BICTT

 

Sorry for the delay, but I just wanted to mention that the SCOM R2 sizing helper has had an update about 2 weeks ago. You can get the Operations Manager 2007 R2 sizing helper here.

I use these a lot as they help with getting basic sizing recommendations to build into your design documents. Also be sure to pick up the SCOM 2007 R2 design guide as stated below:

"The Operations Manager 2007 R2 Sizing Helper is an interactive document designed to assist you with planning & sizing deployments of Operations Manager 2007 R2. It helps you plan the correct amount of infrastructure needed for a new OpsMgr R2 deployment, removing the uncertainties in making IT hardware purchases and optimizes cost. A typical recommendation will include the recommended hardware specification for each server role, topology diagram and storage requirement. The Operations Manager Sizing Helper is most useful when used with the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Design Guide ( http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=184377)."

Have fun designing and scaling your OpsMgr deployments!

Bob Cornelissen

 

I was just looking through the technet forums and saw an updated post from Kerrie Meyler, the lead writer of the SCOM Unleashed books.

This is an excerpt from the latest post in the thread:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I am now able to confirm that there will be a printed version of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Unleashed (supplement to the previous book). This will be avalable for order sometime in April. This print version is not contingent on the number of ebook/PDF copies sold in the first two months.

The PDF will continue to be available only on Pearson's InformIT site (not available yet as it can't be preordered) - current availability date is now March 30, which is when you will be able to order it. The URL for this is not yet finalized.

The printed version will be available at Amazon.com and other electronic resellers. This is advance information as it is not listed there yet (not sure how much of it will show up in the brick and mortar market). List price for the printed book will be $39.95 US. The PDf was originally priced at $34.95 but this price will be changing to a somewhat lesser price - I don't have that number available yet. If you order both through InformIT you will get a discounted price for the bundle.

Once I have more specifics I will update this thread.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Great!
Of course I would want both of them as I tend to always keep the pdf formatted version available for quick reference from my laptop.
Good news as we can start reading before we reach the MMS! I am guessing the printed format will be available right after the MMS time frame.

Make sure to pick up the SCOM Unleashed and this SCOM R2 Unleashed book! I have been using the SCOM book extensively and I still tend to grab it every time. I had also been using the MOM 2005 Unleashed book written by the same lead writer and (partly the same) co-writers. So a very valuable series.
A big thanks to Kerrie and friends for making these happen!

Bob Cornelissen

 

Had a few machines today with an error we see more often, so I thought I would share it.

Symptoms:
A SCOM agent has these messages.

Event 21041.
Operations Manager has received a bad configuration file for management group mgmtgroup which could not be parsed. Configuration has been re-requested. A copy of the bad configuration file will be placed in C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\Health Service State\Connector Configuration Cache\mgmtgroup\OpsMgrConnector.Config.Error.xml

Event 21027
OpsMgr has received configuration for management group mgmtgroup from the Configuration Service, but failed to process the configuration. Configuration will be re-requested. The current state cookie is "" (State cookie may be empty if there is no active configuration)

Solution:
Re-install the msxml6 XML Parser on the agent machine. You can find it where the installer frm the SCOM agent is located on any management server (usually C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\AgentManagement\).
Re-start the System Center Management Service.

Bob Cornelissen

 

Last week I had some trouble deploying a SCOM cross plat agent to a Redhat 4 machine. During discovery of the machine I got an error indicating that it could not transfer the file GetOSVersion.sh . I will write down what happened and my understanding of the process for at least this part and what the solution turned out to be in our case.

I will not dive into all specifics of the discovery process, also because in our case specific things needed to be done to make discovery and agent deployment work.

So, what normally is needed is check the prerequisites in the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Operations Administrator’s Guide in Appendix A. In our case these were there. Also there might be an underlying dependency on lsb (Linux Standard Base) as David Allen found here.

Next we created two accounts, one as a normal user and one as a priviledged user. Keep in mind that these need to be added in SCOM to the Accounts and in Profiles to the Unix Action account and Unix Priviledged account profiles.

While running the discovery wizard we used the accounts and a root password for the discovery and we selected SSH based Discovery in the wizard (otherwise we can not get it to work, as we also found with the Solaris boxes before). During the deployment process it will use a su to elevate for some commands.

So what the discovery wizard will do at this point is try to resolve the host name of the linux box to an ip address. It will try to connect with SSH to the box using the credentials given. At that point it needs to find out what kind of agent would be needed, so it tries to deploy a script to the box. To get this done it first deletes a temporary folder if it exists and right after that (re)creates the folder. It is formed like this: /tmp/scx-username where the username part is what you entered in the discovery wizard. So this command is run to do that: rm -rf /tmp/scx-username ; mkdir -m 755
-> /tmp/scx-username (of course the username part is replaced by what you entered as user name).
Now the SCOM management server will try to push the file GetOSVersion.sh from its local file location at "c:\program files\system center operations manager 2007\agentmanagement\unixagents\" to the newly created /tmp/scx-username directory. It uses SFTP for this purpose.
Right after this step it does a verify of that file on the linux box, because SFTP does not give an acknowledgement that the file was transferred successfully.
AT this point we got an error in the discovery wizard. The file was not there in order to be verified, so it was not tranferred to the temporary folder on the linux box.

In troubleshooting we used several methods.
One very nice option is to enable logging for the cross plat by creating an empty file with the name "EnableOpsmgrModuleLogging" in the systems temp directory (usually C:\Windows\Temp) and you will see logfiles popping up there.

For instance during the initial discovery you see SCXNameResolverProbe.log telling you the name resolving process. Next the DeployFile.vbs.log was telling us that the deployment of the GetOSVersion.sh file was failing:

[2/18/2010 2:17:03 PM] Executing command: rm -rf /tmp/scx-username; mkdir -m 755 /tmp/scx-username
[2/18/2010 2:17:04 PM]
[2/18/2010 2:17:04 PM] Transferring file: C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\AgentManagement\UnixAgents\GetOSVersion.sh to location: /tmp/scx-username/
[2/18/2010 2:17:04 PM] Verifying that file: GetOSVersion.sh was transferred properly
[2/18/2010 2:17:05 PM] find: /tmp/scx-username/GetOSVersion.sh: No such file or directory
[2/18/2010 2:17:05 PM]

This was about the same message we got in the gui (when clicking details).

So at this point you would want it to find that file and run it in order to determine the linux/unix version of the machine. This is the point in the wizard where it will show you the machines and what it has determined the operating system is and if it has an agent for it etc with the question if you want to deploy the actual agent.

We also used the terrific tool DebugView from sysinternals which also gave us good information as to where in the process things stopped.

So if this is not working, what else can you test?
Well you can try to use WinScp to remotely connect ot the linux box from the management server. In our case this worked like a charm. It should just connect to the OpenSSH as being the server side and uses SFTP to connect to it is handled on port 22.

I also resorted to contacting Robert Hearn, who by the way has created a very good blog post about the discovery troubleshooting process where he encountered networking related problems during discovery while the target had several network cards. We actually also had this situation, but it turned out not to be our problem.

Robert gave some insights into the discovery wizard process which can be found in the Unix Library management pack.

After a while I decided to try another SFTP client and used Putty sftp. And to our surprise... failed! Connection is possible and it accepts username and password and immediately fails at that point. So the problem was at SFTP on the linux side. SFTP was not turned on in the SSH config!

In /etc/ssh/sshd_config remove the comment before Subsystem in order to enable it, like so:
# override default of no subsystems
Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server
After this run: service restart sshd

One quick check in WinScp revealed that winscp has a fallback connection option is sftp fails which is checked by default. It falls back to SCP is SFTP fails. When creating a new connection in winscp you will see the checkbox "Allow SCP Fallback" and just uncheck that one to force it to use the sftp channel no matter what.

Now it worked like a charm, transferred the file, discovered what taste of Linux it was and gave the possibility to install the agent.

So some tips (not all are needed in all cases):

• Make sure to create separate accounts for monitoring purposes
• Make sure you define them in SCOM and add them to the Unix action account and Unix Priviliedged accounts profiles
• A good check is to login directly with the scom priviledged action account to the linux machine using putty or some other means and to do a "su - root" and use the root password to see if it works. Is also a good check for passwords.
• We used both winscp and putty sftp clients to check if sftp worked. But beware that winscp uses a fallback to scp if sftp does not work. Uncheck the checkbox for fallback to scp.
• If it does not work enable sftp
• Make sure name resolving works. Both machines should be able to resolve eachothers name
• In most cases discovery errors occur due to networking (name resolution, routes, firewalls) or credentials

A big thank you also to my linux troubleshooting friends a customer site (Jan, Oleksandr and Gregory) and to Robert Hearn for getting things clear!

Bob Cornelissen

 

Microsoft released another Cumulative Update for SCOM R2 Cross Platform:

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Cumulative Update 2 (KB979490)

This is an update that must be run on Management Servers and Gateways and agents can be updated from there where needed. This update includes the update for Cross Plat from a while back and includes some more as well.

Below the description:

Overview
The System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Cumulative Update 2 includes System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform Agent Update (KB973583) and additional bug fixes.

Feature Summary:
This updated release includes all features that were in the previous update release (KB973583) and additional fixes in this release:
Adds support for (in previous release - KB973583):

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (both 32-bit and 64-bit)
• Zones (Whole and Sparse Zones) for all supported version of Solaris

Fixes for the following issues (in previous release - KB973583):

• The Operations Manager 2007 R2 Cross Platform agent intermittently creates defunct processes on the UNIX system or on the Linux system. This behavior occurs in the following scenario:
• The password for the account that connects to the server is changed on the UNIX system or on the Linux system. For example, the password for the UNIX Action account or the UNIX Privileged RunAs account is changed.
• The password is not updated on the Operations Manager Management server.
• When this problem occurs, the defunct processes (scxcimservera) continue to exist until the Cross Platform agent restarts. These defunct processes consume system resources.
• The Cross Platform agent may not discover soft partitions on supported Solaris systems. Therefore, the disk provider may be unloaded, and then the Cross Platform agent may stop collecting information from the system disks.
• The Cross Platform agent may not restart after the supported AIX server reboots.

Additional issues fixed in this release:

• The Log File provider rescans a file repeatedly if the size of the file has become smaller than last scan, generating old records and potentially causing performance issues on AIX computers and the Operations Manager Management server.
• When the Operations Manager Management server fails over to another Management server, alerts in the failed server’s log files may be re-generated and CPU load may increase significantly.
• The Cross Platform agent installed on a Solaris computer could stop working when the system configuration is changed. For example, when disks are added or removed on the Solaris computer.
• The Operations Manager agent stops working on computers running supported version of Solaris where Hot Spare Pool is declared by name and there is no disk association.
• The Operations Manager Management server fails to replace display string parameter while creating the alert for monitor state change.
• Operations Manager generates 'disk full' alerts when mounting UFS CDROMs on any supported version of Solaris.
• Certificate generation could fail when adding a new UNIX or Linux computer to the management group.

NOTE: This update does not apply to Management console-only installations. Installing this patch on a Management console-only system will cause the setup to complete and state that the installation was interrupted.

 

Microsoft released another update rollup for VMM:

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 hotfix rollup package: February 9, 2010

List of issues that are fixed

Issue 1

Consider the following scenario:

• A user is a member of the Self-Service User role.
• A new virtual machine is created, and the user is assigned the owner of the virtual machine.

In this scenario, the user cannot connect to the virtual machine by using the Self-Service Portal.

Issue 2

Consider the following scenario:

• A highly available virtual machine is offline.
• Quick Storage Migration is used to move the offline virtual machine to another storage location that is in the cluster.

In this scenario, the virtual machine does not migrate to another node that is in the cluster by using Quick Migration or Live Migration after Quick Storage Migration is used.

Issue 3

VMware virtual machines are not listed in the Virtual Machine Manager console if there are duplicate custom named tags in VMware Virtual Center.

Issue 4

Consider the following scenario:

• A new virtual machine is created, and the owner of the virtual machine is a member of the Self-Service User role.
• While the create virtual machine job is running, a user is added or removed from the Self-Service User role.

In this scenario, the user is not added or removed from the Self-Service User role because the create virtual machine job is running.

This rollup also includes the resolutions that are documented in the following article for a Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 hotfix rollup package:
976244 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976244/ ) Description of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 hotfix rollup package: November 10, 2009

 

Hello friends!
Finally it is time to download the DPM 2010 RC release candidate!
Have been eagerly waiting for it and to test some of the new features.
Get it while its hot!

Bob Cornelissen

 

The Windows Server Internet Information Services 7 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 has a new release. Main added feature is support for monitoring IIS on Windows 2008 SP2 and Windows 2008 R2. It can be downloaded from the MS download site and will be available through the online catalog.

Version: 6.0.7600.0
Date Published: 2/8/2010

From the download description:

Overview
This management pack provides an early warning to administrators on issues that could affect services so that administrators can investigate and take corrective action, if necessary. The management pack helps to simplify the administrative environment by providing a single console for the administrator to perform a number of useful management tasks. To help troubleshoot common issues, the management pack contains helpful product knowledge and a way to extend this knowledge through adding your own company or organization knowledge related to an issue.

Note: For System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 environment, hotfix K971541 or later is required in order to manage IIS 7 by using this management pack.

Feature Summary:
The IIS MP provides monitoring of the following objects:

Web Sites
Application Pools
FTP Servers
NNTP Servers
SMTP Servers

As always be sure to read the documentation and as stated above if you are running SCOM SP1 do not forget the hotfix mentioned!

Bob Cornelissen

 

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