I just thought I'd give a shout out to Bruno Saille, one of our Senior Systems Engineers in France, who developed the "Opalis VSD Generator". Since I saw the first version of this tool just over a week ago, Bruno has made a LOT of improvements to it. It's really not fair to call it the "VSD Generator" anymore since it now also exports Word docs. It's really cool and can really save you a lot of time if you're needing to document your workflows. It's really simple to use, with...

System Center Service Manager provides a rich environment for customers to implement their Incident Management processes.  The connectors provided with Service Manager to Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Active Directory greatly simplify the process getting these processes running.  Opalis with the System Center Service Manager Integration Pack (SCSMIP) is a natural fit for customers looking to use automation to customize and/or automate Incident Management processes. ...

The Opalis 6.3 Integration Pack for Microsoft System Center Service Manager provides a mechanism for uploading attachments into Service Manager.  The workflow activity “Upload Attachment” has been designed to support uploading different types of content into Service Manager.  An attachment could be a File Attachment to an Incident or Change.  It could also be a Knowledge Article (end user or analyst content).  This activity can be a little tricky to use since.  Service Manager...

This post goes under the heading "Sometimes you have to learn the hard way"… or maybe "you don't know what you don't know". As I was building the workflows for patching VMM Clusters using Opalis and the Configuration Manager Integration Pack, I wanted to make absolutely sure that what I was building was really going to work. I didn't want to just pull a few scripts off the web and use those in some half-baked demo environment and "hope" they worked. I wanted to make...

I just thought I would pass on this post from another Opalis user. It seemed he was having an issue with logging on to the Operator Console while using AD authentication. Turns out the fix was rather simple… See his post here: http://msopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/12/opalis-operator-console-error-has.html

The latest version of Opalis may have been a big release because of the new support for Windows Server 2008 and the new System Center Integration Packs, but it's still an upgrade – it requires installing 6.2.2 first. This, along with the fact that Opalis is comprised of several components and not everything was updated leads to some confusion among those getting going with 6.3. First of all, be sure you follow the installation instructions for 6.2.2, SP1 and 6.3. If you are installing on...

In Part 1 of this article, I began to talk about the process of maintaining Hyper-V Clusters. The process of "draining" a host (moving guest VM's off to another cluster node) was accomplished using a PowerShell script. The next steps include assigning updates and then monitoring the updates through the process of installation. Just to refresh your memory, we're just about at the step shown here (remember that this policy was actually triggered by another one): Remember that my script returned...