February 04 2012 9:09 AM

SCVMM Tip: Testing PRO Integration in VMM / OpsMgr 2012

PRO Integration still has an important place in VMM / OpsMgr integration System Center 2012 and I expect many people will be leveraging it in a private cloud environment. Once you setup Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) integration (for info on...

January 31 2012 9:39 PM

[Private Cloud]: Configuring anti-affinity between VMs on Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 and VMM 2012

Sometimes, virtual machines that should not reside on the same virtualization host. This comes into play with virtualized Exchange server roles, VMs that are part of a failover cluster, virtualized Active Directory domain controllers or sometimes a VMs i...

January 30 2012 9:12 PM

OpsMgr 2012 UNIX/Linux Authoring Templates: Shell Command [Operating Quadrant]

Kris Bash posted a great tutorial showcasing the new Shell Command monitoring templates in Operations Manager 2012. The new templates are: Monitors UNIX/Linux Shell Command Three State Monitor UNIX/Linux Shell Command Two State Monitor Rules UNIX/Linux S...

January 30 2012 8:31 AM

Implementing rapid scale-out of a machine tier in VMM 2012 via PowerShell

In VMM 2012 using service templates, you can create multi-tier templates consisting of machine tiers (like web, app, data) and establish scale out parameters for the tier…the minimum, maximum and default instance count for each tier. Additionally, you ca...

January 27 2012 1:29 PM

Cloud: A quick note on accurately measuring Hyper-V host performance and utilization

Just a quick note on monitoring overall Hyper-V host processor utilization. You may be tempted to monitor Processor \ % Processor Utilization…but this would be incorrect. Why? For purposes of measuring processor utilization, the host operating system is...

January 26 2012 4:23 PM

MMS 2012 Technology Survey (management, virtualization and cloud)

A few weeks ago we posted a survey in response to a suggestion in the community that interest in private cloud was not a topic of interest in the System Center community (which sounded completely crazy to me). With the survey response now maxed out, the...

January 26 2012 5:38 AM

What’s new in the Cloud Services Process Pack (CSPP) Release Candidate for System Center 2012?

Microsoft have posted a beta refresh of the Cloud Services Process Pack (CSPP), which you can download at http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28726&ocid=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40886&WT.mc_id=aff-n-we-loc—ITPRO40886 I wanted to put together a...

January 24 2012 5:29 AM

Private Cloud in the real world: 5 lessons from the private cloud fabric

When I first said I wanted to talk about private cloud in the real world, I was thinking to share some deep insights. In reality, some of the insights are not so deep, but rather just part of the long list of little things you must get right to deliver o...

January 18 2012 7:36 AM

How to prepare for Orchestrator? Learn Opalis in a month of Friday afternoons! (free online resources)

“Should I learn learn System Center now, or what until System Center 2012 comes out?” I hear this question fairly often from customers. What if I told you that a month from now, you could add a relevant, important skill to your resume in a month of Frida...

January 16 2012 4:05 PM

KB Article: OpsMgr 2007 ACS reports return no more than 42 days of data

I just saw this article…Makes me wonder if we’ll get a free archival tool from MS for OpsMgr ACS someday soon? Symptoms When using System Center Operations Manager 2007, the audit database data retention period is set to 100 days but Audit Collection Ser...