For Microsoft Hyper-V admins out there, you might wanna check out the following couple of MSPress Microsoft Hyper-V Ebooks;

Optimizing and Troubleshooting Hyper-V Networking

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145382924.do

Optimizing and Troubleshooting Hyper-V Storage

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145383068.do

I was honored to write few sections and tech review both books for Mitch. Enjoy!

While publishing “Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out”, we realized we had illustrated a fairly well-understood way to monitor your O365 tenant with System Center 2012 Operations Manager (SCOM), which may produce false positives. In “Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out”, chapter 5 instructs the reader to browse to this web page and download the Office 365 management pack (MP). This MP is merely used as an example of how to use the System Center 2012 Operations Manager (SCOM) Web Application Availability Monitoring wizard to create a management pack of a few synthetic transactions, aka as fake or test transactions.

Download the following MP and Import into your System Center 2012 Operations Manager infrastructure. You will need to edit the MP as described in Chapter 5 and 6 of “Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out”.

It is important to understand that these synthetic transactions only monitor specific entities and relying on them to determine the state of your O365 tenant can lead to false positives. Let’s use Microsoft Exchange as an example. Most Microsoft Exchange servers store mailboxes in more than one mail database, known as the EDB file. There are a variety of reasons for administrators doing this, but the point here is that monitoring a mailbox’s availability only reflects its mail database availability. In O365, mailboxes may be spread across a number of mail databases. This means we may be incorrectly stating that email is running, while only some mailboxes are available.

Microsoft Office 365 distributes mailboxes across numerous mail databases, abstracting this application layer from the user and customers. Monitoring this O365 mailbox will only validate that the mail database it resides on is available. This begs the question; how do we monitor O365 more accurately?

Office 365 has a component called the System Health Dashboard (SHD), which is a matrix of health states of various O365 workloads over the last 7 days. As you can see, O365 has 8 Exchange Online workloads that are exposed in this dashboard and need to be monitored along numerous others services and workloads.

O365 provides the following 7 services and 35 workloads:

• Exchange Online – Email and Calendar access, E-Mail timely delivery, FOPE Administration, FOPE Encryption, FOPE Quarantine, Management and Provisioning, Sign-In and Voice mail
• Identity Service – Administration and Sign-In
• Lync Online – All Features, Audio and Video, Dial-In Conferencing, Federation, Instant Messaging, Management and Provisioning, Mobility, Online Meetings, Presence, Sign-In
• Office 365 Portal – Administration and Portal
• Office Subscription – Licensing and Renewal, Network Availability and Office Professional Plus Download
• Rights Management Service
• SharePoint Online – Access Services, Custom Solutions and Workflows, InfoPath Online, Office Web Apps, Project Online, Provisioning, Search, SharePoint Features, SP Designer and Tenant Admin

The O365 Service Health Dashboard (SHD) is the authoritative source for monitoring an O365 tenant. This means we need to query the SHD with SCOM to determine the state of the services and workloads we are interested in alerting on.

The concepts behind this entails 3 different parts:

1. Run a script from a SCOM Watcher Node that queries the SHD
2. Have the script login to the O365 Admin Portal (https://login.microsoftonline.com)
3. Have the script read the servicestatus.aspx page and determine which one of the 9 values exists for the workload being monitored
4. Have the script write the appropriate event log entries and update monitor status
5. O365 custom MP rules pick up event entries and generate alerts accordingly

We have been leveraging PowerShell and have made progress, but not successfully logged-in due to, what we identified as a Java component requirement.

=================================

$r = Invoke-WebRequest https://portal.microsoftonline.com/ServiceStatus/ServiceStatus.aspx -SessionVariable O365

$O365

$form = $r.Forms[0]

$form | Format-List

$form.Fields["cred_userid_inputtext"] = "username@yourdomain.onmicrosoft.com"

$form.Fields["cred_password_inputtext"] = "password"

$r = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri ("https://portal.microsoftonline.com/ServiceStatus/ServiceStatus.aspx" + $form.Action) -WebSession $O365 -Method POST -Body $form.Fields

$r.StatusDescription

==================================

Next we need to query the E-Mail and calendar access section of the aspx page. From this section of the page, we can retrieve the current state of the workload.

We are retrieving the first column because it is the only state we need. O365 keeps 30 days of history for the tenant service monitoring, but SCOM can maintain months to years’ of data.

As of this posting, we have completed the following PowerShell commands to accomplish this. This script is a work in progress because we are at an impasse attempting to move beyond the login page.

==================================

$EMailServiceName="E-Mail and calendar access"

$HTML = gc '.\Service health.htm'

$section=$false

$result=""

foreach($line in $HTML)

{

   if($line -match "ServiceNames" -and $line.Contains($EMailServiceName)){$Section=$true}

   if($section -and $line.Contains("TodayCol") -and $line -match "title=`"([^`"]*)`""){$result=$matches[1]}

   if($line -match "SubServiceNames" -and -not $line.Contains($EMailServiceName)){$Section=$false}

}

write-host "Service:" "'"$EMailServiceName"'" "Curent Status is:" $result

Finally, once the value is retrieved, we can write to the Application Event Log like this:

write-eventlog -logname Application -source O365MP -eventID 301 -entrytype Information -message "O365 message" -category 1 -rawdata 10,20

==================================

There are 9 states an O365 Service/workload can be in. This table identifies them and how we could reflect them in SCOM:

There are many pages online that guide you through creating a monitor in SCOM. Here are a few we recommend. While they may be written for SCOM 2007, they are applicable for SCOM 2012.

How to Create a Monitor

How to create a monitor based on a script

Create a Script-Based Unit Monitor in OpsMgr2007 via the GUI

Creating a SCOM monitor for an average value

Once this process is complete and working successfully, select a different workload to retrieve the state and repeat for each workload you are interested in monitoring.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of included utilities is subject to the terms specified at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm

With the introduction of Microsoft Hyper-V Dynamic Memory (DM), there’s been many discussions around DM configuration. Before Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, the only options available in User Interface were Startup and Maximum RAM. You could however use another parameter called Minimum RAM (by default the same value as Startup RAM) but that needed to be configured using WMI.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V made it easier by including that option in VM’s Memory settings.

When you start a VM with Dynamic Memory enabled, guest Operating System running inside the VM only has the knowledge of RAM that has been allocated to it at the moment and this is normally equal or around the value of Startup RAM. You can verify this by looking at Installed Memory (RAM) value on the System’s page or Installed Physical Memory (RAM) value on the System Summary page when you launch msinfo32.exe

This number changes in an upward fashion until the next reboot, meaning that as VM’s memory pressure increases, Hyper-V will allocate more RAM to that VM increasing the above mentioned value. Now, for any reasons, if the VM’s memory pressure drops and Hyper-V balloons out part of that RAM from the VM, the value that guest OS has as the Installed RAM won’t decrease. Thus, User Interface and any WMI/PowerShell queries will show the maximum amount of RAM that has been allocated to that VM since the last reboot.

Here’s a PowerShell sample code that shows the RAM formatted in GB;

"{0:N0}" -f ((Get-WmiObject -Query "select * from WIN32_ComputerSystem").TotalPhysicalmemory/1GB)

Now, why do we use this?

There are many cases that applications or installer packages are looking for a minimum amount of RAM as a prerequisite. Some applications might not even launch unless the available RAM query return a satisfactory value. If you’ve ever tried to install Microsoft System Center 2012 components in a VM with Dynamic Memory enabled, you’ve probably seen the available RAM warning message in the prerequisite analyzer wizard. Not fulfilling that requirement won’t stop you from installing any System Center 2012 components though.

Startup RAM value will allow you to allocate that much RAM to the VM upon the start of VM and let guest OS sets the Installed RAM value accordingly. This RAM will be locked to the VM while it’s booting and the extra amount of RAM that isn’t needed by the VM will be available to Hyper-V as soon as VM’s guest OS and Hyper-V Integration Services within the guest OS are up and running. In most cases the actual physical RAM allocated to the VM could go down to the value of minimum RAM if there’s no memory pressure. This all depends on how fast your VM boots.

Off course, you can set the Startup RAM to same value as Maximum RAM for multiple VMs but you’ll need to be careful if the Maximum RAM’s too high and those VMs could start at the same time, some of them might not be able to boot, if the sum of the Maximum RAM values exceeds the total physical RAM available on the Hyper-V server. And yes, you can have the Startup delay action for those VMs and address this concern.

In summary, Dynamic Memory Startup RAM value is a nifty useful dial that could assist you with optimizing your Private Cloud’s memory compute resource. It’s the best to understand the minimum RAM that needs to be reported by the OS as available Installed RAM and set the Startup Value respectfully and let Hyper-V Dynamic Memory does its magic and be efficient in RAM distribution amongst your VMs. So long…

More Info:

Scripting dynamic memory, part 5: changing minimum memory

Dynamic Memory Coming to Hyper-V Part 6…

There are lots of excitements at MMS 2013 (#MMS2013) in Las Vegas. Many opportunities to learn about Microsoft Private and Public Clouds, Cloud OS and celebrate many milestones achieved by Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 SP1, Windows Intune, Windows Azure and Microsoft Cloud Solutions in general.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend, the good news is that you can stream the keynotes live on MSDN Channel 9;

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MMS/2013

Also, don’t miss the opportunity to go back and watch the recording of session you like to know more about during the week.

Free Books

Free Windows Server 2012 (RTM) eBook is Available Now

Mitch Tulloch has updated his very popular free ebook on Windows Server 2012 based on the RTM version of the software. A key feature of this book is the inclusion of sidebars written by members of the Windows Server team, Microsoft Support engineers, Microsoft Consulting Services staff, and others who work at Microsoft. These sidebars provide an insider’s perspective that includes both “under-the-hood” information concerning how features work, and strategies, tips, and best practices from experts who have been working with the platform during product development. If you are into eReaders, you can also download the ePub and Mobi versions for free.

Free ebook: Introducing Windows 8: An Overview for IT Professionals (Final Edition)

Get a headstart evaluating Window 8 - guided by a Windows expert who’s worked extensively with the software since the preview releases. Based on final, release-to-manufacturing (RTM) software, this book introduces new features and capabilities, with scenario-based insights demonstrating how to plan for, implement, and maintain Windows 8 in an enterprise environment. Get the high-level information you need to begin preparing your deployment now.

• Topics include:
• Performance, reliability, and security features
• Deployment options
• Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit
• Windows PowerShell™ 3.0 and Group Policy
• Managing and sideloading apps
• Internet Explorer® 10
• Virtualization, Client Hyper-V, and Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack
• Recovery features

More Resources

Real impact for lean government

http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/guides/Lean-Gov/default.aspx

Microsoft Private Cloud Solutions

http://www.cloudassessmenttool.com

Did you Know these facts?

http://www.didyouknow2012.com

Making government lean with virtualization and private cloud

http://www.microsoft.com/government/ww/public-services/blog/Pages/post.aspx?postID=255&aID=66

Microsoft Government

http://www.microsoft.com/government/en-us/state/pages/default.aspx

Microsoft Government Cloud Computing

http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/guides/cloud_computing/default.aspx

Microsoft Government Server Virtualization

http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/solutions/Server_Virtualization/default.aspx