I’ve been busy building out various demo scenario’s in my lab and after getting SCOM 2012 humming along, I decided to get to work on some of the cool new dashboard features.

First things first…

PART 1: INSTALLATION AND PRE-REQ’S

What all do we need.

• SCOM 2012 (duh!) – make sure you have the web console piece installed.  You can install it on the same server as the SCOM management server, especially if this is a lab configuration. 

• SCOM 2012 ISO or DVD – you’ll need some files from here to get the OpsMgr SharePoint web parts up and running
• Visio 2010
• Visio & SharePoint 2010 Extensions for System Center 2012
• Windows 2008 & .NET Framework SDK (you’ll need this for a utility to install the Visio trusted add-in into SharePoint – you may already have the files you need…more later…)

So, obviously we need SCOM 2012 running somewhere, that’s a given.

The next thing is to get SharePoint installed.  I opted for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise edition.  We won’t go through the SharePoint install here, but once you get it running, you’ll need to do a few things to get the OpsMgr web parts installed.  The full details can be found here, but I’ll copy in the important part.  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh212924.aspx

You want to go ahead and install just the SCOM console on to your SharePoint server.  This is only if you want to do the Visio integration.  You’ll need the SCOM console installed so that the Visio web drawings that we store in SharePoint can connect to the SCOM RMS server for real-time updates.  If you don’t want to do that part, then no need to install the console.

To deploy the Operations Manager web part

1. Copy the install-OperationsManager-DashboardViewer.ps1 file from the Operations Manager installation folder under Setup\amd64\SharePoint to a location that the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell can access.

2. Open the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and navigate to the directory where you saved the install-OperationsManager-DashboardViewer.ps1 file.

3. In the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, type the following command, and then press Enter.

   .\install-OperationsManager-DashboardViewer.ps1 –solutionPath <directory for Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.SharePointIntegration.wsp> -url <optional, for installing to a specific portal address or website>

   Example that deploys the web part to a specific portal address:

   .\install-OperationsManager-DashboardViewer.ps1 “C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2012\” http://localhost:4096

   If an error occurs when you run the script, you must disable the RemoteSigned default code-signing execution policy for the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell. To allow the install-OperationsManager-DashboardViewer.ps1 script to run, type the following command, and then press enter:

   Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

   You will see some confirmation messages, select Y to confirm, and then run the script.

4. Verify that the web part is deployed and activated by performing the following steps:

   1. Open the site http://localhost.
   2. In the Site Actions dropdown menu, click Site Settings.
   3. In the Site Collection Administration section, click Site collection features.
   4. Locate Operations Manager Dashboard Web Part.
      • If the button to the right says Activate, then the feature was not automatically activated during deployment. To activate the web part, click the Activate button.
      • If the button to the right says Deactivate, no steps are required. The Operations Manager Dashboard web part can now be inserted into site pages.

5. If you disabled the RemoteSigned default code-signing execution policy to run the install-OperationsManager-DashboardViewer.ps1 script, you should re-enable it after the script runs. Type the following command and then press enter:

   Set-ExecutionPolicy Restricted

   You will see some confirmation messages, select Y to confirm.

Your output will look something like this:

While we’re dinking around on the SharePoint server, we might as well go ahead and get the Visio integration going as well.  Once these are done, you’re pretty much good as most of the creating dashboards and SCOM web consoles are already configured as a part of the SCOM management server installation.

In the pre-req’s at the beginning of this document I recommended downloading the .NET Framework SDK components.  I did that only because I didn’t happen to have Visual Studio installed anywhere in my demo environment and you’ll need a file called gacutil.exe to get the Visio SharePoint components installed. 

The setup will want to install a massive amount of stuff – like gig’s worth.  You don’t need the whole thing installed if you are just trying to get gacutil.exe like I was.  Here’s the options I chose and I got the file installed I needed.

The next part (configuring the Visio integration) is also pretty straightforward.  It’s tedious, but I didn’t have any issues walking through setup guides that come with the Visio/SharePoint Add-In that you have already downloaded.  These are the 3 files you’ll find in the zip file you’ll download.  There are two other folders in this download – the client add-in (install wherever you are running Visio) and the server piece which doesn’t really install anything – it extracts the files you’ll need to manipulate into a folder on your SharePoint server.  Just follow the directions to get the add-in installed on the client (after Visio is installed of course) and then extract the server side files on the SharePoint server and do what the “Manually Installing the SharePoint Data Provider” file tells you to do.

Once all of that is done, you should be able to see the Operations Manager Add-in in Visio:

You should be able to see the Operations Manager Web Part in SharePoint:

And, when you save a Visio Web Diagram formatted file to a SharePoint document library, it should connect and render real-time data to the Visio diagram.  But, more on that later…

PART 2: SETTING UP DASHBOARDS IN SCOM

First of all, creating new dashboards couldn’t be any easier.  Right-click in the SCOM console on “Monitoring”, select new –> dashboard view and off you go.

First, I decided to create one for the Veeam nWorks VMware management pack.  I decided to use the SLA template.

After you name your dashboard, you’ll be asked to pick from any existing SLA’s you’ve created.

If you don’t have one – you can create one by going to Authoring –> Management Pack Objects.  Creating a SLA is pretty straightforward – it can be trial and error picking the objects and such that you want to monitor, but the good news is – feedback is immediate and the SLA’s are easy to edit and make changes.

Once you have the SLA dashboard created you’ll see it show up in the SCOM console.

Detail view looks like this:

So, the next part was…how do I get this into SharePoint?  Since we’ve already done all the heavy lifting in Part 1, we should be able to connect up to SharePoint, add a new web part to a page and then insert the web console URL for the dashboard view right into the web part.  It’s easy.

First, go to your SCOM web console and get the URL of the dashboard you want to publish.  You would use http://YourScomServer/operationsmanager to connect to the web console.  Click on the dashboard you want to publish and copy the full URL you see in the browser bar:

It will look something like this:

Now, add the Operations Manager Dashboard View Web Part to your page:

You will have to edit the web part after you add it.  Basically, you need to paste that URL you just copied from the console into the appropriate field.  Of course, you can change the title or any other parameters in here as well, if you see fit.

Once you OK the changes here, you should see your web part show up on the SharePoint page:

PART 3: FUN WITH VISIO

Finally, we’ll get to some fun Visio integration.  We’ve already got Visio installed, the SCOM Add-in on the client, we’ve got the SCOM console (not the web console – just the console) installed on the SharePoint server and we’ve configured the SharePoint server so that it can communicate properly with the SCOM RMS server.  We should be good to go.

The easiest way to start messing with this is to open up a diagram view of something in SCOM.  I picked a few components from my vSphere environment I have running in my lab.  Once you get the diagram set the way you want it to appear in Visio, click the Visio icon on the toolbar to export that view into Visio.

Once you get this into Visio, you can totally customize this thing however you want to see it.  You can add new stuff to monitor, change the formatting…whatever.  Now, important here – when you save this file out of Visio…make sure you choose the VISIO WEB DRAWING option.  If you’re going to host this in SharePoint and want to see live data, you’ll need to do this (and this is what we went through all that work on the SharePoint server for…).

Now, you can simply stick that web drawing into a document library in SharePoint.  When you connect to the SharePoint site and click on it – you’ll see it ‘connecting’ to the SCOM RMS server for the latest data.  Pretty cool:

Click on that to get this:

Now, what’s really cool here is…you can click through each of the objects to get more details in the SCOM monitoring view.  It will take you directly to the SCOM web console where you can dig into that particular component.

Pretty dang cool!

Of course, the last option here is to simply make this Visio web drawing a web part.  That’s easy to do as well.  Open the page where you want the web part to go, insert a web part, choose the Visio Web Access web part:

When you edit the web part, it just wants the location of the web drawing we uploaded to the SharePoint site:

Off you go! 

This is one of the most improved upon and compelling features of SCOM 2012 – I hope you enjoy it!

-Ken

One of the first things I wanted to play with in my Windows 8 lab was the new data deduplication feature. 

In my case, I decided to make a small volume and see how well it worked with VHD files.  Well, I’m happy to announce that it works pretty well!

First of all, you need to have the File and Storage Services role installed.  Make sure you drill down in there and get ‘data deduplication’ checked.

Once you get that going – you need to configure deduplication on a volume.  It cannot be the C:\ drive.  In my test server I have a giant RAID 5 array so I used disk management to peel off 100GB and created a F:\ drive that I named “DEDUP”.

You can now enable deduplication and configure the options to suit your environment.

It’s important to note that deduplication is not ‘real time’.  The optimization process runs every hour but you can force it to run manually using some simple PowerShell commands.  (This is great for demo’s when you want to copy a file in the directory, for example, and then immedately show the effect of dedup’ing)

You can trigger an optimization job on demand in PowerShell using the Start-DedupJob cmdlet. For example:

PS C:\> Start-DedupJob E: –Type Optimization

You can query the progress of the job on the volume by using the Get-DedupJob cmdlet:

PS C:\> Get-DedupJob

The Get-DedupJob command show current jobs that are running or are queued to run.You can query the key status statistics including the achieved savings on the volume by using the Get-DedupStatus cmdlet:

PS C:\> Get-DedupStatus

In my case, with all VHD files (and a mix of Windows 7, Windows 8 Client and Server), I saw some pretty significant space savings on the dedup’d volume.

Properties on the disk shows me:

What I actually have on the drive:

A Windows 7 VHD @ 7.4GB with 3 copies.  This would use ~22GB without dedup.

A Windows 8 Client CTP VHD @ 9.2GB

A Windows 8 Server VHD @ 9.0GB

So, total I would have seen ~40GB of space used without dedup.

With Windows 8 Deduplication enabled:

Nice job Windows Server team!

Worth noting��in a dual-boot scenario…what happens when you are in another OS and want to access that dedup’d volume?

• Any file that was deduped with server will not be available (You will be able to see the file system Reparse Points that define the optimized file stub for the deduped file)
• Any file that was not deduped will be available

The situation I envision occurring most frequently is configuring Windows Server 8 with the full GUI because it’s obviously a lot easier to configure/manage the installation of applications, etc… with a UI than with PowerShell and other command line utilities.

After the install is complete and the server is ready for production – let’s remove the GUI, management tools (this of course doesn’t mean that this server cannot be remotely managed) and other components that we no longer need and don’t want the hassle of having to patch or update things like Internet Explorer, for example. 

These examples give you an idea of how you can choose the installation option that might be most appropriate for your deployment needs:

• Server Core installations require approximately 4 GB less space than a Server with a GUI installation. By using Server Core installations on virtual machines, you can achieve a significant space savings by not having to store the GUI files on the virtual machine’s disk.
• Servers often have comparatively large amounts of memory and complex disk arrays, both of which can take a significant amount of time to initialize at startup. Because Server Core installations minimize the number of restarts required for updates, the frequency at which disk arrays and memory must be re-initialized is reduced.
• Certain server applications have dependencies on certain Windows services, libraries, applications, and files that are not available in Server Core installations, but the administrator wants to take advantage of the reduced need for updating typical of Server Core installations. The Minimal Server Interface offers additional compatibility while still maintaining a reduced system footprint (though to a lesser extent than a Server Core installation).
• Features on Demand can be used to reduce the footprint for your virtual machine deployments by removing roles and features that will never be deployed in your virtual machines. Depending on the roles and features used in your virtual machines, it is possible to reduce the size by over 1 GB.
• There’s a lot more info here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831786.aspx

So, the first step in the full GUI implementation is to simply use SERVER MANAGER > REMOVE ROLES AND FEATURES to get here.

You have 2 options. 

When you remove Server Graphical Shell, you are removing IE, Explorer (including the Metro style start screen), and the Desktop – about 300 MB* of binaries. You are left with a command line system plus Server Manager and support for most GUI management tools (e.g. MMC and related snap-ins) and server roles. Exchange is not currently supported in this state.

When you remove Graphical Management Tools and Infrastructure you are removing about 4 GB* of dependencies including most UI framework, MMC, and more. Exchange is not currently supported in this state. You are left with a command line only system (including .NET, WPF, and PowerShell, and support for most server roles plus SQL Server 2012)

* The features can be reinstalled so the disk space is not actually freed unless you use the -Remove option with Features on Demand.

After you pull both off and reboot, you’ll login to this:

If/When you need the UI again.  Use SCONFIG option 12:

Once again, there are a LOT of other options and considerations.  Please make sure you read the URL I referenced earlier to get more information on other scenario’s and best practices.

Enjoy!

PowerShell Web Access is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 (in this case, Windows 8 Beta).  The obvious advantage of this functionality is being able to easily run remote PS commands without making a direct connection (either console or RDP) or using long-hand PowerShell commands like ‘enter-pssession’ and ‘invoke-command’ required for remote PowerShell.

I’m certainly no PowerShell guru, but I’ve shown this a few times in my lab lately and had some folks ask a few questions…primarily, how do you install this?

It’s a pretty straightforward installation…there’s an even a switch to let PowerShell configure the certificate for you (a test cert, so lab usage only please).

In my lab, I started from scratch with a Windows 8 Beta VM.  I installed the IIS and PowerShell Web Access Role/Feature.

Next, you’ll want to run the ‘install-PswaWebApplication –UseTestCertificate’ command to install the application.  If you have an existing cert you can assign it with this switch as well or you more easily, you can just assign it while your in IIS Manager.  You won’t need the switch then (if you try to use it, the script will bark at you letting you know the site is already configured for SSL).  For production environments, you will obviously be using a CA cert of some kind.  The downside, as you can see from the yellow text below, is that this cert expires in 90 days.

Creating a self-signed cert is easy – go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753127(v=WS.10).aspx and create a ‘personal’ cert on the server where you are hosting PSWA.  Edit bindings on the default web site (or wherever you installed PSWA) and select the cert you created and bind it to 443.  Easy enough.

Next, you’ll want to use the ‘Add-PswaAuthorizationRule * * *’ command:

From here, you can login to https://servername/pswa

You can login to both Windows 8 and Windows 2008 R2 hosts.  If you get an error, it’s usually because WinRM isn’t properly configured.  Issuing the command “winrm quickconfig’ on a host will usually fix the problem and you’ll be able to access it remotely.

Have fun!

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