Virtual Machine Management : OpsMgr

Configuring SCVMM 2008's PRO Feature with Ops Manager

mlmich — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:26:00 GMT

hey all,

Alan Goodman from the VMM Program Management team posted a very informative blog on the PRO feature of VMM.You can read it from http://blogs.technet.com/rakeshm/archive/2008/08/22/configuring-scvmm-2008-s-pro-feature-with-ops-manager.aspx

How to configure the integration between VMM and OpsMgr Part II

mlmich — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:13:00 GMT

I know that some folks continue to have trouble getting the integration between VMM and OpsMgr to work. If you are getting this error, this post is for you.

"VMM service does not have the necessary privileges to access the Operations Manager SDK service on <servername>............ID: 11804"

First, i would ask that you follow the troubleshooting steps outlined in my post named "How to configure the integration between VMM and OpsMgr Part". If those don't work, follow these steps below.

If you restarted the OpsMgr SDK service (i.e. Net stop omsdk && net start omsdk) and you are still getting the error, you might want to reboot your OpsMgr Root Management Server and the VMM server. That has been known to fix any lingering permissions issues that were not propagated properly.

If your problem is not fixed, it might be a permissions issue with OpsMgr. What you need to do is to launch the OpsMgr console using the same account that the VMM service uses. In VMM 2008 beta, our service runs as local system. So launch the OpsMgr console as system on the vmm server computer using the command below. If this does not work, you need to ensure that the VMM service account (represented as <domain name>\<vmm server name>$ has the appropriate permissions in OpsMgr for this to work)
psexec.exe -e -i -s -x "C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\Microsoft.MOM.UI.Console.exe"

You can get psexec from this link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx

I hope this helps.

<update> It seems that only PsExec.exe version 1.91 works for providing a console session as System.

How to enable PRO with VMM

mlmich — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:19:00 GMT

Last week I mentioned I was going to talk about how to enable PRO with VMM. PRO stands for Physical Resource Optimization.

If you followed my steps from last week, your Operations Manager and VMM servers are configured to work together to provide monitoring and alerting within your virtualized environment. This also means that your environment is ready for you to enable PRO. PRO can be enabled at the cluster level for both VMware and Hyper-V. Customers can set two main PRO settings—the Monitoring Level and the Automation Level— for each host cluster in their virtualization environment. These settings tell VMM which monitors to enable for hosts and virtual machines within the host clusters and which monitors to configure to auto-implement their respective remediations

Through VMM, you can enable the monitoring of clusters based on the severity of alerts and PRO will only monitor for either Critical only or both Critical and Warning alerts. The following procedure tells how to enable PRO on a cluster for both Warning and Critical alerts.

1. From either Hosts or Virtual Machines view of the VMM Administrator Console, find your host cluster and open the properties.

2. On the PRO tab, select the Enable PRO on this host cluster check box.

3. By default, the monitoring level is set to Warning and Critical, which means that PRO will enable all monitors and display all PRO Tips. To restrict the PRO Tips to Critical alerts only, select the Critical Only option.

4. Click OK to save your settings.

Through VMM, you can enable the automatic implementation of Tips based on the severity of alerts. PRO allows you to specify this setting for each cluster within your environment, and when enabled PRO will only automatically implement either Critical or both Critical and Warning alerts. The following steps would be used to enable PRO to automatically implement tips on a cluster:

1. In either Hosts or Virtual Machines view of the VMM Administrators Console, find your cluster and open the properties.

2. On the PRO tab, select Enable PRO on this host cluster.

3. By default, the monitoring level is set to Warning and Critical, which means that PRO will enable all monitors and display all tips. If you would like for PRO to monitor for and display only Tips with a severity level of Critical, select Critical Only.

4. Select the Automatically implement PRO tips on this host cluster check box.

5. By default, the automation level is set to Critical Only, which means that only PRO Tips with a Critical severity level are automatically implemented. If you would like for all tips to be implemented automatically, select the Warning and Critical option.

6. Click OK to save your settings.

The toolbar of the VMM Administrator Console contains a PRO Tips button, which opens the PRO Tips window, shown below. The window shows all active PRO Tips that the user has access to. (For more information about user roles and delegated administration in VMM, see VMM 2008 Help).

If you click on this button, a new dialog pops up. The top half of the screen lists the Tips, and the bottom half shows details for the Tip that is currently selected. The fields on the left side of the details pane are automatically generated based on the context of the Tip. The content on the right side is product knowledge for the alert, which is developed by the management pack author. The product knowledge for each alert can contain four sections: Description, Recommended Action, Causes, and Summary.

If a selected Tip has an associated action and is still Active, users can click the Implement button to initiate the associated recovery task. Alternatively, if the administrator chooses to not implement a tip, she can simply click the Ignore button, and the Tip will be dismissed.

Thanks to a few of my team members that generated this content and allowed me to share this with you.

This is one of the most important features of the VMM 2008 release and I hope that it provides/adds a lot of flexiblity to your monitoring environment.

How to configure the integration between VMM and OpsMgr

mlmich — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:25:00 GMT

VMM teams up with OpsMgr to provide a comprehensive end-to-end services management through monitoring the health and performance of workloads all the way down to the application level.

VMM and PRO (a feature of VMM that allows you to extend the services management and augment the available knowledge in the MPs to make recommendations or take actions that take advantage of the additional capabilities available when workloads are running in a virtualized environment) require System Center Operations Manger 2007, with SP1. Once you install that follow these instructions to import the VMM 2008 management pack.

1. From Administration view in the Operators Console for Operations Manager, click the Management Packs node in the navigation pane.

2. In the Actions pane on the right, click Import Management Pack.

3. Browse and select the following management pack files, and click Import:

Microsoft.Windows.InternetInformationServices.CommonLibrary.MP

Microsoft.Windows.InternetInformationServices.2003.MP

Microsoft.SQLServer.Library.mp

Microsoft.SQLServer.2005.Monitoring.mp

Microsoft.SQLServer.2005.Discovery.mp

Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.2008.mp

Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.Pro.2008.Library.mp

Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.Pro.2008.HyperV.HostPerformance.mp

Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.Pro.2008.VMRightSize.mp

Microsoft.SystemCenter.VirtualMachineManager.Pro.2008.VMWare.HostPerformance.mp

4. After the management packs are imported, close the dialog box

The VMM server runs as the Local System account of the machine that it is installed on. If the Operations Manager server and the VMM server are installed on the same machine, you can skip this section. If they are installed on separate machines, you will need to grant access to the computer account of the VMM server to the Operations Manager Administrators user profile in Operations Manager. When Operations Manager is installed, it automatically grants the Local Administrators group Operations Manager Administrators rights. Thus, you can grant the VMM server those same rights by adding its computer account to the Local Administrators group on the OpsMgr server. After you make that change, you must restart the OpsMgr SDK Service in order for Operations Manager to recognize group membership changes.

After configuring Operations Manager, you can complete the configuration of PRO from the VMM Administrators Console by performing the following steps (you can also do the below operations from PowerShell using the cmdlet "Set-VMMServer -OpsMgrServer <servername>"):

1. Open the VMM Administrator’s Console, and click the Administration button beneath the navigation pane to display Administration view.

2. Select the System Center node in the navigation pane. Then right-click Operations Manager Server in the results pane, and click Modify.

3. In the dialog box (depicted below), enter the name of the Root Management Server of your Operations Manager installation, and click OK.

If you get an error here saying "VMM service does not have the necessary privileges to access the Operations Manager SDK service on <servername", then you need to check if the OpsMgr SDK service is running under domain credentials. If yes, you need to register SPNs for the following two accounts: MSOMSdkSvc/<RMS FQDN> and MSOMSdkSvc/<RMS NETBIOSNAME>. You can use the SetSpn.exe utility for this. You need to be a domain admin to create an SPN. Also make sure that you provide the RMS server's values in those commands. RMS is the OpsMgr Root Management Server in your environment.

A lot of this content was written by member of the VMM technical team (so I didn't come up with all of these myself) :)

Next week, I will talk about how to enable PRO in the environment I just explained how to set up.