SCOM Maintenance Mode Scheduler

Today I took the 70-400 Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, Configuring and passed with a 980. I was shooting for a 1000 and fell one question short.

* This event was Recorded on Thursday, April 30, 2009. *

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032409727&CountryCode=US

Agenda

– Deployment and Performance Best Practices

– High Availability and Disaster recovery Best Practices

– Virtualization Best Practices

– OpsMgr R2 Deployment and Upgrade

– Deployment Case Studies

In the MMS keynote today Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Server & Tools, announced that Operations Manager 2007 R2 RTM will be released in 30 days.

If you are not at MMS like me you can still catch the keynotes streaming online live at https://www1.mms-2009.com/public/Headlines.aspx

Today was

The Dynamic Datacenter
Tuesday, April 28, 8:30am–9:45am PDT (GMT-8)
Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Server & Tools

Tomorrow is

Managing Clients in a User-Centered World
Wednesday, April 29, 8:30am–9:45am PDT (GMT-8)
Brad Anderson, General Manager

You can also attend MMS virtually this year for $350 at

https://microsoft.crgevents.com/MMS-2009/Register/Contact/Default.aspx

which includes

• Live Webcast of the MMS 2009 Keynotes*
• Video Recordings of Breakout session topics**
• Downloadable PowerPoint slide decks from the Breakout sessions
• Hands-on Lab Manuals
• Sample files shared by Speakers
• Access to the MessagePoint system for online discussions with other attendees
• Copy of the MMS 2009 Post-show DVD set mailed shortly after the event (a $275 value)
• Copy of the MMS 2009 Hands-on Lab Walkthrough DVD mailed after the event (a $125 value)
• Access to all MMS 2009 Online content for 3 months after the event closes

An updated Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack has been released sorta.

**UPDATE**

The Management Pack has been updated on the site.

Here are the changes.

• Fixed performance issues caused by excessive CPU utilization and script timeouts from Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) queries in the following management pack discoveries: Discover SQL Server 2005 Database Engines (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2008 Database Engines (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (Windows Server), Discover SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services (Windows Server).

• Fixed an issue where SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services and Reporting Services discoveries were not reliably discovering these objects on instances of SQL Server that did not have the Database  Engine installed.

• Removed the hard-coded exception in rules and monitors that prevented the monitoring of the System, Temp, and Master databases.

• Improved the means by which database discoveries recognize autogrowth enabled settings. Database discoveries now recognize both “KB” and “%” growth settings; previously the database discoveries recognized only the “KB” growth setting.

• Corrected typographical errors in product knowledge and improved the quality of the text.

After downloading the MP I realized that the file is still the old version  6.0.6460.0.   Hopefully Microsoft will fix this.   I left feedback to mpgfeed@microsoft.com to let them know.

3/31/2009 – Updated version 6.0.6569.0, which provided a number of fixes. Refer to the MP guide for more details.

The beta software is now available for download on Microsoft Connect. To download, simply go to our site on Connect and sign in with your Live Id.

What is VMM 2008 R2 Beta and what are its new capabilities?

VMM 2008 R2 Beta is a comprehensive management solution for virtualized infrastructure that takes advantage of many of the great new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta including:

* Live Migration: Enables the movement of running virtual machines from one virtual host to another with no downtime.
* Clustered Shared Volumes: Helps enable Live Migration and eliminates the previous one LUN per virtual machine requirement thus simplifying SAN administration.
* Hot addition/removal of storage: Allows the addition and removal of new virtual hard disks (VHDs) and iSCSI pass-through disks running on virtual infrastructure.
* Networking optimizations: two new technologies — Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and Chimney – provide increased network throughput while reducing CPU load.

The Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) Management Pack monitors the health of NLB on computers that are running Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 to improve the availability, performance, and security of your Windows environment. This Management Pack requires OpsMgr 2007 MOM 2005 Backward Compatibility MP Update) 6.0.5000.12 (or higher).

Release History
8/6/2007 – Version 6.0.5000.0, Initial release of the English version,
2/24/2009 – Version 6.0.6505.0, Minor update to the management pack to support
side by side import with the new Windows Server 2008 NLB MP.

System Requirements
Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2003 x64
editions

OpsMgr 2007 MOM 2005 Backward Compatibility MP Update) 6.0.5000.12 (or higher)

Release Date: 2/24/2009
Version: (6.0.6505.0)

Download

I needed to schedule a group of URLs into Maintenance Mode.  I already created a script to schedule one URL but setting up 30 would be a pain to manage.  So I created a new script to schedule a group of URLs.

URLGroupMM.zip

Usage: 
C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe C:\URLGroupMM.ps1 -rootMS scomrms1 -group ‘AU 3AM Website Reboot Group’ -minutes 120 -comment ‘3AM AU Websites Reboot’ -reason ‘PlannedOther’

param($rootMS,$groupName,$minutes,$comment,$reason)

Add-PSSnapin “Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client” -ErrorVariable errSnapin;

Set-Location “OperationsManagerMonitoring::” -ErrorVariable errSnapin;

new-managementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:$rootMS -ErrorVariable errSnapin;

set-location $rootMS -ErrorVariable errSnapin;

$groupObject = get-monitoringobject | where {$_.DisplayName -eq $groupName};

$groupagents = $groupObject.getrelatedmonitoringobjects()

foreach ($agent in $groupAgents)

{

$URLStuff = $agent.displayname

$URLStuff

$URLWatcher = (Get-MonitoringClass -name Microsoft.SystemCenter.WebApplication.Perspective) | Get-MonitoringObject | where {$_.DisplayName -eq $URLStuff}

$startTime = [System.DateTime]::Now

$endTime = $startTime.AddMinutes($minutes)

“Putting URL into maintenance mode”

New-MaintenanceWindow -startTime:$startTime -endTime:$endTime -monitoringObject:$URLWatcher -comment:$comment -Reason:$reason

}

Marius Sutara just released a tool that resets the state of a monitor that is closed. This is huge help for my environment. We have rolled out SCOM to many application teams and it is often difficult for them to understand which monitors they can close (rule based) and which will close automatically (state based monitors).

Before this tool if the application owner thought a problem was fixed they would close the alert. If the problem wasn’t really fixed the monitor would stay in error and would never re-fire. If they looked in the alerts view, the alert was closed so they would never think there was still an issue.

With Marius’s tool now if anyone closes an alert from a state based monitor is still in error, the state will be reset and the alert will re-fire.Nice work Marius

http://blogs.msdn.com/mariussutara/archive/2009/02/02/how-to-reset-monitor-when-closing-alert.aspx

Download: SubscriptionTool.zip

Source Code: SubscriptionTool Source Code.zip

Subscription Tool is a simple GUI based tool that lets you enable and disable all notification subscriptions.   This tool is useful if you need to do some major maintenance such as patches, upgrading hardware, redoing AD integration roles, or fixing a major problem. 

The real power of the tool is when you want to re-enable the subscriptions.    The tool will automatically re-enable all subscriptions using “Send notifications for alerts Generated after the subscription is enabled”.  This will save you from sending out huge alert storms your notification subscriptions.

If you are not familiar with this, disable and then re-enable a subscription inside the ops mgr console.  You will notice when you re-enable the subscription you get the dialog box below.

You could enable and disable all subscriptions with powershell using

“Get-NotificationSubscription | Disable-NotificationSubscription”

But powershell uses the default  “Send notifications for alerts Generated since the subscription is disabled  (potentially causing an Alert Storm).   There are no options inside powershell to do this unless you leverage the .net objects directly.