Has anyone played around with these? I'm looking to see if anyone has worked with the VMM/PRO packs yet and what their experiences have been.
-Rob
Robert, I worked with Dell PRO Pack from early beta and I would say the pack worked as advertised. It was triggering off event rules generated by the Dell instrumentation, so the alerts to simulated error conditions seemed realible in my experience. As long as PRO integration is correctly configured between OpsMgr 2007 and SCVMM 2008, it seemed quite realible to me.
In the Dell PRO Pack, they differentiate between warning and critical events. Warning events (such as temperature if memory serves) result in a suggestion of maintenance mode for the affected Hyper-V host. Critical events (such as power supply failure) result in a suggestion to vacate guests from the affected host.
Since the vendor is essentially extending PRO to hardware error conditions, it would seem the PRO Packs in this area need not be complex to serve the intended purpose.
That's pretty cool stuff. I've been dissecting the PRO packs provided with SCVMM R2 for my own education to see how they are constructed (nice to see some embedded Powershell scripts instead of all VB and JS).
Have you had a chance to play with the actaul VMM monitoring packs? I've looked at and loaded in my lab both the SCVMM 2k8 and 2k8 R2 packs and I'm running into an issue. My SCVMM instance isn't being discovered, and when I look inside the packs I don't see any discoveries for it. I see a detailed class structure with a few group populators, but the only discoveries I see around the defined are around virtualzation candidates and self service portal. I added the self service portal to my lab and sure enough it got picked up, but nothing else has. I would guess that I'm missing a pack. Any ideas?
Okay, I think I see. It looks like SCVMM might push group membership data directly through SDK calls. That's the only thing I can think of, so let me play around with the SCVMM console to see if I can get this working.
EDIT: Yup, that was it. There are no discoveries because SCVMM dynamically creates a group of connectors once it's made aware of the Ops Mgr server via a powershell cmdlet run from an SCVMM shell instance:
set-vmmserver -opsmgrserver
The symptom is the PRO options are greyed out in SCVMM's console.