The topic will be the upcoming release of System Center Operations Manager 2012.

See https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032484791&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US to register for the event.

The Data Access Service provides database access for the console, enables viewing the current state of a monitored object, importing management packs, storing management packs, and storing management group configuration information. It also writes event, state, and performance counter information to the database. The Management Configuration service manages relationships and topology of the OpsMgr environment. In addition, the RMS is responsible for dependency monitors, availability calculations, notifications, and group calculations.

Basically, if the RMS is down, your management group isn’t very functional. The RMS is a single point of failure. This can be alleviated by clustering it or promoting another management server to the RMS should the RMS be unavailable,  but it is not an optimal architecture.

Microsoft takes a different approach in Operations Manager 2012, and removes the
RMS role. Instead, there is a pool of management servers. The work previously performed by the RMS is managed by this pool, which is a logical grouping of multiple health services instances. In this peer-to-peer topology, all management servers act as equals. The workload is distributed across multiple management services. Should a management server in the pool become unavailable, its workload is moved elsewhere in the pool. This gives automatic fault tolerance and load balancing.

Operations Manager 2012 provides topology simplification by removing the RMS and introducing of the All Management Servers Pool. We look forward to its release!

Who doesn’t like something for nothing? Step right up and enjoy Dynamic Memory! A free upgrade on your Hyper-V host computers and some updating of your guest Windows operating systems can yield over a 50% increase in the number of VMs you can run per Hyper-V host computer. Microsoft released Windows 2008 R2 SP1 (the first service pack for Windows Server 2008 R2), adding the Dynamic Memory feature on March 15, 2011.

Here’s a chart of what Dynamic Memory is doing for us on two Hyper-V hosts in our Odyssey Lab. Notice we have about a 40% “boost” in effective memory capacity on these hosts, and memory is money folks!

Table 1 – Dynamic Memory with VMM 2008 R2 SP1

Dynamic Memory is an extreme value-add for current Hyper-V owners, who until now were limited by Window’s ‘share nothing’ approach to VM memory management. VMware ESX owners have had a memory overcommit feature for some time. Microsoft threw futile darts at the VMware approach, and after years of wait, adds a similar feature that lets virtualized Windows guests ‘see’ more total memory than is present on the physical host. Install Windows 2008 R2 SP1 using Windows Update or manually download the appropriate Windows 2008 R2 SP1 package at this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c3202ce6-4056-4059-8a1b-3a9b77cdfdda.

A must-read before deploying Windows 2008 R2 SP1 on Hyper-V hosts is the “Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Configuration Guide” at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817651(WS.10).aspx. That reference includes these important tables:

• Support for dynamic memory by guest OS: this usually requires updating the guest Windows OS to the latest service pack as well as updating the Hyper-V guest integration tools.
• Recommended startup memory by guest OS: rule of thumb: 128-MB for 32-bit OS and 512-MB for 64-bit OS.

Managing Dynamic Memory with Virtual Machine Manager

You cannot use the original version of SCVMM 2008 R2 to manage Dynamic Memory on Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V hosts. It is necessary to update SCVMM 2008 R2 to its own new service pack, SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 released March 24, 2011. Once SCVMM 2008 R2 is updated to SP1 along with Windows 2008 R2 updated to SP1 on your Hyper-V hosts, you gain a powerful consolidated view of the Dynamic Memory status of all your VMs. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the manageable attributes involving Dynamic Memory added by SP1 to SCVMM 2008 R2.

Figure 1 – New Dynamic Memory Settings

Notice that Startup Memory, Maximum Memory, Assigned Memory, Memory Demand, and Memory Status are displayed in the SCVMM console.

SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 allows you to create and deploy VMs onto Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V hosts, and will report on the memory currently in use for these VMs where Dynamic Memory is enabled. Using Dynamic Memory for supported VMs allows for more efficient utilization of memory, with consistent performance, and higher consolidation ratios.

Now, with SCVMM you can specify whether to use Dynamic Memory or not on a VM, and if dynamic, what the startup, maximum and buffer settings should be. Figure 2 displays where the Dynamic Memory feature is supported inside the New Hardware Profile wizard in SCVMM.

Figure 2 – Changing the Dynamic Memory Settings

After fully deploying SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1, and all necessary OS and integration updates, we have a full-up view in the Odyssey domain of all five of our current Hyper-V hosts and the 24 VMs running on them, merged into a single pane of glass—our private System Center development cloud, now more optimized than ever! This is displayed in Figure 3.

Figure 3 – The SCVMM Console showing all Hyper-V hosts and VMs

How to get SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1

There is no stand-alone upgrade package or Microsoft Update package for SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1. The only distribution vehicle for the service pack is in an integrated SP1 install of the complete SCVMM product, in licensed or evaluation editions. You can still do an in-place upgrade to SP1, but the download package is large—the whole, updated VMM product. The service pack is not available through Microsoft Update because there is an installer task that asks for DB credentials in order to update the VMM DB to contain the new settings for Dynamic Memory.

• Licensed owners of SCVMM 2008 R2 can download the SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 integrated install media from Microsoft Volume Licensing sites, MSDN, etc.
• If you want to evaluate SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1, the download page at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9189bbce-d970-4c6c-9dd3-9e65798ecd70 has links to several large downloads that combine into the complete install media

The release notes for SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 cover several minor issues, you can obtain them at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=14a0de11-cfa3-48d1-9dda-0a57b3408aa2&displaylang=en

Integration of SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 with SCOM 2007 R2

There is no change from SCVMM 2008 R2 and SP1 in terms of the integration experience. Run the SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 setup, Operations Manager integration portion, just like a new install. The SP1 integrated installer detects the upgrade environment and imports the updated SCVMM management packs.

The SCVMM 2008 R2 management packs are updated to version 2.0.4521.0, although the console views don’t expose any new Dynamic Memory features. For example, the Total RAM value in the SCVMM Virtual Machine view will always list the startup memory assigned to the VM and ignore any other Dynamic Memory related-values. (Also, for VMs with Dynamic Memory, the web-based SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 self-service portal only displays the amount of memory assigned for startup memory.)

Tip: After performing SCVMM to SCOM integration, remember to enable PRO Tip generation in the SCVMM console at Administration -> General -> PRO Settings, as well as at the Host Group level in SCVMM. Failure to enable PRO tips in both places will prevent receipt of those PRO notifications!

Announcements:

• ConfigMgr 2012 Beta 2 announced as available today (feature complete).
• Forefront Enterprise Protection moved from enterprise CAL to core CAL.
• Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring – adding to MDOP (MBAM in MDOP…) currently available in Beta, releasing this year – further integration into Configuration Manager is planned.
• Windows Intune general available announced today. From Brad Anderson: “It’s going to take some time to get up to parity with Configuration Manager”
• Manage & Secure PCs anywhere
• Get the best windows experience
• www.windowsintune.com<http://www.windowsintune.com

Other items of note:

• Managing Mobile Devices with ConfigMgr 2012: Using a connector working through Exchange Active Sync can now manage including Windows Phone 7, Android, iPad, iPhone, and Symbian.
• Demo: ConfigMgr 2012 which included wiping the data from a phone which was lost.
• Video: Showed VDI running through a PC where the user had been playing a movie. They logged into their VDI and had their application streamed to their VDI to run the application they needed (Visio 2010).
• Demo: Dynamic memory and it’s impacts on memory in a VDI environment using Xen Desktop.

This is a picture of a well-used copy of System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed someone brought by the booth:

Book signings are March 22 and 23, from 1:00-2:00 and 3:00-4:00 each day.

Announcements:

• System Center Advisor announced: Azure service previously code-named “Project Atlanta” uses the OpsMgr Agent to return configuration and make recommendations for changes to the configuration. This application was demonstrated during the keynote showing how a hotfix would be relevant for the servers and what has changed in the environment. Licensing – if you have software assurance on Windows Server you are licensed to use this on the server (or Exchange software assurance for Exchange servers). Beta currently available.
• The next version  of Opalis Integration Server is officially named System Center Orchestrator 2012.
• SCVMM 2012 beta announced.
• System Center 2012 officially announcement: Every product in the (System Center) portfolio will have new revisions in the next year.

Other items of note:

• Defining the Hyper-V Cloud: Windows Server Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center.
• Private cloud at MMS: The hands on labs (1,600 virtuals are provisioned in less than 10 minutes).
• Target stores case study video: Running Hyper-V & SCVMM with 15,000 virtual systems. Consolidating from 7 servers to 2 servers in the store locations. Discussion of one application for the pharmacy runs SUSE Linux – in Hyper-V.
• Demo: Concero (code-named): Self service portal for the service consumer. Provisioning with Virtual Machines, services, clouds. This application appears to be built on a Silverlight based UI.
• Demo: SCVMM 2012 & OpsMgr 2012: Michael Michael & Vlad Joanovic (Principal Program Manager Lead – Server and Cloud Product Management). Showed the SCVMM option to build the cloud over Xen, ESX and Hyper-V. Showed how SCVMM can communicate with bare metal systems for provisioning. OpsMgr 2012: Showing the health of the fabric in a distributed application including network, hardware and storage. Showed monitoring for network devices out of the box in OpsMgr 2012 including the state of the network connection and a dashboard view with gauges of usage for the network devices. Displayed voltage, temperature and more on the hardware.
• Brad Anderson: We are seeing the results in the OpsMgr 2012 network monitoring from the integration of EMC and Smarts. (OpsMgr 2012 enhanced network monitoring is based upon the EMC Smarts acquisition.)
• SCVMM 2012 service template: Service templates include the information required to deploy a service which can be deployed via self service user portals. The example service demonstrated was using Server App-V.
• Demo: AVIcode in OpsMgr 2012: Demo showed the new Application Dashboard functionality showing topology, Service Level Objectives, Perspectives and alerts. Showed the integration with AVIcode and how the .NET application can be debugged to a root cause through AVIcode – breaking down the transaction to determine where the slowdown was through the stored procedure which caused the performance issue. Also showed how dashboards can be published to SharePoint. Additional background discussion on how Xbox Live uses OpsMgr and AVIcode to monitor their environment.

Microsoft Codename “Atlanta” is a configuration-monitoring cloud service for Microsoft SQL Server deployments. Customers install an Atlanta gateway at each site where there are SQL Servers systems to monitor, and then install an Atlanta agent on each server. Each day the Atlanta agent connects to Microsoft via the Atlanta gateway at its site to upload configuration data. (If you only have one SQL Server, the Atlanta agent and gateway component go on the same computer.)

Microsoft servers in the Atlanta cloud analyze the uploaded data, and then provide feedback to the customer in the Atlanta console in the form of alerts about configuration issues detected. Atlanta’s mission statement is to be a proactive tool to help Microsoft customers avoid configuration problems, reduce downtime, improve performance, and resolve issues faster.

Impressions

Very useful for SQL admins and DBAs, Atlanta seems like a lot of product for a small task. In reality Atlanta is probably only the beginning step for delivery of Microsoft management services from the cloud. We expect in the future that applications in addition to SQL will be added to the Atlanta framework. Right now Atlanta is only a historical configuration-centric engine, there is no facility for real-time performance monitoring and alerting. The web-based Atlanta console itself is written with Silverlight, and is very similar to the look and feel of the Microsoft InTune console, Microsoft’s cloud-based management service for PCs.

Getting Atlanta up and running was very simple.  After signing in with a Windows Live ID and accepting the services agreement at https://www.microsoftatlanta.com, enter your name and company’s name then click “Create.”  Since all of your account data is tied to both your Windows Live ID and a certificate provided for download after registration, it is easy to have the managed SQL Server systems connect to your Atlanta account.  You don’t have to create any Active Directory accounts, manually generate or install any certificates, or set any permissions.  One drawback to this method of authentication is that, currently, only one Live ID can be connected to an account.  If you wish to allow your coworkers to login and browse the data that Atlanta has collected, you have to either share your Live ID and password or begin the setup process again with a new shared Live ID.

Complete data from the agents might take overnight before appearing in the Atlanta console.  The agents running on the SQL Server systems are the same as the Operations Manager 2007 R2 agent that may or may not already be installed, depending on whether you use System Center Operations Manager in your environment.  If the agent is already installed, the Atlanta setup wizard adds an additional management group configuration to the current agent. (More details later in this post.)

The data provided in the Alerts space of the Atlanta console is presented in a format similar to what you would find in the Operations Manager console; however the alerts contain a different type of information that you would find in OpsMgr.  Our installation of Atlanta found missing SQL updates, databases without clean consistency checks, and a missing service pack.  There was also an alert recommending the number of tempdb data files to be increased.  The alerting is similar to what would be found by the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer tool if run on a regular basis.

Figure 1. Alerts View.

Atlanta contains two other workspaces that show the configuration current snapshot as well as the configuration change history.  These spaces display data about each machine, operating system, SQL instance, and SQL database.  No data is displayed at the cluster level, although individual cluster nodes are supported and displayed like standalone servers. 

Figure 2. Configuration Current Snapshot Space.

Using these two spaces, you can quickly look up specifications of the server and its databases, as well as easily see when any of these change.  For example, you can see details such as databases that were added, or properties on databases that have changed. A report on SQL configuration changes is very useful in high-value and high-security environments.

Figure 3. Configuration Change History Space.

As mentioned, Atlanta uses the standard System Center Operations Manager 2007 agent as the Atlanta agent. If you already have OpsMgr 2007 R2 deployed, when the Atlanta agent is installed it will dual-home your OpsMgr agent to its original management group plus  to Atlanta. Atlanta stores its configuration data in the Windows Registry under its own HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Atlanta key. The registry key for the gateway component includes the thumbprint of the gateway certificate, which is installed as a service certificate for the ‘Atlgateway’ service. The Registry also contains the URLs of the Codename Atlanta web services in the Microsoft cloud the gateway talks with.

Figure 4. Codename Atlanta Gateway Registry and Certificate.

While Operations Manager uses .XML files to exchange data between its agents and management servers in real time, Atlanta uses a different technique.  Atlanta agents generate one or more .CAB files each day, which are staged on the local Atlanta gateway. The gateway collects all the agent .CAB files and exchanges information over the Internet using the cloud web service.

Figure 5. Codename Atlanta File System.

Learn More

For additional information about Atlanta, we suggest the following URLs.

Overviews:

• http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2010/11/11/configuration-assessment-from-the-cloud-with-microsoft-codename-atlanta.aspx
• http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/atlanta.aspx

Detailed Deployment Instructions: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/atlanta/ff962510.aspx
System Requirements: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/atlanta/ff962524.aspx
Planning Considerations: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/atlanta/ff962505.aspx

Contributor’s credit: Thanks to Brandon Ryan, DBA at ClearPointe, for his help in evaluating Microsoft Codename Atlanta.

Microsoft has announced immediate support for deploying a new Operations Manager 2007 R2 installation with SQL Server 2008 R2. Upgrading your R2 deployment from SQL Server 2005 SP 3 / SQL Server 2008 SP 1 to SQL Server 2008 R2 will be supported with a future cumulative update of Operations Manager 2007 R2.

For details on the steps to perform a new installation, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2425714.

There have been several Cumulative Updates for the OpsMgr 2007 R2 release, here is the first one for SP1. KB 2028594 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028594) lists issues resolved by this update:

• The Active Alerts report from the data warehouse includes auto-resolved alerts that are no longer active in the Operations Manager Console.
• The Generic performance report consumes lots of temporary database space and can fail in some instances.
• Agents taken out of maintenance mode revisit old entries in the Application log in certain cases. When this occurs, incorrect alerts are generated.
• When Antigen Enterprise Manager (AEM) is set up to use SharePoint, reports from Watson are blocked.
• Reports for Operation Manager 2007 SP1 fail when you use a shared data warehouse after you upgrade a Management Group to System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.
• Because of a thread-locking issue, the SDK service stops responding in certain cases.
• The color of the chart lines does not match the legend in Performance views when the Web Console is used.
• ACS stops collecting data when the event log uses auto-backup.
• The Alert View link in the notification emails shows the list of active alerts, instead of the detailed alert description.
• The allow anonymous discovery property in the Internet Information Services (IIS) Management Pack is incorrect in the console.
• Management Pack discoveries fail when a double-byte character exists in string data that is returned.

Before applying CU1, you must have already installed the SP1 Update (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971541/), which was a hotfix rollup and included support for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and SQL Server 2008. The update rollup can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05d7785d-fe69-48bc-8dfa-72a77c8936bf&displaylang=en.

CU1 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=62b6c324-38b9-47df-bd89-a62908f0b642&displaylang=en.

We were asked not too long ago if OpsMgr 2007 R2 is 508 compliant. Section 508 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act requires that individuals with disabilities have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to the access and use by those employees that are not disabled. This pertains specifically to federal agencies.

The good news is, yes OpsMgr 2007 R2 is Section 508 compliant, although that information is not in the Operations Manager section of Microsoft’s website – because Microsoft maintains information regarding 508 compliance for their products in a central location. For information about Microsoft products and section 508 compliance, see http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/products/section508.aspx.