BICTT

 

From a posting by Kerrie: At the MMS Veeam is giving away a limited number of copies of this great new book. There will also be signings by the authors!

Congrats for getting the paper version out there too Kerrie!!!

Bob Cornelissen

 

Just read from the SCOM Blog that the Visio and SharePoint 2010 extensions for Operations Manager have shipped. Check out the blog post for more info.

Also good news as Sasha and Roy are also going to show this at their MMS sessions!

Bob Cornelissen

 

Earlier today Microsoft announced the RTM release of System Center Data Protection Manager 2010.

Taken from the DPM website:

Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 is part of the System Center family of management products from Microsoft. It delivers unified data protection for Windows servers such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Virtualization and file servers -- as well as Windows desktops and laptops.

• New in 2010 is the ability for roaming laptops to get centrally managed policies around desktop protection.
• Your laptop data will be protected whether you are connected to the corporate network or travelling on an airplane.
• DPM also provides native site-to-site replication for Disaster Recovery to either another DPM server or an off-site cloud provider.
• Centrally managed System State and Bare Metal Recovery are also new in DPM 2010.

DPM seamlessly uses disk, tape, and cloud-based repositories to deliver an easy-to-use and best-of-breed backup and recovery solution for Windows environments from Microsoft. Windows customers of all sizes can rely on Microsoft to provide a scalable and manageable protection solution that is cost-effective, secure, and reliable.

New in 2010 is the ability for roaming laptops to get centrally managed policies around desktop protection. Your laptop data will be protected whether you are connected to the corporate network or travelling on an airplane. DPM also provides native site-to-site replication for Disaster Recovery to either another DPM server or an off-site cloud provider. Centrally managed System State and Bare Metal Recovery are also new in DPM 2010. DPM seamlessly uses disk, tape, and cloud-based repositories to deliver an easy-to-use and best-of-breed backup and recovery solution for Windows environments from Microsoft. Windows customers of all sizes can rely on Microsoft to provide a scalable and manageable protection solution that is cost-effective, secure, and reliable.

I am very enthusiastic about this product. Also its auto healing possibilities, auto growing, workgroup server protection!
Have had a lot of fun with the beta and RC version already.

Now lets back up everything!
Bob Cornelissen

 

Earlier today System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE 2010) was released to manufacturing.

Some of the highlights from the SCE website:

System Center Essentials 2010 (Essentials 2010) is a new management solution in the System Center family of IT systems management products specifically designed for midsized businesses. Essentials 2010:

• Provides a unified solution with a single console for managing a broad range of tasks across your physical and virtual servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services for a unified experience.
• Enables you to proactively manage your IT environment, helping keep your system up-to-date with a solution that accelerates problem resolution and enables automation of system updates and data collection.
• Is easy to deploy and maintain helping simplify complex management tasks for increased IT efficiency.

Based on customer feedback we've received over the last couple of years, here’s what’s new in Essentials 2010:

• We've raised the number of Windows Server devices you can manage from 30 to 50.
• We built Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 technology right into the product, so that Essentials 2010 provides a single console and management solution for managing both your physical and virtual servers. This includes support for converting physical servers to virtual machines and support for live migration.
• The console has a new look and feel making it easier than ever to quickly check the health of your IT environment and address any issues.
• Installation and configuration are even easier with checks for prerequisites during installation and Group Policy checks for proper configuration.

So lots of good stuff in there!
Happy SCE-ing.
Bob Cornelissen

 

Looks like I am one fo those who got stranded in Europe this weekend, due to airspace being closed. Wanted to fly tomorrow from Amsterdam via London to Las Vegas and for a while it did look like it might just go through because I had a later flight than most... Allas, no such luck. Just got confirmation that both my flights for tomorrow got canceled. Not sure if there is any way to rebook as this is bound to be filled with people from Thursday and Friday already. Still keeping my fingers crossed though.

Update 17-4-2010:
The MMS team has posted an FAQ for European attendees here.
In short and also from other sources:

• If you can not make it, do not cancel attendance to MMS as you now still have access to the CommNet that will contain slide decks and videos soon after each session.
• Make sure to inform the hotel you are staying. Most hotels know about the situation and are very helpfull. No problem to cancel your stay because of this reason.
• Try to catch as much as possible online. Keynotes through webcasts and the rest through recordings and slide decks on COmmNet.
• The MMS team will work hard to get the conference DVDs out as soon as possible

Little chance of going now as all flights on Monday seem to be full already, so we are looking further into the week already. Makes no sense to go now. have to follow as much as possible online.

Just hope my friend Maarten Goet can still make it for his breakouts, so we can enjoy the videos the day after! Good luck man!

For the ones who can attend.. please keep us informed!

Bob Cornelissen

 

So the Message Queuing management packs for version 4 and 5 have been released. I know this is old news for some of you, as these MPs have been available for the last 2 weeks almost . I recently got a question as to what these versions are.
Well MSMQ 4 = Windows 2008 and MSMQ 5 = Windows 2008 R2.
Now you know what to download from the catalog.

 

We had a chance the other week to understand the memory usage by SCOM cross plat agents for Red Hat linux and I wanted to share this info with you as I could not find much about it. The take away by the way is that the agent is not using much memory.

The case:
After deploying the X-plat agent to a number of Red Hat 4 and 5 servers during a proof of concept the linux admins discovered that the agent was consuming a lot of memory. And we are talking between 200 and 500 MB of ram.

Trying to find out what was going on:
We were running the "top" command to see what processes were using memory and how much they were using. This showed a few processes from the SCOM agent picking up 150 MB each. Here is part of the output of that command:

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5777 root 16 0 128m 9244 6004 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.30 scxcimprovagt
5709 root 17 0 114m 8436 5388 S 0.0 0.1 0:03.57 scxcimserver
5737 scoma 17 0 34548 5688 5076 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.09 scxcimprovagt

So in column number 5 it says that these three processes take 128+114+34 MB, right?
So let's pick up a "pmap" of the first process (this is a long list!):

# pmap 5777
5777: /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/scxcimprovagt 0 15 18 root SCXCoreProviderModule
00111000 32K r-x-- /lib/libcrypt-2.3.4.so
00119000 4K r-x-- /lib/libcrypt-2.3.4.so
0011a000 4K rwx-- /lib/libcrypt-2.3.4.so
0011b000 156K rwx-- [ anon ]
00142000 132K r-x-- /lib/tls/libm-2.3.4.so
00163000 4K r-x-- /lib/tls/libm-2.3.4.so
00164000 4K rwx-- /lib/tls/libm-2.3.4.so
00165000 36K r-x-- /lib/libnss_files-2.3.4.so
0016e000 4K r-x-- /lib/libnss_files-2.3.4.so
0016f000 4K rwx-- /lib/libnss_files-2.3.4.so
00174000 156K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegprm.so.1
0019b000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegprm.so.1
0019c000 308K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegrepository.so.1
001e9000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegrepository.so.1
001ea000 196K r-x-- /lib/libssl.so.0.9.7a
0021b000 12K rwx-- /lib/libssl.so.0.9.7a
0021e000 76K r-x-- /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.so.2.2
00231000 4K rwx-- /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.so.2.2
00232000 60K r-x-- /lib/libresolv-2.3.4.so
00241000 4K r-x-- /lib/libresolv-2.3.4.so
00242000 4K rwx-- /lib/libresolv-2.3.4.so
00243000 8K rwx-- [ anon ]
00245000 56K r-x-- /lib/libaudit.so.0.0.0
00253000 8K rwx-- /lib/libaudit.so.0.0.0
0026e000 156K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/providers/libpegprovider.so.1
00295000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/providers/libpegprovider.so.1
00296000 396K r-x-- /usr/lib/libkrb5.so.3.2
002f9000 8K rwx-- /usr/lib/libkrb5.so.3.2
00367000 32K r-x-- /lib/libpam.so.0.77
0036f000 4K rwx-- /lib/libpam.so.0.77
0039c000 32K r-x-- /lib/tls/librt-2.3.4.so
003a4000 4K r-x-- /lib/tls/librt-2.3.4.so
003a5000 4K rwx-- /lib/tls/librt-2.3.4.so
003a6000 40K rwx-- [ anon ]
003d5000 88K r-x-- /lib/ld-2.3.4.so
003eb000 4K r-x-- /lib/ld-2.3.4.so
003ec000 4K rwx-- /lib/ld-2.3.4.so
003ed000 2100K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegcommon.so.1
005fa000 28K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegcommon.so.1
00601000 8K rwx-- [ anon ]
00603000 560K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libCMPIProviderManager.so.1
0068f000 12K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libCMPIProviderManager.so.1
006a7000 768K r-x-- /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.3
00767000 20K rwx-- /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.3
0076c000 24K rwx-- [ anon ]
00779000 8K r-x-- /lib/libcom_err.so.2.1
0077b000 4K rwx-- /lib/libcom_err.so.2.1
007d6000 84K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegwql.so.1
007eb000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegwql.so.1
0087d000 40K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/scxcimprovagt
00887000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/scxcimprovagt
00888000 1188K r-x-- /lib/tls/libc-2.3.4.so
009b1000 8K r-x-- /lib/tls/libc-2.3.4.so
009b3000 8K rwx-- /lib/tls/libc-2.3.4.so
009b5000 8K rwx-- [ anon ]
009ef000 60K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegquerycommon.so.1
009fe000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegquerycommon.so.1
009ff000 852K r-x-- /lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.7a
00ad4000 72K rwx-- /lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.7a
00ae6000 12K rwx-- [ anon ]
00b3f000 56K r-x-- /lib/tls/libpthread-2.3.4.so
00b4d000 4K r-x-- /lib/tls/libpthread-2.3.4.so
00b4e000 4K rwx-- /lib/tls/libpthread-2.3.4.so
00b4f000 8K rwx-- [ anon ]
00bca000 172K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libDefaultProviderManager.so.1
00bf5000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libDefaultProviderManager.so.1
00bf6000 116K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegpmservice.so.1
00c13000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegpmservice.so.1
00d71000 60K r-x-- /usr/lib/libz.so.1.2.1.2
00d80000 4K rwx-- /usr/lib/libz.so.1.2.1.2
00db0000 148K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegprovidermanager.so.1
00dd5000 16K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegprovidermanager.so.1
00e0a000 36K r-x-- /lib/libgcc_s-3.4.6-20060404.so.1
00e13000 4K rwx-- /lib/libgcc_s-3.4.6-20060404.so.1
00e17000 128K r-x-- /usr/lib/libk5crypto.so.3.0
00e37000 4K rwx-- /usr/lib/libk5crypto.so.3.0
00e38000 220K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegclient.so.1
00e6f000 8K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegclient.so.1
00f1f000 8K r-x-- /lib/libdl-2.3.4.so
00f21000 4K r-x-- /lib/libdl-2.3.4.so
00f22000 4K rwx-- /lib/libdl-2.3.4.so
00f44000 172K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegconfig.so.1
00f6f000 8K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegconfig.so.1
00f95000 20K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegqueryexpression.so.1
00f9a000 4K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/libpegqueryexpression.so.1
00f9b000 2176K r-x-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/providers/libSCXCoreProviderModule.so
011bb000 16K rwx-- /opt/microsoft/scx/lib/providers/libSCXCoreProviderModule.so
08990000 1020K rw--- [ anon ]
aebfc000 4K ----- [ anon ]
aebfd000 10240K rw--- [ anon ]
af5fd000 4K ----- [ anon ]
af5fe000 10240K rw--- [ anon ]
afffe000 4K ----- [ anon ]
affff000 10240K rw--- [ anon ]
b09ff000 4K ----- [ anon ]
b0a00000 10860K rw--- [ anon ]
b149b000 404K ----- [ anon ]
b15fe000 4K ----- [ anon ]
b15ff000 10240K rw--- [ anon ]
b2000000 728K rw--- [ anon ]
b20b6000 296K ----- [ anon ]
b21ff000 4K ----- [ anon ]
b2200000 10920K rw--- [ anon ]
b2caa000 344K ----- [ anon ]
b2d6b000 4K ----- [ anon ]
b2d6c000 10240K rw--- [ anon ]
b4b70000 4K ----- [ anon ]
b4b71000 10240K rw--- [ anon ]
b5571000 4K ----- [ anon ]
b5572000 10240K rw--- [ anon ]
b6973000 4K rw--- [ anon ]
b6974000 4K ----- [ anon ]
b6975000 10240K rw--- [ anon ]
b7375000 24K r--s- /usr/lib/gconv/gconv-modules.cache
b737b000 2048K r---- /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
b758b000 4K ----- [ anon ]
b758c000 10264K rw--- [ anon ]
b7fa2000 8K rw--- [ anon ]
bfec0000 1280K rw--- [ stack ]
ffffe000 4K r-x-- [ anon ]
total 131508K

I told you the list was long.
We see a number of libraries and a few anon entries with 10 Mb size each.
Hmmm strange.

So we went into a CSS call with Microsoft and we got to discuss some things with Microsoft CSS and the X-plat team. Thanks to Bhushan and Robert we got to gather the following.
The memory usage is not what it seems o be frm these commands and actually we can see the real memory footprint on the live system. Will come back to that. This is what happens (This is part of the email conversation containing my try to explain what I think happens and the answer of the product team on this):

==================================

• The agent (several processes as you know) seems to request to linux that it wants a few hundred MB of memory. Lets say 350 MB.
• Linux seems to say OK to the request.

[Response] As long as the memory being allocated fits into the total virtual memory available (physical RAM+Swap), memory allocation will succeed. However before the virtual address is touched, the system won’t bother to allocate the page for you.

• Linux seems to only give the actual physical memory when the process actually writes to it.

[Response] Yes this is expected. The system only allocates pages/virtual memory when the process actually uses it. As the process does not require any pages, no pages are allocated.

• The agent seems to take around 20 MB of resident memory (perhaps this grows when we add more rules or when time passes, will have to see about this)

[Response] This is the memory being touched by the code.

• Swap space is not used on the machine

[Response] The paging strategy on Linux is different from Windows. So this is expected.

• When looking with top and expanding into the memory we see a number of “anon” entries with chunks of 10 MB each. We can not see what they do. Perhaps they are reserved or claimed, but the agent is not yet writing into those parts of memory.

[Response]: In “pmap” output, there are entries for the process code segment itself (mapped into virtual space), shared libs, -- these are named, and more importantly there are [stack] entries and [anon] entries which is memory allocated on heap(runtime). So basically, pmap shows the total size of the process which includes all of the shared libraries. This is not a fair number (since the libraries are shared, many different processes use them). From the pmap output you provided earlier, it seems the stack being used is very reasonable and heap[Anon] was used a lot.

• So what would be a question to the dev team would be why the agent seems to request a lot of memory to start with and especially the large amount (agent of 20 mb can easy request 40 perhaps…?). And if it is expected to grow that large. Why not start smaller and perhaps request more when needed?

[Response] There are some valid reason for doing that, most common cases would be file/device mapping [see mmap(2)] and memory pool for avoiding memory fragmentation. Allocating a big memory at the beginning and consuming little by little slowly is not an issue. However, memory fragmentation is an issue, unintended big memory allocation is an issue, memory leak is an issue.

==================================

So, to resume. The agent requests this amount of memory, but is not using it. It needs to request this much in order to later avoid memory issues. If we now look at the top output again:

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5777 root 16 0 128m 9244 6004 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.30 scxcimprovagt
5709 root 17 0 114m 8436 5388 S 0.0 0.1 0:03.57 scxcimserver
5737 scoma 17 0 34548 5688 5076 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.09 scxcimprovagt

We should be looking at column number 6. So it takes 9+8+5=22 MB basically. We also checked this before by stopping and starting the agent and observing what happened to the amount of available physical memory on the box and that only changed a small amount of MB and not hundreds. That is also when we started doubting that the agent actually would take so much memory.

This 22 MB usage by the way is while running only the default linux management packs that come with the product. We can expect this to become a bit bigger due to more rules running against the agent if you load more custom management packs onto it.

It is also possible that a larger amount of memory allocation happens when a large number of instances are returned for any class (for Eg: thousands of concurrent processes on the Linux Servers). Also because of some winrm queries being run such as some process monitors, but I think this only covers the first call as it needs to load what it needs to execute this into memory.

So, if your linux admins are asking about the memory usage and are knocking at your door (or holding you out the window ) please point them to this post and have them check what is really being used and not what is being requested. There probably is no problem.

This excercise and some things we ran into before (some of them on this blog in previous posts) helped me to understand a bit more about the cross platform agent. All this research was done together with the linux admins at this customers location and it helped to gain their confidence and understanding (and I was happy to not be hanging by my ankles from the fourth floor anymore).

If in the end you do find a high memory usage than please check if you have created any custom rules that go crazy (you can disable them to check) and if that is not the case perhaps you need to contact Microsoft through the forums or CSS.

Thanks to the guys in the linux team and to Microsoft CSS and the product team for clearing things up and for working quite well together!

Good luck with cross plat monitoring! It's grrrrreat!

Bob Cornelissen

 

Just thought to post on a management pack that has been around for some time, posted by my friend Pete Zerger. On Windows boxes it not only discovers if it is a windows virtual machine (hyper-v for instance), but also if it is a vmware guest. This is very valuable as you might want to set overrides to performance monitors/rules for virtuals. Here is the Virtual machine discovery MP on systemcentercentral. Check this MP out and load it into your system. It is very valuable.

In the meantime it looks like the same is not yet available for vmware guests running linux, so I will create a discovery for that and a quick check if the vmware tools deamon is still running on the box. Will share that MP with you guys as soon as it is finished or in a stable stadium Already half way there.

Anybody wanting to offer any help with this is welcome as well by the way as long as progress is there.

Bob Cornelissen

 

While installing a SQL 2005 Reporting Services on a Windows 2003 machine today I got the following error:

[codespan]
The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

A name was started with an invalid character. Error processing resource 'http://localhost/reports/'. Line...

<%@ Page language="c#" Codebehind="Folder.aspx.cs" AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="Microsoft.ReportingServices.UI.Folde...

[/codespan]

I was thinking of rights and asp and .net framework at first.
After researching a bit more and combining a few issue posts I found a solution to be in a few IIS specific settings.

Go to the Default Website in the IIS manager (if it is installed there).
Go to the properties of the web site.
Go to the ASP.NET tab.
If there is no ASP.NET version selected here (as was in my case) select the correct version. In my case this was 2.0.50727.
Next click the button for Edit Global Configuration.
Go to the application tab.
In my case the Page language default needed to be changed to c#.
click ok everywhere and restart the website (or run iisreset).
Try to access the server/reports website again.
It is normal that it takes a while to load and perhaps request credentials, but it should show you the nice reporting services interface.

Good luck!

Bob Cornelissen

 

Last week I visited Savision head quarters in the Netherlands.
Was great to see them again and talk about new things to come.

I can't wait to see and get the new releases of software coming from these guys.

Of course there will be a new version of the world class Savision Live Maps. Amongst other features it will also work together with a feature built in to the new Jalasoft R2 version, also due to be released shortly. This is about Network topology discovery and of course visualizing it in a Live Map. You guys will have to wait and see this for yourself. Hang on, will be there soon.

We also discussed about one of the new projects Savision is working on and had a chance to give some feedback and discussion about it. I can not say much more about this for now as this is internal NDA. Just keep an eye on these guys for the coming months as they will go public with this. All I can say is that I realy like it and that I think they are on the right track with this.
Thanks guys!

I will blog more details after my friends at Savision publish their info on this.

Bob Cornelissen