UPDATE : #Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Windows Server Operating System #sysctr #SCOM

Overview

The System Center Management Pack for Windows Server Operating System consists of the following management packs: Microsoft Windows Server Library, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Discovery, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Monitoring, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Discovery, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Monitoring, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Monitoring BPA, Microsoft Windows Server Clustered Shared and Volume Monitoring, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. The System Center Monitoring Pack for Windows Server Operating System monitor the performance, health, and availability of Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2003and Windows 2000 Server.
By detecting, alerting on, and automatically responding to critical events and performance indicators, these management packs reduce resolution times for issues and increase the overall availability and performance of your systems running the Windows Server operating systems, thereby helping to reduce the total cost of ownership.
Feature Summary

• Availability
  • Key Operating System Services: Required services are checked for status (for example, running, not running, or paused)
  • Storage: Logical hard drives are checked for availability, sufficient free space, and integrity of the NTFS partition.
  • Network: Network adapters are checked for connection health, name and IP address conflicts.
• Performance
  • Processor: System processor(s) performance is checked system-wide.  Processors can optionally be monitored on a per processor basis.
  • Memory: Memory consisting of physical memory and virtual memory (also known as page files) is monitored using the following performance indicators:
    • Available memory (in MB)
    • Pages per second
    • Page file percent usage
  • Disks and Partitions: Logical disks/partitions and physical disks are monitored, and performance data is collected for average disk seconds per read, disk seconds per write, and disk seconds per transfer.  Monitoring is also provided for fragmentation of logical disks.  Depending on which version of the operating system is being monitored, either logical or physical monitoring is enabled by default.  Refer to the MP guide for more detail.
  • Network Adapter: Network adapters are monitored for the number of bytes received per second, the number of bytes sent per second, and the total bytes per second. In addition, the health state of the network adapter is evaluated and is set to Healthy if connected and Critical if disconnected.

Known Issue:

If the BPA monitor is enabled, then there will be an error in the PowerShell script which is a know issue in the Agent. This has been fixed in Operations Manager next update which is coming up.

You can download the Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Windows Server OS here

When you search for other System Center Management Packs, I can recommend this great TechNet WiKi site :

A nice collection of Microsoft Management Packs you can find here on TechNet Wiki

Video presentation: How to Design and Configure Networking in #SCVMM and #HyperV

How to Design and Configure Networking in System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Hyperv by Greg Cusanza
Microsoft Senior Program Manager on the SCVMM Team

 

 

#Microsoft Fabric Architecture Guide #Hyperv #SCVMM #WS2012

Overview

This document provides customers with the necessary guidance to develop solutions for a Microsoft private cloud infrastructure in accordance with the IaaS PLA patterns that are identified for use with the Windows Server 2012 operating system. This document provides specific guidance for developing fabric architectures (compute, network, storage, and virtualization layers) of an overall private cloud solution.

You can download the Microsoft Fabric Architecture Guide here

Great #Microsoft Fabric Management Architecture Guide #sysctr #SCVMM

This document provides specific guidance for developing a management architecture for an overall private cloud solution.
You can download this Great WhitePaper here

Making a TestLAB with Windows Server 2012 – System Center 2012 SP1 – #WindowsAzure – Hybrid #Cloud #sysctr

Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Making a testlab environment is important for your business innovation to do proof of concepts for example Hybrid Cloud scenario’s to see and experience the benefits for your Company.

In this Testlab we use the following Microsoft Products to get the Basis infrastructure for Hybrid Cloud :

• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition for Operating System and Hyper-V as Hypervisor.
• Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 – Datacenter Edition – starting with Virtual Machine Manager
• Microsoft SQL 2012 Enterprise Server
• Microsoft Windows Azure Subscription.
• Microsoft Office 365 Subscription

When you make a Testlab environment start small and think always in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) :

• A physical / virtual Server on premises or virtual Server in the Cloud of Microsoft with Windows Azure ?
  Think of all the costs like hardware, power consumption, scalability, storage, etc ….
• Make the right choices for your bussiness

Get inspired by one of my favorite Microsoft employee Yung Chou :

He has a great blog site about Microsoft Hybrid Cloud : http://blogs.technet.com/b/yungchou/ with videos, E-books, and cool blog posts !

In the Next blogpost about TestLAB : How to make the basis infrastructure for Hybrid Cloud scenario’s.

#Microsoft Window Server 2012 Products and Editions Comparison #Winserv #Hyperv

Overview

This chart illustrates the differences among the various Windows Server 2012 products and editions, including the various editions of Windows Server, Microsoft Hyper-V Server, Storage Server, and MultiPoint Server. The chart includes information about locks and limits (such as the maximum number of connections of various kinds, domain-joining capability, and CPU and RAM limits), which server roles are supported, and which server features are available.

You can download the Windows Server 2012 Products and Editions sheet here

Virtual Machine Import Wizard of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Manager #Hyperv #WS2012

Administrators often think of a virtual machine as a single, stand-alone entity that they can move around to address their operational needs. However, a virtual machine consists of several parts, which administrators do not normally need to think about:

• Virtual hard disks, stored as files on the physical storage.
• Virtual machine snapshots, stored as a special type of virtual hard disk file.
• The saved state of the different, host-specific devices.
• The memory file for the virtual machine or its snapshot.
• The virtual machine configuration file, which organizes all of those parts and arranges them into a working virtual machine.

Each virtual machine and every snapshot associated with it must be unique, so globally unique identifiers are used. Additionally, virtual machines store and use some host-specific information, such as the path information for virtual hard disk files. When Hyper-V tries to start a virtual machine, it goes through a series of validation checks before being started. Problems such as hardware differences that might exist when a virtual machine is moved to another host can cause these validation checks to fail. That, in turn, prevents the virtual machine from starting. The administrator is left with files on the disk that take up space and are not useful.

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 introduces a new Import wizard that detects and fixes more than 40 different types of incompatibilities. The Import wizard walks you through the steps of addressing incompatibilities when you import the virtual machine to the new host—so this wizard can help with configuration that is associated with physical hardware, such as memory, virtual switches, and virtual processors.

Also, you no longer need to export a virtual machine to be able to import it. You can simply copy a virtual machine and its associated files to the new host, and then use the Import wizard to specify the location of the files. This “registers” the virtual machine with Hyper-V and makes it available for use. You can copy a virtual machine to an NTFS-formatted USB drive, and you can recover virtual machines in cases where the system drive fails but the data drive that stores the virtual machines is intact.

In addition to the new wizard, automation support is available. The new Hyper-V module for Windows PowerShell includes cmdlets for importing virtual machines.

Requirements

To try out the Import wizard, you will need the following:

 Two installations of Windows Server 2012 with the Hyper-V role installed (Hyper-V requires a computer that has processor support for hardware virtualization)

 A virtual machine

 A user account that belongs to the local Hyper-V Administrators group

Technical overview

To import a virtual machine, the wizard does the following:

1. Creates a copy of the virtual machine configuration file.

This is done as a precaution in case an unexpected restart occurs on the host, such as from a power outage.

2. Validates hardware.

Information in the virtual machine configuration file is compared to hardware on the new host.

3. Compiles a list of errors.

This list identifies what needs to be reconfigured and determines which pages appear next in the wizard.

4. Displays the relevant pages, one category at a time.

The wizard explains each incompatibility to help you reconfigure the virtual machine so it is compatible with the new host.

5. Removes the copy of the configuration file.

After the wizard does this, the virtual machine is ready to be started.