to complete some tasks.
After a while I got the notification popup with an error, saying the system has to be restarted etc. Clicking OK returns you to the wizard. After this the system can be restarted.

remember the manually installed agents or the ones that are deployed by some other means (SCCM for example). Also Gateways (remember to check the agentdeployment directories). Consoles installed locally on all kinds of workstations and systems management servers have to be upgraded as well and are easily forgotten.

Bob Cornelissen

 

The other day I was talking to a friend with a problem using Activesync from several devices to a SBS 2003 server. He had gone through several KB articles and could not find the solution.

So full of hope I started out on the server and checking the settings. Hmmmmm, seemed OK. In most cases changing SSL or the permissions settings (like anonymous) are the culprit. Such can be found through:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817379
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330463
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916958/en-us

Whenever somebody synced we could see an error 3005 on the SBS server generated by Server ActiveSync. the error was

Unexpected Exchange mailbox Server error: Server: [bla.bla.local] User: [user@domein.com] HTTP status code: [409]. Verify that the Exchange mailbox Server is working correctly.

So I went to the IIS logging and found a few entries each time somebody was trying to sync. This included 401 and 403 status codes and that 409 code.

Alright, so lets start to dig deeper.
Try to access the OWA site from the device (http://server/exchange).
Works.
Try to access the OMA page from the mobile device (http://server/oma).
Does not work.

So it is telling you that the server is not available.
Tried to do the same from an internet explorer from the server and same result. Contact your system administrator

But we are still digging.
While I was doing that I found a great resource for exchange errors relating to activesync and whatever. Big list here
http://www.pocketpcfaq.com/faqs/activesync/exchange_errors.php

Through what I learned during this troubleshooting there are several things to keep in mind and check.
When installing SBS the install wizard already creates an IIS virtual directory for you with name Exhange-OMA. After you have completed setup you would run the Internet Connection wizard. ALWAYS run the wizards while working with SBS. This wizard does a lot of things actually, but email settings are also set here and setting some stuff on the actuvesync, oma and exchange-oma folders also belong to this.

I tried to re-run the internet connection wizard and run through the email stuff as well with this wizard. Always run IISRESET after this wizard. This did not help. Strange as this should correct most errors you might have made while playing around with the settings to make things work

So back to OMA. As Activesync and OMA are linked I thought this one would be the best to troubleshoot first to get things running.

In the end I found this link to a KB article giving me the solution.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937635/en-us.
Yes, some of the checkboxes were not correctly set on the Virtual Directory tab of the Exchange-OMA folder in IIS. The link above shows the checkboxes that need to be ticked. Seems somebody played around with this after the installation and before passing the server on into the care of my friend. I am betting these boxes get ticked by the sbs install wizard and not the Internet connectio wizard (as it didn't change after running that second wizard).

Changed the settings and ran an IISRESET.
OMA was accessible! There we go.

The next step was resolving a certificate error we got on the mobile device, but that was just because the intermediate certificate (mail.domain.com) was installed on the mobile device and not the root cert used to sign that one. Took the trusted root cert off the server (of course you do not export the private key!) and installed it on the mobile device.

Sync! sweet

Bob Cornelissen

 

Has been a bit quiet here, but I am back on the blogging trail.
Starting off with a strange case.

A nephew of mine had a new desktop and got Windows 7 home premium on it. All good and nice.

Suddenly he had a problem with the Clock gadget in the windows sidebar. It's settings seemed to change. After restarting the computer the clock disappeared. When placing it back and configuring the configuration also did not want to work and after a restart it was gone again. Also I saw a "ghost" gadget appearing sometimes and it was staying on top of other screens at times. Drove me crazy for a bit (and drove my nephew even more crazy actually).

So now on how to solve this issue:

It seems the settings are kept in c:\users\some-user-name\appdata\local\microsoft\windows sidebar
Something there probably did not work correctly.

So what I did was to first go into configuration screen. Programs. Turn windows features on or off. Windows Gadget platform. I uninstalled it from there and restarted the computer.

After the restart removed the settings from the directory named above (I moved it away first just to be sure).

After this install the Windows Gadget Platform again in the same way. I added a few gadgets and made some changes in the config and restarted the machine. All working fine.

To be honest I think only removing the ini file from that directory should be enough to fix the problem in stead of removing the whole directory and contents. If you have downloaded and installed gadgets the first method would also remove those files. We did not have those in our case, so it did not matter.

Good luck if you encounter this.

Bob Cornelissen

 

Thanks to a question from one of my readers and some help from a Microsoft forum I updated my post on this topic based on SQL 2005 with the specifics for SQL 2008 as minor changes apply.

Here is the post.

Bob Cornelissen