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Stuart Renes: The Blog

Microsoft MVP, Operations Management

Profile

Stuart Renes

Occupation
Senior Technical Leader
Location
Plano, Texas
Stuart is a Senior IT Technical leader for a Fortune 500 company that manages more than 65,000 servers, 3 million desktops and 10.2 petabytes of storage around the world. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and has spent the last 30 years working in various Information Technology roles. He has participated in Microsoft Beta programs since 1993 starting with the beta release of Windows NT 3.1. Stuart was a member of the Microsoft Joint Development program for Windows Server 2003, the Technology Adoption Program for MOM 2005, System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and the Deployment Technology Adoption Program for Windows Server 2008. Stuart has been a Microsoft MVP since 2005.
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Blog
June 16

New Exchange 2007 Management Pack for Ops Mgr 2007 R2 Available

 

Utilizing some of the new capabilities in Operations Manager 2007 R2, such as PowerShell hosting and new monitoring templates, the new Exchange 2007 MP for Operations Manager 2007 R2 is now available for download from the System Center Catalog, as well as via the new web-service catalog from which Ops Mgr 2007 R2 can download MPs.

To highlight some of the key enhancements of this MP over its predecessors:

  • Full, native implementation of the management pack, leveraging the latest capabilities offered in Ops Mgr 2007 R2, (e.g., basing health rollups on factors such as synthetic transactions, not just on component health, enabling alerting and response based on end-user impact).
  • 60% reduction in noise-based alerts, enhanced by allowing the user to enable only the monitors and alerts that they require (as opposed to delivering the MP with all monitors turned on, whether needed or not).
  • Integration with the Exchange BPA, providing a summary alert for deviations per Exchange Server.
  • New wizard-driven monitoring templates simplify the ability to create synthetic transactions against Outlook Web Access (OWA), Exchange ActiveSync, Web Service, POP3 and/or IMAP.
  • Visualization of synthetic transactions, allow rapid identification of where issues exist.
  • Over 30 new/enhanced availability and performance reports against Service Level Objectives help identify alignment of service delivery against service targets.
  • Full support for Microsoft Clustered configurations.
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June 03

How to reinstall System Center Operations Manager Reporting

Unfortunately, the reinstallation of this product can be hampered by the modified state of the underlying SQL 2005 Reporting instance as well as a bug in the XML configuration file creation.
 
Here's a step-by-step guide that may help you reinstall the reporting component of SCOM R2:
 
1) Uninstall SCOM Reporting Server (using Add\Remove Programs)
2) Uninstall SQL 2005 Reporting (using Add\Remove Programs)
3) Open IIS Administrator and delete the Reports and ReportServer Web Sites (under the Default Web Site)
4) Issue an IISRESET command
5) Open SQL Server Management Studio and delete both the ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB databases
6) Reinstall SQL 2005 Reporting
7) Reapply SQL 2005 SP3
8) Configure the default Reporting instance using the Reporting Services Configuration utility
9) Using your browser, verify you can successfully connect to http://Reports/
10) If you get an error, select the Reports Web Site under IIS Admin and select Browse
11) If you get a "ReportServerVirtualDirectory missing" error, proceed with step 12; otherwise proceed to step 14
12) Edit the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.n\Reporting Services\ReportManager\RSWebApplication.config file and change the line that reads <ReportServerVirtualDirectory></ReportServerVirtualDirectory> to <ReportServerVirtualDirectory>ReportServer</ReportServerVirtualDirectory>

13) Verify you can successfully connect to http://Reports/

14) Install SCOM R2 Reporting

15) Click on the Reporting pane in the Ops Console, select Reporting and Refresh the View to see the Reports (Reports may take a while to get loaded)

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May 28

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2!

On Friday, May 22nd the RTM of Operations Manager 2007 R2 was approved, which immediately initiated the next stage of the process ... getting this latest version of Microsoft's end-to-end monitoring product for IT environments and datacenters out to YOU!  Read more in our overview whitepaper, What's New datasheet, or download the trial, and see customer stories and more information on our pages on Microsoft.com and TechNet.

Get community help on the New Online Forums here:  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

The trial version of Operations Manager 2007 R2 RTM (build 7221) is now available via the Microsoft Download Center.  General Availability of the product will be 1st July 2009, at which point new and existing customers will be able to obtain the bits from their respective customer download centers, such as MVLS.

In addition to the updated product documentation, our overview whitepaper, and what's new datasheet, newly released collateral includes a number of new datasheets that include:

Some of you have also have the opportunity to try our new hands on labs at our MMS and TechEd events this year, which cover topics such as installation, introduction, management pack authoring, and more.  We're busily upgrading these with the RTM bits, and they will be available for you to use via the TechNet Online virtual labs next month (June).


In addition to downloading the trial (or if you're waiting for the upgrade or full product bits to arrive in your customer portal):

 
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April 24

Visio Add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 BETA

The Visio Add-in for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 combines the strengths of two applications widely used in enterprise IT to simplify the creation of customized graphical dashboards showing the health of an environment. Examples of such diagrams include showing objects by geography overlaid on a map, by location in a datacenter or building, by role in a logical view of an application or by topology for complex distributed applications such as Exchange or Active Directory.

Features include:

·        Visio diagrams exported from System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (release candidate) show automatically live health state on the exported objects in Visio.

·        Easily create new Visio diagrams and link shapes to any managed object (computer, database, web site, perspective etc.) to show the current health state

·        Automatically link entire existing Visio diagrams to the computer and network devices managed by Operations Manager by matching computer names or IP addresses

·        Auto-refresh of health state in Visio diagram - use with Visio’s full screen view to create dashboard views suitable for use as a summary display in a datacenter control room

Predefined data graphics to allow user to toggle from Operations Manager health icons to shape color for health state.

 

Download the Visio add-in at https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=446&DownloadID=17995.
(To get access to this release, apply to participate in the "Operations Manager Public Beta" at https://connect.microsoft.com/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=2249&pageType=1&SiteID=446.)

 

Check out the attached User Guide for instructions and some sample documents you can make combnining Visio and Operations Manager 2007 R2 and below:
Visio Add-in Samples

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