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.
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Recently we had an issue with our production SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 server. One day, out of the blue, when you tried to launch the console and connect you would get the following error:
This is actually a SQL error. To remediate you need to add sa to the dbo role for the VMM database called VirtualManagerDB. If you followed the default install process SCVMM R2 installs SQL 2005 and has no management tools installed. You can download and install the SQL Server Management Studio and add the sa account to the dbo role or you can do it with an osql command. My co-worker Andrew did it via OSQL using the following command…
osql -E -S SCVMMR2\MICROSOFT$VMM$ -Q "USE VirtualManagerDB; EXEC sp_changedbowner ‘sa’"
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
Richard talks to Rodney Buike about how System Center 2012 facilitates the construction of private clouds. This is where System Center all comes together – utilizing Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Service Manager and Orchestrator to create effective private cloud infrastructure in your own data center. Rodney talks about how each of the System Center components work together to simplify the deployment of services – beyond the individual VM and into a suite of VM, networking rules, storage, etc. Each of the System Center products bring something to the table in this scenario. You should already be using them for their core purposes, now take it to the next level!
Listen to the 36 minute podcast here…..
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 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
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
I recently posted a set of articles on deploying Citrix XenDesktop. XD can use Hyper-V R2 and SCVMM R2 as it’s virtualization and management layer but doing so does require a few configuration changes to SCVMM for optimal performance. While not mandatory they will ease management especially as your VDI infrastructure grows.
In a large (150+ hosts) environments one of the recommendations is to enable Server Optimized Garbage Collection. Enabling this replaces the default Workstation Garbage Collection and reduces the CPU utilization on the VMM server. Even if you do not have that many hosts in your VDI infrastrucutre it is still recommended to enable this to reduce SCVMM CPU utilization. To enable server-optimized garbage collector (GC) on the VMM server, create a file that is named vmmservice.exe.config place it into the %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2\Bin directory on the VMM server. The file should contain the
Continue reading SCVMM VDI Configuration
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