Monthly Archives: May 2015

The future of SCOM: Customer Feedback Survey

The SCOM team over at Microsoft is looking for your feedback! If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I with SCOM had feature X” as I’m sure many of us have this is the time to have your voice heard. This is where cool stuff like the built in maintenance mode feature in the upcoming SCOM 2016 comes from.

Link to the Survey request – here

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SCOM: Updated Windows Server Print Server MP v6.0.7294.0

Microsoft has released a new version of the Windows Server Print Server MP version 6.0.7294.0 is available for download here.

New in this version:

  • Version 6.0.7294 of the Management Pack for Windows Print Server supports Print Clusters.
  • Removed “Microsoft.Windows.Server.PrintServer.mp” since we have dropped support for Windows server 2003.  Please ignore all sections in this document related to Windows Server 2003 / Microsoft.Windows.Server.PrintServer.mp.

Kevin Holman has more in this management pack here with a  warning for those of you with large print environments.

 

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SCOM 2012: Veeam announces beta for Veeam Management Pack v8

Veeam has announced the beta for version 8 of their Veeam Management Pack for System Center.

v8 is available for download here.

Here is a brief rundown of the new features in addition to overall tuning and general improvements :

Sphere 6.0 support – pretty much self explanatory

The Morning Coffee report – Veeam MP’s new Infrastructure Summary report provides a single overview report to check the status of the entire environment.

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Hybrid Cloud Capacity Planning report  – The report now offers updated analytics with improved logic and accuracy.

Checkpoint/vSphere snapshot tracking – Now includes a heatmap to assist in quickly identifying storage-related performance issues across the entire virtual environment

Support for SMB shares for Hyper-V – SMB shares can now be seen in the Storage Topology view, with drill-down to the virtual machine (VM) level.

For more information check out Veeams site.

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Management Pack Recap – April 2015 Wave

This is a summary of the wave of Management Packs that were released in April 2015. Information and download location in the links provided:

Cisco IMC MP version 1.2(1)here

DPM 2012 R2 MP V 4.2.1276.0here

NiCE Log File MP v1.30here

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V MP v7.1.10107.0here

Windows Server Storage Spaces 2012 R2 MP v1.1.253.0here

If you know of any other Management Packs that have been released recently that I may have missed leave me a note in the comments and I’ll add them.

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SCOM 2016: Management Packs for Open Source Software

Another addition addition with Technical Preview 2 for SCOM 2016 is the inclusion of a management pack for Open Source Software.

is is available for download here

Currently the following products are supported:

  • Apache HTTP Server 2.2 – 2.4
  • MySQL Server 5.0 , 5.1, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7 / MariaDB 5.5, 10.0

Guides are available detailing the current capabilities of the management packs.

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The future of SCOM, learnings from the technical preview.

A question I’ve often posed regarding SCOM is, “Why do should we be using 3rd party utilities to perform certain functions?” and the one that comes up most frequently is scheduling maintenance mode.

Well it’s finally here and i’m not surprised to see it as the first feature cropping up in the community blogs, as it is exciting, we’re finally getting the ability to create maintenance mode schedules from inside the product.

You can find this feature under the administrators node in the console.

I for one am certainly looking forward to see what other surprises are in the System Center goodie bag, more to follow.

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SCOM “2016”: Technical Preview 2

Microsoft has announced Technical Preview 2 for the upcoming System Center 2016.

The VHD for SCOM is available for download here a link to the other System Centers products is under the details section.

New features in System Center 2016 technical preview 2 include:

  • Improved Linux management, including Desired State Configuration (DSC) support, native SSH support, and improved LAMP stack monitoring.
  • Software Defined Datacenter management, including mixed mode cluster upgrades, enhanced Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) management, and deployment of software-defined networking (SDN) at scale.
  • New monitoring capabilities for Azure, Office365, SQL Server and Exchange.

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