March 18 2010 12:55 AM

Security Bulletins for the Regular IT Guy - March 2010

Over pints Pierre Roman, Bruce Cowper and Rick Claus decided they would put together a concise and timely podcast each “Update Tuesday”. The object is to keep it simple by letting you know in plain, non-technical language what the updates are, what they

March 17 2010 10:25 PM

PowerShell Scripts for System Center (Master Collection)

I've started gathering all the System Center-related PowerShell scripts I use from System Center Central (and a few from elsewhere) so I could have a convenient reference point. Here's the first round, but there's a lot more to be added. Here are the cat

March 14 2010 10:08 PM

Kris Bash: Building an Oracle Management Pack for OpsMgr Cross-Platform Agents, Part 1

Very cool to see someone forging ahead with OpsMgr X-Plat authoring....Go Kris! Says Kris: "Over a series of future posts, I intend to describe my efforts to build an OpsMgr SCX Management Pack for monitoring of Oracle running on UNIX/Linux platforms. In

March 13 2010 11:01 AM

Helpful queries for spotting OpsMgr agents with health issues

I decided to clean up some Operations Manager (OpsMgr) agent issues agent problems in my environment this morning and find the completely dead ones. Here are the queries I used to find them... Problems with the Health Service Watcher (Kevin) select bme.D

March 12 2010 8:12 PM

Script Tip: Equivalent of the 'sleep' batch command for Windows 2008

I was writing some simple automation sequences for a user demonstration and realized that the sleep command present on most versions of Windows is missing from Windows Server 2008. So, I found myself in need of an alternative. I bit of digging around, I

March 10 2010 10:01 PM

Virtual System Center Part 2: Guidance on Dynamic VHDs (Thin Provisioning) for Production Workloads

The answer on dynamic virtual hard disks (or thin provisioning, in VMware terms) has become more nuanced over time. A few years ago, the answer was "not for production workloads". As with many situations, the answer today is "it depends". In part 1 of th

March 09 2010 2:02 AM

Essentials 2010 Virtualization Management: PRO Tips in SCE 2010

In a previous post, we looked at how System Center Essentials 2010 leverages SCVMM 2008 R2 functionality to perform a virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion of VMware guests (see Test: Essentials 2010 Virtualization Management: Converting VMware Guests to H

March 07 2010 5:18 PM

OpsMgr: Download Location of all the Dell 4.0 Management Packs (Server, Client, PRO, Printer and StorageArray)

Just bookmarking these for future reference. The Dell Storage Array MP 4.0 was released in January, meaning all Dell management packs have an updated MP now. Putting together some notes on Dell 4.0 tuning experience now... Download Locations Dell 4.0 Ser

March 05 2010 12:22 PM

Essentials 2010 Job Aid: Verbose List of WSUS Error Codes

I find having a list of these codes is a must have when troubleshooting update and deployment issues with Essentials 2010. I have seen it posted in a few different places, but here is the original source: Eric Brodish[MSFT] posted a verbose list of WSUS

March 01 2010 9:34 PM

Tip: System Center Essentials 2010 Console Shortcut Keys

If you're working with System Center Essentials 2010 and have not yet gotten comfortable with the shortcut keys, they are nice for those of us who prefer the keyboard over the mouse. Here is a list of the Essentials 2010 keyboard shortcuts to streamline