Below is the easiest way to perform an "in place upgrade" of all SCOM 2012 SP1 Roles. Let us start and see Operations Manager 2012 R2 looks like.

First of all the System Requirements from the Supported Configurations page on Technet can be found here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn281925.aspx

My SCOM is running on the top of Windows 2008 R2 SP1 and SQL 2008 R2 SP2 and of course has SCOM 2012 SP1 with CU4 installed.
First reboot the machine to be sure that there is no issue. Once everything is up and running, we can proceed with the installation.
Download the SCOM 2012 R2 ISO file and mount it to the machine.

Prerequisites:

• Microsoft System CLR types for SQL Server 2012.
• Microsoft Report Viewer 2012 Runtime.

You must restart the system before proceeding with the report viewer installation 

Now we proceed with the Microsoft Report Viewer 2012 installation:

Ensure that your current Operating system is fully updated.
Let’s start with the in place upgrade.Please insert the System Center Operations Manager R2 Media.

Note that all roles are combined on one machine.

Click on Install

So as we can see, the wizard found the installed roles and will check the prerequisites for that upgrade.

Quick Tip:Before doing any upgrade , ensure that both databases are backed up (OperationsManager , and OperationsManagerDW).

Now it asks you to agree with the license terms.

Select installation location. In my case the default installation location is fine, so I will click Next.

A prerequisite checker starts running which verifies the hardware and software configuration.

Passed! Next!

As we can see, you have the choice of Local System or domain account. If the database is running locally as it’s the case you can leave it at Local System.

If the databases are on remote server it requires to use a domain account.

We are ready to upgrade Click  Button.

It will take a while for the upgrade to finalize, there is a progress bar for each role.

During the Operational Database Configuration phase it also imports a whole set of management packs that takes some time.

After upgrade finishes, just close the setup screen.

You will find a warning that indicates the current version of the product is not licensed, please start the Operations Manager Shell and use the Set-SCOMLicense cmdlet to license the product.

Start the SCOM console and go to Help -> About.

Next we have to update the SCOM agents.
Go to the Administration Pane of the SCOM console and open the Pending Management node, you will see all the agents that needs update, just approve them.

All the agents that are installed through the SCOM console are manageable and set to Pending Management with the note Agent Requires Update. Right-click on them and select Approve. Use the default action account or a domain account you provide and select Upgrade.

Next jump over to the Monitoring Pane, and on the left hand side go to Operations Manager -> Agent Details -> Agents by Version.

You will see that the agents are upgraded and its version is 7.1.10184.0 this value refer to 2012 R2.

In my Next Blog, I will demonstrate how to monitor non-domain servers.

Dany Abboud From NEPA PFE Team.

Exchange 2007 provides high availability through four models; Local continuous replication, Single copy cluster, cluster Continuous replication and Standby continuous replication.

Exchange 2007 single copy cluster provides high availability for the node failure scenarios and can be implemented with at least two nodes in Active/Passive model. This is very much similar to the Exchange 2003 cluster setup where shared storage is used between the nodes and storage group resides on that shared storage.

I have been to couple of customers where there were complains cluster of shifting and dismounting of the databases. I have started checking and found that resources dependency model on those Exchange 2007 clusters were not configured as per the recommendations.  Resource dependency model in Exchange 2007 Single copy clusters were implemented like exchange 2003 conventional cluster although it is changed in Exchange 2007 single copy clusters.

I have found that for both of the customers were not having physical disk resources in the dependency for the Exchange 2007 database instances. I have also found that for one of the customer “Affect the group” option for the Microsoft Exchange information store resource were not set to its default value and it was enabled.

Correcting and comparing the whole resource dependency model for Exchange 2007 Single copy cluster according to the best practices alleviated many pains to the customers and helped them to avoid critical situations.

Following articles could be used for further details and comparisons against the recommended configurations.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998607(v=exchg.80).aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997195(v=exchg.80).aspx

Configuring Disk Dependencies

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691095(v=exchg.80).aspx

Farooq Ahmed from NEPA team.

Hello,

Fazal Muhammad Khan has made an excellent series of videos showing and explaining the different features and enhancements in Active Directory on Windows Server 2012!

We start with Part 1 and 2 

Enjoy!

Part 1 (direct link)

Part 2 (direct link)

All the videos:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/nepapfe/archive/2013/11/08/windows-2012-active-directory-domain-services-videos.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/nepapfe/archive/2014/02/05/windows-2012-active-directory-domain-services-videos-2.aspx

Fazal Muhammad Khan from NEPA PFE team.