Well I have been off for a while but I am starting up again and I have decided to move this blog to a new location for various reasons. A change is as good as a rest they say. Also as MOM is changing to System Center Operations Manager and there are more System Center products I thought it was time to expand to those areas that will link into MOM or SCOM as it will become.

 

For all of those who have read and enjoyed this blog I hope you enjoy the new one. Especially those of you who kept this blog in your reader for so long without an update!

 

New location:-

 

 

Ian

A much requested feature from MOM 2000. But there are quirks with it.

 

It is recommended that when servers are being worked that they be put into maintenance mode. This prevents the console from receiving new alerts from that server while it is being worked on. The console also shows that the server is in maintenance mode by showing a small spanner by the server’s name.

 

There are three methods of putting a server into maintenance mode. This can be done via the console gui or via a choice of two command line utilities. These are MOMinfo.exe which is part of the MOM 2005 Resource Kit and MaintenaceModeUtility.exe which is provided as part of the MOM 2005 SDK.

 

1. Console GUI

 

In the console right click on the server and click “Put Computer in Maintenance Mode”. In the dialogue box there is a box for the reason and a choice of putting the server into maintenance for a duration in minutes or putting it in maintenance mode until a specific end time. Note that there is no ability to schedule a start time.

 

Once in maintenance mode the server will display the spanner icon and stay in that mode until the time set. If maintenance is finished early then the server can be right clicked again and chose “Remove Computer From Maintenance Mode”. You will be asked to confirm that.

 

If the work needs to carry beyond the original end time then right click and chose “Update Maintenance Mode Duration” and you will see the same dialogue box as when you first put the server into maintenance mode.

 

2. Command Line

 

The difference between the two utilities is that MOMinfo.exe works at the agent whereas MaintenaceModeUtility.exe works at the MOM server and is generally the preferred method.

 

2a. MOMINFO

 

This utility is also used for dumping rules that the agent is running, clearing queues and enable script debugging.

 

MOMInfo.exe /maintenancemode:<timeout>

 

The time is in seconds and if no time is set it defaults to -1 which is infinite. Run the utility set to “exit” to remove the server from maintenance mode.

e.g.       MOMInfo.exe /maintenancemode:exit

 

Optional           /server:<servername> to run it on a remote server.

 

If no server is chosen then it defaults to the server that it is installed on.

 

Because this tool initiates the communication from the agent, if the agent cannot contact the MOM server, the agent will not appear to be in maintenance mode in the console.

 

This is best run as a scheduled task when you know that maintenance work will be done and the length of time.

 

2b. MaintenaceModeUtility

 

This is provided as a VB project to compile and also to alter to suit your requirements. However a compiled version exists at

 

http://www.momsolutions.org/Tools/MaintenanceModeUtility/Maintenance.htm

 

Version 1.0 is the sample code compiles and version 1.01 has been altered to add a timeflag. Copy the exe and the dll to a directory on the MOM server’s hard disk.

 

MaintenanceModeUtility -a DOMAIN ServerName 120

 

The time is in minutes. This is generally more useful that mominfo which is in seconds.

 

Usage:

MaintenanceModeUtility.exe -l|-g|-a|-r [ComputerGroupName time]|[ComputerDomain ComputerName time]

 

-l: lists all computers in maintenance mode.

-g: lists available computer groups.

-a: places computers in maintenance mode.

-r: removes computers from maintenance mode.

 

Examples:

MaintenanceModeUtility.exe -l

MaintenanceModeUtility.exe -g

MaintenanceModeUtility.exe -a ComputerGroupToAdd time

MaintenanceModeUtility.exe -r ComputerGroupToRemove time

MaintenanceModeUtility.exe -a DOMAIN ComputerToAdd time

MaintenanceModeUtility.exe -r DOMAIN ComputerToRemove time

 

Again this is best run as a scheduled task when you know that maintenance work will be done and the length of time.

 

Tip 1

 

As this utility has the ability to run against a computer group you can set these groups up and have a scheduled task for each group if there is always the same maintenance window. Alternatively have the one scheduled task with the computer group and change the date and time to start as required and include a list of servers in the group for that particular work window.

 

Tip 2

 

Justin Harter has written a script that will create a scheduled job on the fly and then delete itself when finished.

 

Info and script at

http://spaces.msn.com/jharter/blog/cns!39CE28DB5474A6C7!293.entry

 

I have found the easiest way to keep up to date with new KB alerts for MOM and other products is to sign up for e-mail notifications from KBAlertz.

 

 

Add your e-mail and a password and chose as many categories as you like to get regular e-mails informing you when Microsoft has released a KB on that subject (the content is aslo included in the e-mail).  And it is free. The only downside is that if you sign up for multiple technologies then they all come in a single e-mail.

 

They also have an RSS feed for MOM 2005 KB articles

 

The MOM 2005 page at Microsoft is

 

which has the KB search box already pre filtered for MOM 2005.

 

I find KBAlertz easier to use.

 

Stefan did say that the updated Resource Kit for MOM 2005 SP1 will be out soon and Rob Stevens (Microsoft) has mentioned it on his blog and here it is

http://www.microsoft.com/mom/downloads/2005/reskit/default.mspx 

 

A quick glance and it looks very similar to the 2000 resource kit but there are some neat new tools.

 

Alert to RSS Utility: Now subscribe to alerts via RSS!

I love this error from the Exchange BPA MP.

  

"The Exchange 2003 server X is running Service Pack 2, which is yet to be released."

 

 

Have you ever wondered where MOM came from? It started with Sentry which was bought by Mission Critical Software. They appear to be the ones that that named it OnePoint and even today that name still exists as the MOM database in MOM 2005. It was also the name of the service in MOM 2000.

 

Mission Critical was bought by NetIQ and they named it Operations Manager. NetIQ then had two products in their portfolio that overlapped – AppManager and OM. Although both are designed to do server monitoring AM is more aimed at subject matter experts who are script savvy and can drop scripts onto servers to dig into what is going on and OM was rule based and could monitor a lot of servers without needing to know about scripting.

 

A number of years ago now Microsoft decided to get into the server management market to complement SMS. Microsoft showed that Windows 2000 could scale to UNIX workloads with the TCP benchmarks but manageability in a data centre was a big thing. From discussions I had with some the guys involved it was a choice of do they build from scratch or buy. They decided to buy as that would take some time off getting into the market with a mature product. After looking around they decided on OM. It was used internally by MS IT and was built on SQL and COM+ so it was easier to bring it in house. OM v3.3 was bought from NetIQ in 2000 with the plan being to rebrand it and sell it. That did not happen as there were too many issues with it for MS to send it out so it took about 6 months before it was ready. As a by product of this the scalability went up from a couple of hundred agents to 1000 agents. Part of the agreement was to do joint marketing with NetIQ and NetIQ would produce management packs. After a while NetIQ’s focus went more onto security and they continued to sell AppManager and defocus on MOM add-ons.

 

MOM 2000 RTM was in June 2001, although the Application Management Pack (AMP), which had the management packs for Exchange, SQL and others,  was not released until a few months later. Then the pricing was $849 RRP per processor for the base pack (BMP) and $949 per processor for the AMP. So an 8 way SQL Server would need 8 x BMP and 8 x AMP. A price promotion for 6 months was put into effect and that meant the BMP and AMP were $349 per processor each and the 6 months promotion turned into a permanent price.

 

When MOM 2005 came out there was another change in licensing and this time it was priced per server and there was no AMP style licence. The MOM server was priced at $729 RRP and the managed device was $539. This license is called an OML – Operations Manager Licence. In effect very similar to a CAL. So the 8 way SQL Server which would originally have cost $14,384 for MOM 2000 to manage and then dropped to $5,584 with the discounted pricing becomes $539 with MOM 2005. A steal – and that is before discounts. And even more amazingly this is the price per physical server so if you are using MOM with virtual servers you only need an OML for the physical box even if you have multiple virtual servers each with their own agent (except Workgroup Edition).

 

Before MOM 2005 though there was MOM 2000 SP1 which was released in January 2003. Although called a service pack it was actually more like a new release and should have been called MOM 2003. There was no SP that you could take and upgrade an existing MOM 2000 installation. You needed the whole MOM 2000 SP1 CD and more or less did an upgrade.

 

MOM 2005 started life as MOMX then MOM 2004 before being called MOM 2005. As well as the full product which was RTMed in August 2005 there was a new version called Workgroup Edition. This does not have any reporting, no MOM Connector Framework (MCF) and is limited to 10 agents (even virtual ones unlike the full MOM). In its favour is its price – $499 which includes the MOM server and 10 agents. And if you use the free MSDE database then it costs you less than $50 per server and you can use all the MOM management packs. As an example of the changing face of MOM pricing, if you are responsible for 10 x 8 way SQL servers with MOM 2000 it would have originally cost $143,840 which was then dropped to a new price of $55,840. With MOM 2005, which is a better product, the price became $5,390 to manage your 10 servers but if you can do without the reporting you can use Workgroup Edition and manage all 10 for $499. Talk about commoditisation.

 

MOM 2005 SP1 was released for download on 1^st August 2005. Unlike MOM 2000 SP1 this was a service pack and was released as a proper bug fix SP. Pity they did not mention the dependency on MSI v3.1 until later!

 

In the meantime there are been many new management packs and add-ons from Microsoft and partners.

 

MOM v3 (I think it should be called MOM v4) is in private beta at the moment but a public beta should be available for (or just after) the Microsoft Management Summit held in April 2006 in San Diego rather than Las Vegas. I prefer San Diego myself. And the MOM team look to be on track to release it in Q4 2006. The next chapter – I think it will be a good one.

Having had my ADSL bandwidth increased from 512 Kbs to 2 Mbs (great for downloading large files) brought to mind one of the frequently asked questions that comes up – how much bandwidth does MOM take up over a WAN. And the answer is – it depends. When you first install MOM and you push the agent out then that will take about 6 MB to get the agent installed and then there is the management packs to download.

 

The reason this comes up is that in Europe there are still a lot of companies with small WAN pipes – especially if they have offices in Eastern Europe. Bandwidth seems to be so cheap and pervasive in the US that sometimes you feel that the product groups in Redmond don’t get it. I was having a talk with Omar, from the MOM product group, about this when MOM 2005 was in beta and he was telling me that they had one customer in the TAP program that had very low bandwidth. He said that it was as low as 64 Kbs. Well for some European organisations that is a good pipe! Having said that they have taken the feedback on board and in the sizing spreadsheet you can see the amount of bandwidth that a typical agent may use. I went through the new beta of the System Center Capacity Planner for MOM and put in the lowest bandwidth and did a simulation on monitoring servers over slow links and SCCP provided an estimate of how much bandwidth would be taken. So it is possible to see how much bandwidth can be potentially used. And in most cases it is not that much.

 

In order to reduce bandwidth there a few things you can do. Obviously don’t push out agents during working hours but in the evening and weekend instead. The same goes for updating management packs. You can also use a distribution tool like SMS to deploy the agent MSI file as these tools have more control but you can not deploy management packs like that. As far as MOM is concerned this is a manual deployment of the agent and so the global setting needs to be unchecked to allow that.

 

Once running you can increase the value of the heartbeat times. The agent heartbeat is a lightweight “ping” and I would recommend leaving that if possible as you want to know if your servers are up. The management pack heartbeat is 5 minutes by default and that can be increased as you should be releasing management packs in a controlled manner at specific times.

 

The other traffic is alerts. Which is what you want, as that is why you have installed MOM. But you can look at alerts that come in and disable rules that create informational or success alerts to reduce traffic. A good tool to help in analysing a management pack before you deploy it is Silect’s MP Express Studio. The other traffic is caused by collecting performance counters. Again it is a case of which counters do you really need and that will depend on the scope of the project when you first evaluated MOM. Some counters you can stop and others you can increase the time between samples so it is every hour instead of every 5 mins and so on. The best way to do this is to copy the original rule to a new rule directory and disable the original. That gives it a new GUID so it does not get overwritten by an updated management pack. If you disable some counters than some of the reports will not have the data.

 

If you have a mix of servers in a data centre and servers across slow WAN links then you may want to consider having 2 management groups (it will depend on the number of servers you are managing). One management group can be set up with all the management packs and default settings and the other can be configured just to do servers over WAN links so that the settings can be tuned. Then link the management groups with the MCF. This will depend on how precious your bandwidth is as there will be an administrative overhead in doing this. Alternatively have one management group with 2 MOM servers with Global Settings switch off so you can tune each server individually. You can also ensure that the correct servers report to the correct MOM server by using manualmc.txt. This text file is read by the MOM server and contains a list of server names that it will use.

 

Or you can just do what the Americans do and buy more bandwidth. J It is getting cheaper. I wonder if there will be a day when bandwidth stops being an issue or will the requirements of the software continually expand to fill the existing bandwidth in the same way that nature abhors a vacuum.

I am not at IT Forum this year. A shame as the last three years it has been in Copenhagen (and cold) and this year it is in Barcelona.

 

I was reading the press release based on today’s keynotes and there are some interesting things going on.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-15ITForum05UmbrellaPR.mspx

 

On the management front System Center Capacity Planner 2006, mentioned in a previous blog, will RTM in December. See previous blog for explanation of RTM.

 

One of the areas that caught my eye was the push towards 64 bit. OK It is hard to buy a server these days that is not 64 bit but it looks like a few products will be 64 bit only.

 

After announcing the new virtual licensing for Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition R2 (http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-4a6d-aed9-f2c1f8f23e14/virtualization_brief.doc – means that you can have 4 virtual servers running at no extra cost), now they have announced the new R2 for Virtual Server 2005 and the Standard product (1 to 4 CPUs) will be $99 and the Enterprise Edition will be $199. That is aggressive pricing – and that is before discounts for volume licensing.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/howtobuy/default.mspx

This should make it cheaper to set up a virtual test lab.

 

The other management announcement was System Center Essentials.

 

“Microsoft also detailed plans for a mid-market offering called System Center Essentials. The new product will bring the commitment of the Dynamic Systems Initiative to midsize companies, allowing them to easily and cost-effectively secure, update, monitor and track their IT environment and better support end users.”

 

Microsoft defines mid-market as 25 to 500 PCs.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/midsizebusiness/default.mspx

 

I expect more info to come out now that it has been announced but don’t expect a new product – just a bundling of existing products like MOM WE and WSUS.