System Center

All posts concerning the System Center suite including but not limited to Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Service Manager, Data Protection Manager and Orchestrator. Quite often, posts relating to Hyper-V will crop up here due to the link with Virtual Machine Manager.

System Center Service Manager 2012 R2 Data Warehouse Reports Unavailable

Richard Green on

Late last week, I had the pleasure of deploying and configuring a System Center Service Manager 2012 R2 Data Warehouse. I got informed today that none of the reports were available in the Reporting tab in SCSM so I had a look at what the problem might be.

With the SCSM Data Warehouse, the most important job during setup is one of the Data Warehouse Jobs named MPSyncJob. The MPSyncJob has the purpose of deploying all of the management packs from SCSM into the reports folders in SQL Reporting Services (SSRS).

When I looked at this job in the Data Warehouse Jobs tab under Data Warehouse in the SCSM Console, 175/181 has the status Associated but 6 of them were stuck with the status Pending Association and these were all the reporting management packs with this status. Viewing the Management Packs tab under Data Warehouse in the SCSM Console, I could see that these same 6 management packs had a Deployment Status of Failed which is obviously not good.

I logged on to the SCSM Data Warehouse server and poked into the Operations Manager log which is where SCSM records all it’s events and there were a number of critical alerts in the log with the Event Source Deployment and the message went along the lines of insufficient permissions to complete the requested operation so I knew immediately there was a permissions issue with SSRS. I headed over to the SSRS Report Manager URL which normally looks like https://SERVERNAME.domain.suffix/Reports_InstanceName and logged in as myself.

Viewing the permissions on the System Center and Service Manager report folders, I quickly could see that the account that I specified during the setup of the SCSM Data Warehouse was missing, the installer had not properly assigned the permissions to the account.

I manually added the permissions to the account and restarted the deployment of the management packs in a failed state and the Operations Log has now reported that they have successfully been deployed, happy days. Now I just need to wait for SCSM to complete all of the other jobs in the appropriate order to get the full functionality through from our Data Warehouse.

 

SCOM Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions

Richard Green on

If you’ve ever been responsible for the management or monitoring of a Hyper-V virtualization platform, you’ve no doubt wanted and needed to monitor it for performance and capacity. The go to choice for monitoring Hyper-V is System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and if you are using Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to manage your Hyper-V environment then you could have and should have configured the PRO Tips integration between SCOM and VMM.

With all of this said, both the default SCOM Hyper-V Management Pack and the monitoring improvements that come with the VMM Management Packs and integration are still pretty lacklustre and don’t give you all the information and intelligence you would really like to have.

Luckily for us all, Codeplex comes to the rescue with the Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions. Available for SCOM 2012 and 2012 R2, the Management Pack provides the following (taken from the Codeplex project page):

New features on release 1.0.1.282
Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 hyper-V
Hyper-V Extended Replica Monitoring and Dashboard
Minor code optimizations

Features on release 1.0.1.206
VMs Integration Services Version monitor
Hyper-V Replica Health Monitoring Dashboard and States
SMB Shares I/O latency monitor
VMs Snapshots monitoring
Management Pack Performance improvements

Included features from previous release
Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical processor monitoring
Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual processor monitoring
Hyper-V Dynamic Memory monitoring
Hyper-V Virtual Networks monitoring
NUMA remote pages monitoring
SLAT enabled processor detection
Hyper-V VHDs monitoring
Physical and Logical Disk monitoring
Host Available Memory monitoring
Stopped and Failed VMs monitoring
Failed Live Migrations monitoring

The requirements to get the Management Pack installed are low which makes implementation really easy. If you keep your core packs updated there is good chance you’ve already got the three required packs installed, Windows OS 6.0.7061.0, Windows Server Hyper-V 6.2.6641.0 and Windows Server Cluster 6.0.7063.0.

The project suggests there is documentation but it seems to be absent so what you will want to know is what is the behaviour going to be upon installation? If you have a development Management Group for SCOM then install it here first to test and verify as you should always be doing. The Management Pack is largely disabled by default which is ideal but there are a couple of rules enabled by default to watch out for so check the rules and change the default state for the two enabled rules to disabled if you desire.

As is the norm with disabled rules in SCOM, create a group which either explicitly or dynamically targets your Hyper-V hosts and override the rules for the group to enable them. The rules are broken down into Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 sets so you can opt to enable one, the other or both according to the OS version you are using for your Hyper-V deployments.

If you do have the VMM integration with SCOM configured and you are using Hyper-V Dynamic Memory, you will notice very quickly if you enable all the rules in the  Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions that you will start receiving duplicate alerts for memory pressure so make a decision where you want to get your memory pressure alerts from be it the VMM Management Pack or the Hyper-V Extensions Management Pack and override and disable alert generation for the one you don’t want.

There is still one metric missing even from this very thorough Hyper-V Extensions Management Pack and that is the collection of the CPU Wait Time Per Dispatch performance counter, the Hyper-V equivalent of the VMware vSphere CPU Ready counter. I’ll cover this one in a later post with a custom Performance Collection Rule.

You can download the Management Pack from Codeplex at http://hypervmpe2012.codeplex.com/. I hope it finds you well and enjoy your newly found Hyper-V monitoring intelligence.

UK Regional Settings for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2013

Richard Green on

As we all know and hate, everything in Microsoft products and operating systems defaults to English United States and a time zone of -8hrs Pacific Time.

This week, I’ve been working with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) for a customer to image client machines in their environment. In MDT, we want to use the Deployment Share Rules configuration to hide the wizard selection panes for setting the time zone, region and locale settings and automatically set them to the UK settings and as such, prompt the user for one less piece of information, making our Lite Touch Installation (LTI) as Zero Touch Installation (ZTI) as possible. The MDT documentation tells us that we need to use the SkipLocaleSelection and SkipTimeZone properties to hide the panels in the wizard but it doesn’t give us the values for overriding the default values.

Luckily for us, a helpful blog post from Andrew Barnes at http://scriptimus.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/mdt-2010-regional-settings/ gives us the values without us having to dig through the full code and value listings on MSDN. If you are in a country other than the UK, sorry, I don’t have those codes to had, but Andrew does provide the links to the MSDN pages which have the full listing of codes.

With those values and settings added to the Deployment Share Rules, our users invoking a LTI via the Boot Media or via PXE will have to answer a few less questions helping them to get the process moving faster and also means that we don’t have to worry about our mixed up ” and @ symbols on UK and US keyboards. It’s also very important for troubleshooting early on in MDT deployments as if we want to review a setup log on the client, we want to have our time codes in the correct time zone so that we can figure out when certain events are taking place.

DPM Replica Recovery Point Run Out of Space

Richard Green on

If you receive an alert in System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) that a replica or recovery point volume has run out of space, you will probably find this is a result of your DPM Storage Pool being out of space and head off to talk to your storage administrator to get some additional disk presented. While this is obviously the correct thing to do, you also need to take into consideration the impact this may have on your Recovery Point and Replica volumes.

Once you have added a new disk to the server, you will add it to the DPM Storage Pool to extend the capacity of the pool. With the pool extended, it would be logical to assume that DPM will automatically extended the Replica and Recovery Point volumes and whilst this is true for normal operation that DPM will auto-grow these volumes if you have enabled the auto-grow feature, if you’re DPM Storage Pool completely filled before the new disk was added, you will need to do this manually. When DPM has attempted to auto-grow the partition on a previous attempt but been unable to do so due to insufficient disk space, it puts the Protection Group into a state where this operation is not attempted again automatically.

Imagine a scenario whereby a DPM server has a single 2TB volume in use for the Storage Pool. DPM creates many dynamic partitions on the disk to store your Protection Group data. When the disk fills and DPM needs to start using a new disk that you added, it will convert the existing dynamic partition into a spanned partition to allow it to span the multiple Storage Pool disks. If this operation occurs during normal DPM operation whereby there is sufficient free space to do so then it will happen automatically and you have nothing to worry about. If however, your DPM Storage Pool completely fills before it has a chance to convert it to a spanned partition, even once their capacity, DPM will stop trying to perform this operation.

Luckily for us, the fix is pretty simple. Locate the Protection Group which is reporting that the Replica or Recovery Point volumes are out of space and extend them manually using the DPM Central Console by any amount you like. It can be as little as 100MB if you need it to be. This manual extension will force DPM to read the data from the Windows Logical Disk Manager (LDM), it will see the new disk available and perform the span conversion operation.

If you can’t identify via the DPM Central Console which Protection Groups are faulting, another way is to look at the Disk Management console and look for partitions on the DPM Storage Pool disks which are not of type Spanned. Non-spanned partitions in this instance will be partitions which have not been pulled across both disks. This could be because that Protection Group hasn’t yet needed to be extended to make use of the new disk or it could be because it’s out of space but it’s a step in the right direct.

If you are extending the existing DPM Storage Pool disk instead of adding a new disk, I’m not exactly sure what would happen. If I had to hazard a guess, I would probably say that DPM will know about this uplift in capacity and extend the Protection Groups automatically as you are still working with the same disk, therefore no span conversion operation is required however I could be wrong? This is something for me to test in my new lab once I get it built.

Logical Network Creation Error in VMM 2012 R2

Richard Green on

If you are working with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and trying to configure Logical Networks on a Hyper-V host, here is an issue you need to be aware of.

If the display name of the network adapters on your host contain the square bracket characters (Eg. [ or ]) then the creation of the Logical Network on the host will fail with a rather spurious error message. Check the display name of all of the adapters on the host and ensure that they do not contain the square bracket characters before you go through any other troubleshooting. You could save yourself an hour or two.

Automating SharePoint Online with System Center Orchestrator

Richard Green on

Recently, I’ve been working with a customer who uses Office 365 SharePoint Online and were looking to automate the creation of new sub sites in SharePoint Online with System Center Orchestrator. In addition to the requirement for automating the creation of the sub sites, the customer wanted this to be available as a self-service offering which they can make available to their users.

The customer asked me to put together a video on how we achieved this. This has been put up on YouTube as a four part video series.

You can see the series in the Automating SharePoint Online with System Center Orchestrator playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAKHPB7NYKVWBHi778g3LoQmtZ-cBMgsb or with the embedded video below.

The four parts are broken down as follows:

Part 1: Introduction and Prerequisites
Part 2: System Center Orchestrator Configuration
Part 3: System Center Service Manager Configuration
Part 4: Finished Product Demonstration

License Types with Automatic Virtual Machine Activation

Richard Green on

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article on how to use Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA) with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V. I wanted to follow this up with a brief note on license types Microsoft provide and how they seem to work with AVMA.

In production environments you will be using keys purchased through either a Select, Volume License or other commercial agreement and in test and development, you may well be using keys from MSDN or TechNet according to how you operate.

It appears through some testing I did that AVMA only works with operating system media and license keys obtained through volume license channels and that for operating system source media downloaded from TechNet or MSDN that the AVMA client key will not be accepted as a valid one. This is especially worth noting if you are using VMM to automate the deployment of a virtual machine onto Hyper-V as the result will be that steps in the VMM virtual machine creation process will fail after the Customizing Virtual Machine phase. Connecting to the newly spawned VM with either the Connect via Console option in VMM or from Hyper-V Manager will reveal the machine is stuck at the license key entry step of the operating system OOBE process.

If you are using a single VMM instance to manage your production and testing and development clouds and guest workloads and you plan on using AVMA for virtual machine activation that you will need to have provisioned separate virtual machine templates and Guest OS Profiles in your VMM library for your various environments using the respective media from TechNet, MSDN or volume license to be able to properly compete an automated VMM virtual machine deployment.

Hyper-V Integration Services Error in VMM 2012 R2

Richard Green on

When working with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 recently, I encountered an issue whereby deploying a Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machine from template worked great but deploying a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine from template reported a failure in the VMM Jobs view. The error shown is that Hyper-V Integration Services reported an error installing and generated the error code 60001.

When working with virtual guests it is important to consider the requirements for the guest operating system. In this incident, the issue was caused by using Windows Server 2008 R2 as the guest operating system however as per the About Virtual Machines and Guest Operating Systems page on TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794868(v=ws.10).aspx for Windows Server 2008 R2, you must be running Service Pack 1.

After using an updated template with Service Pack 1 incorporated, the error no longer occurs when deploying the guest operating system. A lesson to us all to double check everything. I had assumed that the .iso file I was using for Windows Server 2008 R2 incorporate Service Pack 1 however clearly on this occasion, it didn’t.

SQL 2012 and System Center 2012 R2 Guide

Richard Green on

Over on the TechNet Gallery a great new guide has been published titled SQL 2012 and System Center 2012 R2. The guide delves into the configuration of SQL Server best practice, how to deploy SQL Server and how to protect SQL Server, all specifically focused around using SQL Server with System Center 2012 R2 products such as Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Operations Manager (SCOM), Orchestrator (SCO). The guide also looks at SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn HADR, Hyper-V Replica and SQL Azure.

You can download the guide from http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SQL-2012-and-System-Center-553b5161.

The guide has been published and largely written by Paul Keely, Microsoft Private Cloud and Datacenter MVP (@paul_keely). The guide is really good, however in the interests of honesty, the contributors on this book, aside from Robert all work for Infront Consulting, my employers. Paul Keely is also my Principal Consultant for Infront Consulting Europe.

The guide has been contributed to additionally by other people including myself, Craig Taylor (@LupoLoopy), Matthew Long (@MatthewLongUK), Pete Zerger (@pzerger) and Robert Hedblom (@RobertandDPM).

Configuration Manager 2012 OSD Fails After Restart

Richard Green on

I was working today testing the operating system deployment capability of System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (not R2) for a Windows 7 task sequence. In the environment, I am using a VMware vSphere virtual machine as my target for the deployment but sadly, the networks available to the host don’t have access to client DHCP enabled VLANs which means that everything needs to be done manually including booting the pre-execution environment as there is no way of getting this from the network as without DHCP to provide the Option Codes 66 and 67 which contain the TFTP server name and the boot image path the client doesn’t know what to do.

By creating a .iso file using the Bootable Media Wizard in Configuration Manager and attaching the .iso file to the virtual machine we can boot into the pre-execution environment. Ensure that Connect at Power On is selected for the .iso file attached to the virtual machine so that you can actually boot from it. Configuration Manager 2012 environment welcomes you with a boot media welcome panel which allows you to set a static IP address and other network parameters you may need to be able to contact the Management Point and Distribution Point roles for the Configuration Manager deployment.

Once the Operating System Deployment (OSD) Task Sequence (TS) has reached the point at which it applies the Windows operating system .wim image to the target computer however, it restarts and exits Windows PE environment and boots into the Windows operating system from the local disk and applies an overlay user interface so that you continue to see the task sequence progress. At this point, if you are unable to reach a DHCP server, the task sequence will fail as the static address set in Windows PE is lost due to the transition between environments.

In order for your task sequence to continue successfully, you need to set a static IP address on the client. The issue herein however lies in the fact that you need to be quick. If you aren’t quick enough, the Task Sequence will abort with an error code of 80070057. The easiest way to do this is to hit F8 which opens a command prompt and then enter the following commands.

netsh interface ipv4 set address name=”Local Area Connection” static 10.10.10.10 255.255.255.0 10.10.10.1
netsh interface ipv4 set dnsservers name=”Local Area Connection” static 10.10.10.100 primary

The IP addresses in both commands are examples so make sure you change the addresses to those which suit your environment. The first command sets the interface IP parameters on the client and the second command sets the DNS server address to use for name resolution. The first command is in the format IP Address, then Subnet Mask and finally the Default Gateway.

If your machine has multiple network adapters installed, the Name parameter will be different for each of the adapters. To further confuse matters, the above command works for Windows 7. If you are using Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 then you need to change the default interface name from Local Area Connection to Ethernet as this is the new naming standard used Windows 8 and onwards. netsh interface show interface or good old ipconfig will give you a list of the interfaces and their physical connection status if you are in any doubt in either situation.