SCSM

New UR’s for SC 2012 R2 & SP1, Updated Exchange 13 MP & more

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Wow another exciting day for Microsoft and specifically System Center! Microsoft is moving at a fast pace and doing some cool things. There were several announcements today. These included: Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 http://aka.ms/yktkfk App Controller is not included in this. I am not surprised by this. Configuration Manager and Orchestrator … Read more

Speaking @ MMS as one of the 3 International System Center Chefs

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I am excited to be co-presenting a Service Manager session at MMS 2014 on November 10th. The Midwest Management Summit is a 3-day conference purposely capped to just 500 attendees so that nobody gets lost in the crowd. Almost 60 Microsoft MVP’s will be presenting on System Center topics and more.

Areas the speakers will be presenting on are Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Orchestrator, Service Management Automation, Service Manager, Data Protection Manager, Azure Pack, PowerShell, Desired State Configuration and more.

The session I will be co-presenting in is titled: 900 Degrees of Service Manager with 3 International System Center Chefs. I am lucky to be co-presenting with:

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Here is what you can expect from the session:

“In this demo-packed session, you explore the depths of customizing Service Manager with Samuel Erskine, Dieter Gasser and Steve Buchanan (MVP). We will walk you through real-world scenarios of using advanced customization techniques such as the Authoring Tool, PowerShell, and Visual Studio to build and customize classes, forms, workflows and console tasks in Service Manager. We also discuss best practices, recommendations and processes you follow when customizing Service Manager. You will learn how to plan for customizing Service Manager for business processes. Transform your plans into custom solutions using the advance authoring tools. Finally the session is delivered by 3 deep experts with vast real world deployment and authoring experience.”

Here is a video from the MMS site with us talking about the session:

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About me:

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Full details about this session can be found here: 900 Degrees of Service Manager with 3 International System Center Chefs

UPDATE:

MMS has extended reduced conference registration until Friday, October 17th. So go and register today to keep from paying the higher conference and hotel rates!

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Hot off the press: Service Manager 2012 Unleashed book

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The System Center 2012 Service Manager Unleashed book is finally done! I received some copies of it on Friday. It is set to publish on Monday October 6th 2014. Here is the link for it and a picture below.

http://www.amazon.com/System-Center-Service-Manager-Unleashed/dp/067233707X

SCSM 2012 Unleashed

There was a great team of people behind this book consisting of well-known folks in the Service Manager community from MVP’s, MCT’s, expert consultants, and even Microsoft staff. Authors included me, MVP Kerrie Meyler, MVP Kurt Van Hoecke, and MCT Sam Erskine. Contributors include MVP Jakob Svendsen, Microsoft employee Kathleen Wilson, MCT Kenneth Surksum, Oskar Landman, MVP Patrik Sundqvist, and Peter Quagliariello. Even the foreword was done by former Microsoft program manager and now MVP Christian Booth and Service Manager program manager Srikanth Ranganathan.

This book is packed with tons of “why” and “how to” content for Service Manager. If you have Service Manager deployed or you are about to embark on a Service Manager project add this book to your library. Here is an overview of the content in the book:

This comprehensive resource will help you automate and optimize all facets of service management with System Center 2012 Service Manager.

Expert consultants offer deep “in the trenches” insights for improving problem resolution, change control, release management, asset lifecycle management, chargeback, and more. You’ll learn how to implement high-value best practices from ITIL and the Microsoft Operations Framework.

The authors begin with an expert overview of Service Manager, its evolution, and its new capabilities. Next, they walk through overall planning, design, implementation, and upgrades. Then, to help you focus your efforts, they present stepwise coverage of all topics in each feature area, linking technical information about Service Manager with essential knowledge about the technologies it depends on.

Whatever your role in deploying or running Service Manager, this guide will help you deliver more responsive support at lower cost and drive more value from all your IT investments.

• Leverage MOF and ITIL processes built into System Center 2012 Service Manager
• Plan and design your Service Manager deployment
• Install Service Manager or upgrade from earlier versions
• Efficiently administer work and configuration items
• Use connectors to integrate with Active Directory, Exchange, and System Center components
• Create service maps
• Enable end user access through Service Manager’s self-service portal
• Implement incident, problem, change, and release management
• Utilize workflows to automate key support processes
• Create service level agreements with calendars, metrics, and objectives
• Provide quick access to a standardized catalog of services
• Use notification to ensure that Service Manager items are promptly addressed
• Secure Service Manager and its data warehouse/reporting platform
• Perform maintenance, backup, and recovery
• Manage Service Manager performance
• Customize Service Manager

http://www.amazon.com/System-Center-Service-Manager-Unleashed/dp/067233707X

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Point SCSM DW & WAP Request Management to new SQL server

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I recently worked with a client that hosted the Service Manager database on a SQL cluster. They manually failed over the SCSM database to the other node in the SQL cluster. Request Management in Azure Pack and the SCSM data warehouse were still trying to communicate with Service Manager using the old node in the SQL cluster. We needed a way to manually flip both Azure Pack and The DW over to the new node in the SQL cluster. Below is how I did this. I am posting about this in case it saves anyone else time and for me if I need it for future reference.

GridPro Request Management in Windows Azure Pack Failover:

Navigate to: C:\inetpub\MgmtSvc-RequestManagementAPI

Open the “solidConnectionSettings.config” file in a text editor such as notepad.

Modify the highlighted value in the connection string to the name of the second node in the SQL cluster:

<connectionStrings>

<add name=”ServiceManagerCMDB” connectionString=”Server=SQLSERVER1,1433;Database=ServiceManager;Integrated Security=True”/>

</connectionStrings>

 

After this is modified an IIS reset is needed. After that the Request Management in Windows Azure Pack should now attempt to connect to Service Manager on the correct SQL node.

Service Manager Data Warehouse failover:

In regards to the data warehouse we needed to re-point this to the second node in the SQL cluster. To do this I:

Opened the DWStagingAndConfig database.

Open the MT_Microsoft$SystemCenter$ResourceAccessLayer$SqlResourceStore table.

And

Run Select * from MT_Microsoft$SystemCenter$ResourceAccessLayer$SqlResourceStore

Or

Right click on the table and Select Top 1000 rows. (Don’t worry there are only 10 rows in this table.)

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Note the 5th row column DataService_98B2DDF9_D9FD_9297_85D3_FCF36F1D016B has Service Manager listed. Further along in row 5 under column Server_48B308F9_CF0E_0F74_83E1_0AEB1B58E2FA it has the SQL server for Service Manager that it is pointed to listed. This is what needs to be changed. You can see this in the following screenshot:

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To change this run the following:

UPDATE MT_Microsoft$SystemCenter$ResourceAccessLayer$SqlResourceStore

SET Server_48B308F9_CF0E_0F74_83E1_0AEB1B58E2FA = ‘SQLSERVER2’

WHERE DataService_98B2DDF9_D9FD_9297_85D3_FCF36F1D016B = ‘ServiceManager’

NOTE: Be sure to replace SQLSERVER2 with the name of your new SQL node.

Now if you Run Select * from MT_Microsoft$SystemCenter$ResourceAccessLayer$SqlResourceStore

You will see row 5 in the Server_48B308F9_CF0E_0F74_83E1_0AEB1B58E2FA column will reflect the change.

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Microsoft Private & Public Cloud Poster

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On August 1st Microsoft released a new Cloud Ecosystem poster. Microsoft has a great Public and Private cloud story. With Microsoft technologies On-premises and public Azure and other Microsoft public cloud technologies such as Intune are really tied together. Microsoft Private and Public cloud consist of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and … Read more

Error installing Service Manager with SQL Alwayson

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Recently I was deploying a new Service Manager and I was placing the Service Manager database on a SQL 2012 AlwaysON Availability Group. I was specifying the Database server as Availability Group listener DNS name. This is supported with Service Manager. Here are two links the first shows it is supported and the second has install steps for deploying SCSM to a SQL 2012 AlwaysON Availability Group.

Link 1:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh495585.aspx

Link 2:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2013/02/25/how-to-install-system-center-2012-service-manager-sp1-with-a-sql-2012-alwayson-availability-groups.aspx

The Service Manager wizard did not see the Availability Group. I got an error that SQL services were not running. The following screenshot shows the error.

SCSM-AG-Error

I checked the SQL services and they were fine and my SQL Availability Group was not a named instance.

The strange thing is if I specified the Database server as the IP of the Availability Group or cluster name the wizard would not error out. I could not get Service Manager to install using the SQL Availability Group listener DNS name. Here is what I did to work around this issue:

  1. Installed the Service Manager database to one of the SQL nodes.
  2. Installed the rest of my management servers.
  3. Added the Service Manager database to the Availability Group.
  4. Re-pointed Service Manager registry key DatabaseServerName from the SQL node to the SQL Availability Group listener DNS name. To do this I followed the steps on this TechNet article:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2012/04/22/moving-the-service-manager-and-dw-databases.aspx#pi144248=2

After completing those steps the Service Manager database was running successfully on the SQL Availability Group. I was able to simulate a failover and everything worked as it should.

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Service Manager SP1 Update Rollup 4 Error

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I recently ran across some problems when trying to update System Center Service Manager SP1 with Update Rollup 4 (UR4) (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40836). Here is the error: “Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Service M has stopped working“.   There is a Temp folder on management servers with SCSM setup logs like in the screenshot. The … Read more

Remove Orphaned Connectors in Service Manager

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PROBLEM: Recently I came across a Service Manager environment that had some old SCOM 2007 connectors that were no longer being used. These SCOM 2007 connectors would not remove from the SM console and would throw the following error when trying to remove. This is an easy fix. Use the SMLets to remove this connectors … Read more

Free Hyper-V and System Center Training from MVA

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More free training coming soon on Hyper-V and System Center from Microsoft Virtual Academy (www.MicrosoftVirtualAcademy.com). This is going to be one event you don’t want to miss. I am also happy to announce I(@Buchatech) will also be a part of this event answering questions during the System Center 2012 R2 Datacenter session. Here is the … Read more

Free SCSM, SCOM, DPM Tools for the Community

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Wow what an exciting week in the System Center space! Lately there has been several free tools released for various System Center products in the community. I wanted to mention them here in one blog. Service Manager: Advanced Send Mail This one is very cool and something that has been needed for some time. Big … Read more