Rodney Buike - Founder and original lazy admin.
Daniel Nerenberg - Microsoft MVP and lazy admin.
Disclaimer
These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. You assume all risk for your use.
|
|
Microsoft has a great wiki that outlines all the AV exclusions required for all the different Enterprise products you may have deployed in your organization. It covers everything from AD to SQL, Failover Cluster Service to IIS, ISA and more. You can find the Windows Anti Virus Exclusions list here.
Also included in the list is the System Center suite of products, with the exception of Service Manager. While I am sure Microsoft will get around to updating the wiki you can use the list of files, folders and processes below to create an exclusion list for Service Manager.
Service Manager Folders
The following folder should be excluded from real time AV scanning…
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft System Center\Service Manager 2010\Health Service State\*
Service Manager Processes
The following processes should be excluded from real time AV scanning…
%programfiles%\Microsoft System Center\Service Manager 2010\HealthService.exe
Continue reading Service Manager AV Exclusions
While at TechDays in Toronto, Richard talks to Rodney Buike about virtualizing desktops. Rodney digs into how Citrix’s XenDesktop can let you use Windows 7 applications on your iPad! The conversation also explores the use of application virtualization to minimize storage use and simplify software updates, as well as an approach to using desktop virtualization to keep older workstations up and running for longer. VDI is coming of age, and Rodney digs into how to get things done.
Listen to the 30 minute podcast here…
In a typical Hyper-V R2 cluster built on Microsoft’s best practices will have 6-8 NICs depending on the SAN type (iSCSI or FC) including:
- Management Network
- VM Network
- VM Network
- CSV Network
- Live Migration Network
- Cluster Heartbeat Network
- iSCSI MPIO (or FC adapter)
- iSCSI MPIO (or FC adapter)
One common issue that comes up in this scenario is failed Live Migrations, Quick Migrations will work but live ones will not. When you attempt a Live Migration and it fails due to “A cluster network is not available for this operation” it is caused by improper NIC Binding Order on the Hyper-V Hosts. When this happens two events are created in the Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V High Availability\Admin event log on the destination server. Look for EventID 21126 and 21111
Your first thought will be to check that all the cluster resources are online and you will find they are. When this happens you need
Continue reading Live Migration NIC Binding
I recently completed a project converting a clients production network of 70+ servers to virtual machines for a lab environment. SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 was used to perform a physical to virtual conversion of all the physical servers. While the large majority converted without any issues at all there were a few errors encountered along the way that were easy to fix.
VSS Writer did not respond within the expected time interval – Error 13243
This was an interesting error that came up twice and both times the fix was the same. While the error looks like an issue with VSS it is actually a profile issue. When I attempted to log on to the server to investigate the VSS issue the logon would fail with a User Profile Could Not Load error. I’ve seen this before on desktop PCs when the user
Continue reading Common P2V Conversion Errors
When you are deploying new VMs with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 you have the option to mount an ISO image to install the OS from. When you do this the default behaviour is to copy the ISO file from the library to the location where the VM is being created. This causes two things to happen, first you have to copy the ISO over the network and second you end up losing that storage space as the ISO remains in the VM file location.
SCVMM allows you the option to share the ISO rather than copying it. While the data in the ISO still gets copied over the network during the install, the ISO isn’t saved to the VM file location and in the long run this will save you some space.
To implement this you need to configure some
Continue reading Sharing ISOs in SCVMM Library
System Center Vitrual Machine Manager 2008 R2 provides the capability to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine. You have two options to complete this task, online and offline.
For most physical machines in your environment an online P2V conversion will work. During an online conversion the source machine remains online and responding to requests. With an online P2V, VSS takes a snapshot of the system and that snapshot is converted to a VM. There are a few times when an online P2V is not recommeneded or available including:
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Operations Manager 2007 R2 can be integrated to provide reporting and a feature called Performance Resource Optimization (PRO). Using PRO, Operations Manager will pass alerts raised in relation to the virtualization hosts and/or VM(s) to the Virtual Machine Manager console through something called a Pro Tip.
Implementing PRO and reporting is pretty straight forward but before you start add the SCVMM Service Account to the SCOM Advanced Operators role as it will require permissions to SCOM. Once complete insert the SCVMM install media into your SCOM server and run the SCVMM Setup.
Select Configure Operations Manager. You will need to provide some basic information including the SCVMM servername, service account credentials and the tool will install the SCVMM Management Console on the server as well as importing the SCVMM 2008 R2 management packs.
(Note: You will have
Continue reading Using Pro Tips in SCVMM 2008 R2
Sorry for the alphabet soup title but I thought some explanation was due in regards to iSCSI redundancy options and issues you may have with IPv6.
Multi-path I/O (MPIO) and Multiple Connections per Session (MCS) are two options you have to provide load balancing and redundancy to your iSCSI connections. MPIO and MCS are the same but different. MPIO leverages Device Specific Modules (DSM) to manage the requests over multiple paths.
MCS is part of the iSCSI protocol and allows for teaming of iSCSI connections. In order for this to work your SAN vendor must support it and your virtualization platform must support it as well. VMWare supports MPIO but not MCS and Hyper-V supports both.
Whichever you choose is not relevant but there is something you should be aware of in regards to MCS. MCS does not support using both IPv4 and IPv6 with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. If you have IPv6
Continue reading MPIO, MCS, IPv6 and iSCSI
System Center Virtual Machine Manager uses a service account to complete it’s tasks. You can use LOCAL SYSTEM, which is the default, or a domain account. If you are going to integrate SCVMM with SCOM and enable Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) you will need to use a domain account. Even if you are not going to implement PRO at this time, use a domain account.
The domain account does not need any special permissions other than Local Administrator rights on the SCVMM server and it needs to be given priviledges in SCOM.
Now here is why you want to do this at the start, even if you are not implementing PRO at this time. Even if you never plan on it, one day you might change your mind and the only way to change the VMM Service Account is to uninstall VMM
Continue reading SCVMM Service Accounts
System Center Service Manager 2010 leverages SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to build reports. Depending on the size of your Service Manager deployment you may have the Data Warehouse database running on a remote SQL server. This will be a more common occurrence based on the Microsoft best practices of separating your management server, data warehouse server and the related database servers onto separate servers.
When you do this there is some manual configuration that needs to be performed on the Data Warehouse SQL server, or whichever server is running SSRS. Without the configuration completed there will be five (5) management packs that will fail to import as well as a warning event of EventID: 33411 Event Source: Deployment created in the Operations Manager event log on the Data Warehouse server. Also when you look under Reporting on the SCSM Management Console and try to view any reports, none will exist
Continue reading SCSM and Remote SQL Reporting Errors
|
|
|
Get a free 5GB e-mail account @isalazyadmin.com |
|
