Advanced Monitoring with System Center Operations Manager 2007 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager : Operational Tuning

Microsoft System Center Management for Virtualization

walterch — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:06:14 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/c754f940-b5a1-43ee-99f1-d9e083dbc81a

SCVMM Reports - Coming Soon

walterch — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:31:17 GMT

For those interested, the SCVMM Reports are not publicly available but are available for internal use only at:

Tip: How to Automate Daily Discovery and Agent Installation in OpsMgr

walterch — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:35:36 GMT

Courtesy of Pete Zerger - http://www.systemcenterforum.org/news/tip-how-to-automate-daily-discovery-and-agent-installation-in-opsmgr-and-essentials/

2007 Debugging OpsMgr Scripts

walterch — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:01:13 GMT

Courtesy of Stefan Stranger - http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_stranger/archive/2008/12/07/debugging-opsmgr-scripts.aspx

How to Make Active Directory MP Discover Untrusted Domains

walterch — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 04:56:49 GMT

Courtesy of Raphael Burri's Blog - http://rburri.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/how-to-make-active-directory-mp-discover-untrusted-domains/

Enterprise Active Directory Integration In-Depth for OpsMgr 2007

walterch — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:23:31 GMT

Courtesy of Peter Zerger - http://www.systemcenterforum.org/news/enterprise-active-directory-integration-in-depth-for-opsmgr-2007/

Advanced Example Using PowerShell and the OpsMgr SDK: Creating and Updating Groups

walterch — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:21:44 GMT

Courtesy of Marco Shaw - http://www.systemcenterforum.org/news/advanced-example-using-powershell-and-the-opsmgr-sdk-creating-and-updating-groups/

How to search the entire database for a string value or GUID

walterch — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:51:02 GMT

Courtesy of The Manageability Team Blog - http://blogs.technet.com/smsandmom/archive/2008/11/17/opsmgr-2007-how-to-search-the-entire-database-for-a-string-value-or-guid.aspx

Single Server View

walterch — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:48:56 GMT

Courtesy if Ian Blyth - http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/single-server-view/

Enabling Agent Proxy for all Computers Hosting an Instance of a Specific Object class

walterch — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:40:24 GMT

Courtesy of Pete Zerger - http://www.systemcenterforum.org/news/opsmgr-enabling-agent-proxy-for-all-computers-hosting-an-instance-of-a-specific-object-class/

Scheduled Discovery and Agent Deployment in Large and Complex Environments

walterch — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:34:52 GMT

Courtesy of Pete Zerger - http://www.systemcenterforum.org/news/scheduled-discovery-and-agent-deployment-in-large-and-complex-environments/

Populating Groups from External Sources

walterch — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:35:05 GMT

Courtesy of Boris Yanushpolsky: http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2008/10/26/populating-groups-from-external-sources.aspx

Creating Exchange 2007 Reports using the Service Level Dashboard Solution Accelerator and the Exchange 2007 Management Pack

walterch — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:19:00 GMT

Communications from the Operations Manager Product Team

It is possible to create custom reports for Exchange 2007 using the Service Level Dashboard Solution Accelerator and the Exchange 2007 Management Pack. These enable you to report on Exchange availability and health against a target SLA that you define. The attached document walks through how this can be accomplished.

The attached document covers two scenarios:

1. Creating a custom report that tracks Exchange availability against a target SLA per Exchange 2007 server role

2. Creating a custom report that tracks Exchange availability against a target SLA for each Exchange 2007 server

Alerts Issued from MOM 2005 ADMP after Instalaltion of OpsMgr 2007 SP1 Agent over a MOM 2005 Agent on a Domain Controller Running a 64-bit Version of Windows

walterch — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:17:00 GMT

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956184

Working with Large Data Warehouses

walterch — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:31:00 GMT

So you are designing an environment with enough agents and a retention policy necessitating a terabyte data warehouse. In reality, it takes some time to populate a terabyte warehouse. Of course the SAN space has been reserved but who is to say you need to start with a terabyte warehouse? What I recently devised for a client was a 12 month incremental approach. I calculated how much space the DW would require at 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, 180, 210, 240, 270, 300, 330, 360, 390 day mark. Now at 390 days the maximum size was approximately, 1.6 TB and that is how much space was secured on the SAN.

However, the data warehouse database initial size was set to that of 30 days. At 25 days it was increased to the 60 day size so on and so forth. In addition to simply increasing the database size, of course the data retention policy must also be changed too. I use dwdatarp, available at http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2008/05/14/data-warehouse-data-retention-policy-dwdatarp-exe.aspx

The primary benefit is:

It ensures no undue burden on the DBAs (Holiday season is approaching so you want to be on their good side) If the database has 22GB of data but is 1+ TB in size, someone will be grumpy.
Provides a mechanism to grow the data warehouse in an exacting fashion, not taking up any more space than necessary.
It makes forecasting easier. The sizing model is a reference for a specific static environment. Factoring in institutional knowledge is virtually impossible. Now you can capture their affect and adjust accordingly.
Performance - Small databases are fast databases. Again, why make it it any bigger than it needs to be.

I am sure there are many opinions as to why this may not be a good idea and I am sure they all have merit. I just wanted to share with you in case you can benefit from it.