When monitoring some Windows 2008 print servers I noticed that they weren’t detected by Operations Manager and the discovery of “Print Services Roles” in OpsMgr remained empty.
The registry key’s which are needed for the MP where available, the printers where installed and shared properly and the MP was imported correctly.
After some investigation I found that to monitor the print servers the “Print Services” role should be added on the print server. Once I did this and restarted the health servers everything worked properly.
See Kevin Holman’s blog for more information
Posted in Management Packs.
Tagged with Agent, Best Practice, Documentation, Management Packs, MP, OpsMgr, R2, SCOM, Script.
By Willemjan
– July 23, 2010
As posted in my previous post Windows 2008 default enables hibernation.
This timed script is designed to monitor on which servers the hiberfil.sys is active and run a console task to disable this.
This is an example how to use a timed script two state monitor to monitor a file exists. If the file hiberfil.sys exists the monitor is in error state.
Create the Two State Monitor
- Go to authoring, monitor and create a new unit monitor
- Choose Timed Script Two State Monitor
- Give it a name, target it to ““Windows Server 2008 Operating System” and set parent monitor to “Availibility”
- Schedule it when to run (we used every week)
- Input the script below
‘ check if hiberfil.sys is available
‘ and create a alert when its there
Dim oAPI, oBag
set oAPI = CreateObject(“MOM.ScriptAPI”)
set oBag = oAPI.CreatePropertyBag()
set objFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)
strFile = “C:\hiberfil.sys”
If objFSO.FileExists(strFile) Then
Call oBag.AddValue(“Status”,”Error”)
Call oAPI.Return(oBag)
Else
Call oBag.AddValue(“Status”,”Ok”)
Call oAPI.Return(oBag)
End If
- As unhealthy expression input “Property[@Name='Status'] equals Error”
- As healthy expression input “Property[@Name='Status'] equals Ok”
- Fill in the proper alert settings
Create the “console task”
- Go to the authoring pane, Tasks and create a new task
- Select Agent Tasks, Command line
- Fill in the following commands
After this is finished the OpsMgr server will generate an alert when the Hiberfil.sys file is active and you can disable hybernation from the console!
Posted in Rules and Alerts.
Tagged with Agent, Documentation, Management Packs, MP, OpsMgr, performance, R2, SCOM, Script, Step by step, System Center Essentials 2010.
By Willemjan
– July 22, 2010
The system drive of Windows 2008 consumes a lot of disk space which can be a problem; especially when you use a small c:\ partition (smaller than 40 GB). This article describes how to cleanup files which are not necessary.
-Windows Server 2008 Hibernation
It looks like Windows 2008 Server enables hibernation by default. This is quite interesting since I’m not sure how many people actually hibernate a server. Nevertheless, it’s something we need to deal with. Particularly for those (like me) who do most of their work in VMs.
As you may know, Windows creates a file named hiberfil.sys in the root of the system drive for systems where hibernation is enabled. The hiberfil.sys file is always the same size as physical RAM. In a VM where hibernation is normally replaced with the VM software’s suspend feature, that can be quite a sizeable chunk of wasted space. In a production environment I would normally want to disable hibernation, too.
Trouble is, you can’t disable hibernation anywhere in the GUI. It must be disabled from the command line using the command:
powercfg.exe /hibernate off
This is further documented in the following MS KB articles:
Also see my blog post on how to monitor the hibernation settings with OpsMgr.
-WINSXS Folder
After the installation of Windows 2008 server, the WINSXS directory consumed 3 Gb of disk space. After a while and several updates this folder growed to 10 Gb.Windows 2008 stores all language versions for all DLLs it downloads in the normal updating process. Just deleting stuff there is described as mortally dangerous as it contains vital components.
After installing SP2 (which comes with compcln.exe) you can run this tool and it will clean unnecessary updates.
You can run compcln.exe to cleanup the WINSXS folder.
Posted in Operating System.
Tagged with Best Practice, Disk use, Documentation, performance, Windows 2008.
By Willemjan
– July 22, 2010
Lots of people work with the SLD 2.0 of SCOM 2007 R2. What lots of people don’t know that you can monitor thresholds and monitor the health of the environment with the built-in components of the Service Level Dashboard as shown in the picture:
Next steps are to create a dashboard to monitor if the Processor, Memory and Disk are performing within the threshold we going to set.
First step is of course to install the SharePoint WSS features and the SQL dashboard. Steps to install the software are described in the documentation of the SLD dashboard; this is not covered in this document.
- Create a new “Service Level Tracking” item
- Give it a name; in this example it’s called “Disk Usage”
- Next
- Select a class of object to target “Windows Server 2008 Operating System”
- Scope it to “Agent Managed Computer Group”
- Select a management pack to save the data
- Next
- Choose Add; “Collection rule SLO”
% Processor Time
Service level objective name:
- % Processor Time
Targeted class
- Windows Server 2008 Operating System
Performance collection rule
- Processor % Processor Time Total 2008
Aggregation Method
- Avarage
Service level objective goal:
- Less Than 40
Available MBytes
Service level objective name:
- Available Megabytes
Targeted class
- Windows Server 2008 Operating System
Performance collection rule
- Memory Available Megabytes 2008
Aggregation Method
- Avarage
Service level objective goal:
- More Than 300
Available MBytes
Service level objective name:
- Available Megabytes
Targeted class
- Windows Server 2008 Operating System
Performance collection rule
- Memory Available Megabytes 2008
Aggregation Method
- Avarage
Service level objective goal:
- More Than 300
After these steps we have to insert the KPI’s in the SharePoint site.
- Open the “http://localhost/default.aspx” site on the SharePoint site server
- Edit the “Hidden Dashboard Configration”
- Select the “Hidden Dashboard Configuration” and select the counters you want to see.
- Browse to http://localhost/default.aspx and you see the dashboard as shown below
Posted in OpsMgr 2007 R2, Reporting.
Tagged with Best Practice, Dashboard, Documentation, Download, KPI, OpsMgr, R2, SCOM, SharePoint, SLA, SLO.
By Willemjan
– July 16, 2010
Starting with the installation of SQL 2005 last year i noticed that the options with SQL 2008 R2 are much more comprehensive especially the reporting functions are very good. So let’s upgrade to 2008 R2.
Before taking the upgrade start with good backups of the databases, the SQL server and all the OpsMgr components.
1. Back up all databases
2. Be sure to only upgrade with OpsMgr R2 (if possible minimal Cumulative Update 2)
3. Upgrade Database components (OperationsManager, OperationsManagerDW and the ACS database)
4. Upgrade the Operational database to SQL 2008
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 adds support for using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for your databases. If you currently are using SQL Server 2005, you need to perform some steps on your Operations Manager 2007 data before and after you upgrade your SQL Server installation. Two tools are provided on the R2 installation media to facilitate the upgrade. These tools are also included in SP1 update rollup 971541 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167911) if you are upgrading from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 with Operations Manager 2007 SP1.
To inplace upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 R2
- Go to the reporting server and Run the SRSUpgradeTool program. This tool saves and restores three configuration files that were modified during Operations Manager 2007 Reporting installation. Run the following command from a command prompt: SRSUpgradeTool.exe /InstanceName:<InstanceName> /Action:PreSQLUpgrade
Instance name is the name of the SQL instance that houses the reporting database example: SRSUpgradeTool.exe /InstanceName:MSSQLSERVER /Action:PreSQLUpgrade
Note that the SRSUpgrade tool should be from at least the Cumulative Update 2 version
- Restart the SQL Server Reporting services service
- Upgrade the SQL Server 2005 installation to SQL Server 2008 R2, using the procedures outlined in the SQL Server 2008 product documentation (this is just a next next finish upgrade)
- If you have a separate reporting server also upgrade this server.
- After the upgrade it’s best to run a SQL query to clean up the localizedtext and publishermessage tables.
The cleanup script (cleanup.sql) can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/library/dd789073(en-us).aspx.
The implace upgrade to SQL 2008 R2 of the OpsMgr servers worked like a charm! No issues or strange things.
Posted in Best Practice.
Tagged with Best Practice, Documentation, MP, OpsMgr, Planning, R2, SCOM, Step by step, Update.
By Willemjan
– July 14, 2010
