Veeam now has their own conference in Vegas called VeeamOn.  I really miss the MMS conference in  Las Vegas.  If you are involved in Virtualization, Business Continuity (DR / Backups) then this is the conference for you.  They are hosting it at the Cosmopolitan which is located in new part of the strip,

October 6th -8th

Veeam has large lineup of  sessions for the following tracks

 Here are the Technical Sessions I find most interesting

· Introducing the Veeam Management Pack for Hyper-V

· Upgrading to Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V the Right Way

· Veeam Management Pack: More Than Just System Center Operations Manager

· What Is the Ultimate Backup Storage Architecture?

· Advanced Capacity Planning and Performance Management with Veeam

· vSphere and Hyper-V: Architecting Data Protection Between the Two Hypervisors

· Advanced SQL Server Backup and Recovery with Veeam

· Automation for All! PowerShell Tricks That Make Everyday Life Easier

· Backup and Restore Best Practices for Linux VMs

· Backup Bottleneck Technical Deep Dive

· Deduplication Any Way You Want It!’

· Deep Dive: Veeam Backup Management Suite

· Deploying Veeam ONE in Large Environments: Tips and Tricks

· Integrate Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 with Veeam!

· ONEbelievable tricks: Veeam ONE and Automation Services

· PowerShell and RestFUL API: Ten Things That You Cannot Do with the GUI

Who should attend VeeamON 2014?

VeeamON is the world’s first and only event focused entirely on availability of applications and data. The conference is geared for both Veeam customers and partners. The wide variety of breakout sessions across multiple tracks offers valuable content for all conference attendees. As an IT professional, you will learn new techniques, deep-dive into products, connect with like-minded peers and get next-level advice and detailed strategies to achieve non-stop service and continuous availability for your applications and data. If you are a Veeam Partner, you will have access to a day devoted to growing your business and learn how to more strategically position Veeam in your product portfolio.

The conference is open to everyone; you don’t have to be a current Veeam partner or customer.

Click Here for More Information

The Office 365 Management Pack has been released and  is now available.

Download: Link

Features:

• Add and configure Office 365 subscriptions to be monitored in Operations Manager
• Proactively monitor connection health for subscriptions
• Automatically discover services and features available for each subscription
• Proactively notify when Office 365 Incidents that affects services operational status appear, being changed or resolved
• Reflect Office 365 Incidents and informational Messages for the subscription to Operations Manager alerts
• Intuitively visualize subscriptions health and corresponding alerts via dashboard.

In some environments it’s difficult to predict the state of the Default Website and IIS where SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler gets installed.  There might be a group policy or a standard process that your IIS team uses to configure IIS.  In these environments the Maintenance Mode 2012 Config tool might throw an error.  We will need to do a Manual Install in these environments.

Manual Install Process

Run the SCOM 2012 MSI and do a standard install.

Instead of using the  Maintenance Mode 2012 Config tool.

Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.  This tool is located under Control Panel\System and Security\Administrative Tools

Expand your servers name and click Application Pools

Right click on Application Pools and click Add Application Pool

Name the Application Pool MMWebAPPPool

After the App Pool is created right click on it and pick Advanced Settings

In Advanced Setting, scroll down and select Identity.  Click the … next to ApplicationPoolIdentity

Select the Custom account: radio button.  Then click Set..

Type in the domain\username of your SDK account and type the password twice.

Click OK, OK, OK

In IIS Manager Expand Sites, Default Web Site and click on MMWeb

Right click on MMWeb and click Convert to Application

Click Select.  Under Application pool select MMWebAPPPool

Click OK and OK

Open up Internet Explorer and type in the address to the Admin page.  (Replace yourserver with the hostname of your server)

http://yourserver/MMWeb/Admin.aspx

On the Admin page type in your SDK account, Password, MS Server, and OperationsManager DB Server

Click Save

Now in Internet browse out to the Maintenance Mode Scheduler Web Page

http://yourserver/MMWeb

I

f you get a Trial has Expired.  E-mail me at timothymcfadden@scom2k7.com.com for a new 30 day key. 

Computer Maintenance Mode

In this scenario a SQL Admin will be performing maintenance on a SQL server at 2:00am on Sunday. During maintenance, services might be stopped or the server might be rebooted. The admin opens Maintenance Mode Scheduler and schedules a maintenance window for this time frame so that alerts for the SQL server don’t get sent to himself or other IT support staff.

1.) Open the Maintenance Mode Scheduler Website in Internet Explorer. http://yourMSserver/MMWeb

2.) Pick the Computer to Schedule for Maintenance Mode.

3.) Under Start Time; Pick the time and date for Maintenance Mode on the computer to Start.

4.) Under End Time; Pick the time and date for Maintenance Mode on the computer to finish.

5.) Under Frequency choose how often Maintenance Mode should run.

a. Once – Run just once.

b. Daily – Run every day at the Start Time selected.

c. Weekly – Run every week on the day/time selected for Start Time.

6.) Under Category choose the category (Planned or Unplanned) to specify the maintenance mode.

7.) Under Comment: Type in an Optional Comment.

8.) Verify the job has been created on the SCOM server by going to Task Scheduler

9.) Test by right clicking on the job and selecting Run.

10.) Look in the console and verify that the server has went into maintenance mode

11.) Right click on the server click Maintenance Mode and Select Stop Maintenance mode.

12.) Scheduled Maintenance Mode will now run at the specified time on the correct server.

Group Maintenance Mode

In this example, a Network Admin needs to perform maintenance on a network segment of Exchange Servers. The Maintenance will be performed on Sunday at 2:00am and the network will be down. To do this, open the Maintenance Mode Scheduler and schedule a maintenance window for the Exchange Servers Group. With the maintenance window scheduled, alerts won’t be sent to the Exchange Admin or other IT support staff.

1.) Open the Maintenance Mode Scheduler Website in Internet Explorer. http://yourMSserver/MMWeb/Group.aspx

2.) Pick the Group to Schedule for Maintenance Mode.

3.) Under Start Time; Pick the time and date for Maintenance Mode on the group to Start.

4.) Under End Time; Pick the time and date for Maintenance Mode on the group to finish.

5.) Under Frequency choose how often Maintenance Mode should run.

a. Once – Run just once.

b. Daily – Run every day at the Start Time selected.

c. Weekly – Run every week on the day/time selected for Start Time.

6.) Under Category choose the category (Planned or Unplanned) to specify the maintenance mode.

7.) Under Comment: Type in an Optional Comment.

One Click Maintenance Mode

This situation makes it easy for IT staff to put a server into maintenance mode without having to go to the SCOM console. On any server the server administrator can visit the SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler One Click website at http://yourMSserver/MMWeb/OneClick.aspx

Creating a shortcut on the desktop of the servers to make it even easier.

Options for this are:

• Manually create the shortcut.

• Use System Center Configuration Manager, AD Group Policy or some other software deployment tool to deploy the shortcut out to all servers.

1.) Open the One Click Maintenance Mode Scheduler Website from the server to put into maintenance mode in Internet Explorer. http://yourserver/MMWeb/OneClick.aspx

2.) The server is automatically put into maintenance mode for 60 minutes.

Class Maintenance Mode

In this setting a Unix/Linux Admin is performing maintenance on a Linux server on Saturday at 4:00AM. During the outage the server will be rebooted and the admin does not want to alert the NOC or the on-call engineer.

1.) Open the Maintenance Mode Scheduler Website in Internet Explorer. http://yourMSserver/MMWeb/Class.aspx

2.) Pick the Class for the type of object. Pick Microsoft.Linux.Computer

3.) Under Object: Pick the Linux Computer to Schedule for Maintenance Mode.

4.) Under Start Time; Pick the time and date for Maintenance Mode on the Linux computer to Start.

5.) Under End Time; Pick the time and date for Maintenance Mode on the Linux computer to finish.

6.) Under Frequency choose how often Maintenance Mode should run.

a. Once – Run just once.

b. Daily – Run every day at the Start Time selected.

c. Weekly – Run every week on the day/time selected for Start Time.

7.) Under Category choose the category (Planned or Unplanned) to specify the maintenance mode.

8.) Under Comment: Type in an Optional Comment.

Subscription Maintenance Mode

In this scenario full backups are performed every night that create a flood of alerts for the Windows Team Pager. The team would like to not get alerted during this time. They have a complex subscription with individual monitors and rules for their alerts. Creating and maintaining individual groups for maintenance mode is too complex. They would like to just put the subscription into Maintenance Mode so they don’t get alerted in the middle of the night.

**Note: The individual objects will still change state and create alerts that will not be sent to the subscription during the maintenance window. You can choose to send the alerts after the maintenance window or to discard the alerts using the Queue Alerts option.

1.) Open the Maintenance Mode Scheduler Website in Internet Explorer. http://xom01/MMweb/Subscription.aspx

2.) Pick the Subscription to Schedule for Maintenance Mode.

3.) Under Start Time; Pick the time and date for Maintenance Mode on the subscription to Start.

4.) Under End Time; Pick the time and date for Maintenance Mode on the subscription to finish.

5.) Under Frequency choose how often Maintenance Mode should run.

a. Once – Run just once.

b. Daily – Run every day at the Start Time selected.

c. Weekly – Run every week on the day/time selected for Start Time.

6.) Under Queue Alerts choose whether or not to send the alerts queued up during the maintenance window

a. No – Do not send alerts that happened during the maintenance window

b. Yes – Save alerts that happened during the maintenance window and send them when the window is over with

7.) Under Comment: Type in an Optional Comment.

8.) You may notice that when creating a subscription maintenance window it creates two jobs. This is normal as it creates a job to start the subscription maintenance windowsand one to stop the subscription maintenance window.

Manage Maintenance Mode Jobs

In this example an Admin has created a maintenance mode job that they no longer want to run. The job they want to delete is a re-occurring Sunday 3AM Maintenance Mode on all of their servers.

1.) Open the Maintenance Mode Scheduler Website in Internet Explorer.

http://yourMSserver/ MMWeb/Manage.aspx

2.) Pick the Manage to Manage Maintenance Mode Jobs

3.) Under Jobs; Pick the job “All Windows Computers – 60 minutes Maintenance Mode – Sunday 3AM Updates”

4.) Click the Delete Button

5.) For Subscriptions delete both the Begin and End jobs.

Requirements:
The Maintenance Mode Scheduler must be installed on a SCOM 2012 RTM, SP1, or R2, Management Server that has the Operations Console and Web Console installed.

1.) Copy the SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler.msi file over to the Management Server.

2.) Right click and choose Run as Administrator

Note: In some environments Run as Administrator may not show up. In this case just click Install

3.) Click Next

4.) Read and Accept the License Agreement, then click Next

5.) On the Ready to Install screen click Install

6.) Click Finish

7.) On the Desktop you will see a wrench Icon called Maintenance Mode 2012 Config.

8.) Right click on the icon and choose Run as Administrator.

9.) The configuration screen will automatically populate the Management Server, Operations Manager DB Server, Database Name, and Domain.

10.) Type in the username and password of the System Center Data Access Account (SDK)

  Note: You can also create a new AD user that is a member of the local administrators, SCOM Admins, and have read access to the Operations Manager Database.

11.) Click OK

12.) On the complete screen click Start to Launch the Maintenance Mode App

Import the SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler Management Packs (Optional)

These Management pack were created with the help of SCOM Expert Tao Yang. http://blog.tyang.org/

More info on the Monitoring MP can be found here. http://bit.ly/1m9bE6m

1.) Make sure you are running SCOM 2012 R2 UR2. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2929891

2.) Open the SCOM Console and Select the Administration Pane.

3.) Under Management Packs. Right click and select Import Management Packs

4.) Select Add From disk

5.) Select No on the Online Catalog Connection dialog

6.) Browse out the MM Scheduler install directory. C:\Program Files\SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler\Management Packs

7.) Select both the Dashboard and Monitoring Management Packs.

8.) Click the install button.

I believe that core to any monitoring system is the ability to send out accurate alerts.  SCOM sends out many valuable alerts but will flood e-mail boxes and paging systems during maintenance windows.

Here are the new features in V3 that will help address this problem:

• Schedule Subscriptions for maintenance mode.  Most organizations only use the alerts from SCOM.  Now you can schedule your complex subscriptions into maintenance mode.  You can choose to send the alerts that were queued up or discard them.
• International Date format of DD/MM/YYYY now supported
• New Integrated Dashboard with the help of Tao Yang
• Removed resource pools from the list of groups
• Changed default start time to only 2 minutes ahead instead of 5
• Check to verify start time hasn’t already passed
• Minor bug fixes

Read about all the features of the SCOM 2012 Maintenance mode scheduler here: Link

Schedule Subscriptions for Maintenance Mode

International Date Format

New Integrated Dashboard

We believe that core to any monitoring system is the ability to send out accurate alerts. SCOM sends out many valuable alerts but will flood e-mail boxes and paging systems during maintenance windows.  We set out to build a maintenance mode scheduler that anyone can quickly and easily use to prevent these floods of useless information.

Features:

• Easily access the new web based maintenance mode scheduler from any browser.
• End users will thank you at how easy it is to pick a computer, group, object, and even a subscription with a start time and end time. The app calculates the minutes for them and schedules a future maintenance window.
• The manage tab will make it easy to see and manage any upcoming maintenance windows and identify any gaps.
• The new integrated dashboards make it feel like the scheduling maintenance mode was always there.

Running SCOM 2016?  Click here for our new 2016 version

Groups

Schedule a group of Computers, Databases, or any objects in the group into maintenance Mode.

One Click Maintenance Mode

Another great feature is the ability to do one click maintenance mode from any server.  This means is you can place the same shortcut on the desktop of your all your servers.  With one click, the IT administrator can put the server into maintenance mode.

After the shortcut is clicked, the web page automatically detects what server you are on and puts the server into Maintenance Mode with no interaction.

Dashboards Integrated Into The SCOM Console

Subscriptions

Most organizations only use the alerts from SCOM.  Now you can schedule your complex subscriptions into maintenance mode.  You can choose to send the alerts that where queued up or discard them.

Manage any upcoming maintenance windows and identify any gaps

Windows 8 App

The Windows 8 app can be download from the Windows App Store.  It uses the existing the same infrastructure and web service as the Web based version.

Download Now from the App Store

Any problems, bugs, or issues please e-mail:  support@scom2k7.com.com

Related Posts

SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler Installation Guide – https://www.scom2k7.com//scom-2012-maintenance-mode-scheduler-installation-guide/

SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler User Guide – https://www.scom2k7.com//scom-2012-maintenance-mode-scheduler-user-guide/

Securing SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler – https://www.scom2k7.com//securing-scom-2012-maintenance-mode-scheduler/

With the release of V2 I began building a management pack to collect the event logs created by the Maintenance Mode Scheduler and display them in the console.   Recently SCOM guru Tao Yang e-mailed me about his MP that provided similar functionality with more features then I had imagined.

I am making this my official management pack for the SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler.

Full Blog post with download can be found on his site.   http://blog.tyang.org/2014/05/22/management-pack-scom-2012-maintenance-mode-scheduler/

Features Include:

• Auto Cleanup of past maintenance mode jobs that were set to run once. 
• State View to see state of SCOM Maintenance Mode Scheduler.  It also validates the account has local admin permissions and a valid password.

• Event View for New Jobs and Jobs that were Auto cleaned up 
• Task to Launch the Web Console.

• Dashboard View using the new PowerShell widgets 
• Report on New Jobs

If you are using the SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler.  I highly recommend you checking this out.

All credit goes to Tao Yang.  Thank you for creating such an awesome MP.

SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler 2 is an all new web based maintenance mode scheduler built from the ground up for SCOM 2012, SP1, and R2.

The new web based scheduler simplifies the process of scheduling maintenance mode for SCOM administrators and IT staff.  You can easily schedule a computer group or any object to maintenance mode in seconds.

Once the app is installed and configured.  All you need to do is visit the SCOM Maintenance Mode web page and select the computer, group or class object you want to schedule.  Pick a start time, end time, and then click schedule; the app will automatically calculate the minutes for you.

New in Version 2

• Auditing of who and when a scheduled maintenance mode job is created
  
• New tool to easily secure and manage who has access to SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler
  
• Added Ability to Hide Tabs to simplify the tool using the new Administration Page
• Added Ability to enable and disable Schedule Jobs
• Removed other tasks from showing up on the Manage Page
• Minor bug fixes

 Download V2 Free Trial

Auditing of who and when a scheduled maintenance mode job is created.

New tool to easily secure and manage who has access to SCOM 2012 Maintenance Mode Scheduler

Added Ability to Hide Tabs to simplify the tool using the new Administration Page

Added Ability to enable and disable Schedule Jobs