OpsMgr 2007 OpsMgr 2012

Quick Demo – Add Windows Performance Collection Rule [#opsmgr, #mpauthoring]

February 21, 2013 – 09:25

By request, I uploaded a short clip demonstrating how you would add a windows performance counter to a performance collection rule using the Authoring Console.

It is a fairly simple task to complete but does require the Authoring Console, obviously, and a better target class than what I use in the demo. The demo also assumes that this counter exist on all the targeted servers in your environment. It would be wise, when making your management pack, to check that it’s there on all targeted operating systems, and that’s what I use Performance Monitor for. (just search for perfmon in your start menu or run perfmon.exe)

Enjoy.

Tags , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
OpsMgr 2012 PowerShell

OpsMgr 2012 Agent Failover – MS and GW “Load Balancer” [#opsmgr, #powershell]

September 4, 2012 – 12:00
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Operations Manager 2012 - Fail-over Management

I’m going to keep calling this a load-balancer, because I fail to come up with something better. Though, truthfully, it’s all about distributing your agents evenly among your Management servers or Gateway servers. This is an Operations Manager 2012 version of the “Load Balancing” Powershell Script for Operations Manager script for OpsMgr 2007. I have also made it faster, more intelligent and a little bit less prone to spit errors.

As with previous scripts, this is an example and a proof of concept as well as a good conversation starter at dinner-time. It will most likely need some tweaking and tuning before being tossed into production. You also have to make sure you understand what it does. I may not be an evil person, but I do make mistakes every now and then.

I haven’t outlined the script and explained everything I do in it, but a lot is logic, a bit of math or is explained in more depth in previous posts in this series.

read more »

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
OpsMgr 2012 PowerShell

OpsMgr 2012 Agent Failover – A Faster Script with Wildcards [#opsmgr, #powershell]

June 28, 2012 – 14:28
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Operations Manager 2012 - Fail-over Management

Now we’re gonna make things even faster! In the previous post on the subject of Agent Fail-over in Operations Manager 2012 we created a script that will go through a selection of agents and make sure that they all have up-to-date fail-over settings. We are doing the same thing in this one, but making it go faster. In my lab, it’s about five times faster in fact and I only have about 20 agents to play with. Not really a big deal, but scale it up a bit and add a few thousand agents and the pay-off will be very significant.

As usual, the script will work as is, but it really is more to show the concept. You would have to add filtering to make sure you don’t mix agents behind gateway servers and agents behind management servers. Giving an agent behind a gateway a management servers as it’s fail-over server will likely not help you in any way.

We will pretty quickly go “advanced” this time, so buckle up. ;)

read more »

Tags , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
OpsMgr 2012 PowerShell

OpsMgr 2012 Agent Failover – Simple Script with Wildcards [#opsmgr, #powershell]

June 21, 2012 – 10:58
This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Operations Manager 2012 - Fail-over Management

In the last post, OpsMgr 2012 Agent & Gateway Failover – The Basics, we looked at the basics of the Agent and Gateway fail-over configuration cmdlets and how to use them in a direct and interactive setting. This is absolutely useful when you got this specific agent that you need to configure with a specific fail-over management server.

To spice it up a little, we are going to add a little intelligence to it and enable wild-card selections while at it. The scenario we are building this script for is that now and then you want to make sure that certain agents have fail-over management servers configured. You also want to make sure that all management servers that are not the primary management server of any selected agent will be in that list of fail-over servers. This would include any new management servers as well as exclude any removed ones. In short, make sure your agent fail-over settings are up-to-date with the current environment.

read more »

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (1)
Technobabble

Menu Problems!

June 21, 2012 – 08:01

The menus are looking a bit off as you may have noticed.

I guess it’s an issue with WordPress 3.4 and Superfish and are trying to figure out where it goes haywire.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update!

I switched the theme to at least get the navigation working while I try to figure out what the problem with the regular theme is.

Tags | Permalink | Comment (0)
OpsMgr 2012 PowerShell

OpsMgr 2012 Agent & Gateway Failover – The Basics [#opsmgr, #powershell]

May 30, 2012 – 14:12
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Operations Manager 2012 - Fail-over Management

I have previously posted a few scripts on managing and configuring fail-over management servers on gateways and agents in System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Now that System Center 2012 Operations Manager is RTM and users are starting to explore the differences between the versions I see more and more questions on how you do, in OpsMgr 2012, what you did in OpsMgr 2007. In a few posts henceforth I will go through Agent and Gateway server fail-over configuration and management. In this first post I’ll look at the very basics of fail-over configuration, the cmdlets to use and some one-liners.

read more »

Tags , , , , | Permalink | Comment (1)
OpsMgr 2012

Load-balanced SCOM2012 SDK Services for Network Illiterates [#opsmgr, #nlb]

May 18, 2012 – 13:16

Prelude

Now that System Center Operations Manager no longer has that pesky Root Management Server role; a server role that in larger environments quickly became the choking point and made creating a fully Highly Available SCOM-environment both complex and frustrating to support and with little gain at that. With that gone and the SDK Service, or Data Access Service, thriving on all the Management Servers HA suddenly became pretty simple. All you have to do in SCOM2012 to make sure your management groups keep on kicking is to have at-least two Management Servers and your databases clustered.

This new distributed architecture does not only give easy HA, it also makes it possible to connect to the SDK-service—be it using the Operations Console or powershell to name two options—on any Management Server. This, in turn, provides for a completely new level of scalability. Choked on sessions? Deploy a new Management Server!

Anyway… given all this scalability and HA, would it not be nice if you could load-balance all these SDK-sessions you will be running from System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Service Manager, System Center Orchestrator, regular scheduled powershell scripts and what-not?

Of course it would! And you can! The simple solution is to use the built-in Network Load Balancer (NLB for short) feature in Windows Server and that’s what we’re going to discuss in this post.
Before we go, I’d like to point to a great article written by Justin Cook that is covering most bases but in a less for-dummies way. So, yeah… I suppose this is the for-dummies version then. ;)

Enjoy!

read more »

Tags , , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

Next Page »

Next Page »