To prevent sprawl, I would suggest one of the following two strategies. Ideally, both would be used.

The first would be to ensure that there are some checks in place for creating virtual machines.

· Does this virtual machine need to be monitored?

· Is the monitoring team aware of this new virtual machine and its monitoring requirements?

· Is this virtual machine being created to serve a temporary need?

· Who will be responsible for removing it later?

Answering some of these questions before creating the virtual machine can dramatically increase your chances of not losing control of it later.

The second approach would be to have a great tool for virtualization management in place. This tool should be able to assess the current capacity needs of your virtual infrastructure, as well as quickly identify stale virtual machines. Identifying stale virtual machines might not always be straight forward. But, if you have the right tools in place that can accurately present where resources are not being best utilized, you have a much better chance of keeping virtual machine sprawl under control. After all, the ability to be nimble with your virtual infrastructure is a large part of why it’s there in the first place.

Savision’s Vital Signs for Hyper-V can provide insight into the health and performance of your Hyper-V hosts, as well as which virtual machines are consuming the bulk of the resources. This information can be very useful in determining if your virtual machines are appropriately sized. Vital Signs will also graphically present the storage footprint used by virtual machines, as seen in the snippets below. This can streamline finding virtual machines that are consuming large amounts of storage, and help you identify opportunities to free up space in your storage subsystem.

Vital Signs for Hyper-V can also show all the virtual machines in your Hyper-V environment, and what applications are running on those virtual machines. Having that information in one view, greatly improves the ability to identify stale virtual machines that can be removed to free up resources.

Stay tuned over the next few months, as Savision will have some exciting announcements at MMS around how to better manage your Hyper-V environment.

If you want to contact us about Vital Signs for Hyper-V or something else, Click Here!

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012:
Cloud computing represents a new era of significant cost savings combined with unprecedented speed and agility. A core component of Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy is System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012.

This new version of SCVMM presents a huge shift from managing virtual machines to managing the entire virtualized datacenter.

The shift is so dramatic that “System Center Data Center Manager” might be a more appropriate name. If you’re in IT, you need to know about all of the great new features in SCVMM 2012!

Attend this webinar to learn about the cool new features of SCVMM 2012, including:

- Infrastructure Enhancements
- Support for Microsoft Private Cloud
- Fabric Management
- Storage Management
- Provisioning

About The Speaker:
Bryan Dehner – Managing Consultant, Catapult Systems

Bryan is a Managing Consultant at Catapult Systems with over seventeen years experience in the computer technology field. He specializes in Microsoft technologies to provide solutions to businesses, primarily concentrating on IT Infrastructure solutions and specializing in virtualization technologies. He is a certified MCITP for Windows Server 2008 R2, Virtualization Administrator certification. Bryan recently attended the SCVMM 2012 Technical Airlift Program at the Microsoft campus in Redmond where he was able to work with the developers of the SCVMM 2012 beta software.

This is why we added a little feature to Live Maps v5.1.1 that will do some performance measuring and shows the results to the user.

In the following section I will explain how this feature can be used in the Live Maps web console and Windows Gadget.

Web Console

To enable the performance tracing add ‘?showtrace=true’ in the address bar right after the url.

After the Live Maps is started you see something like ‘Enabled Tracing on 2012-01-05T16:18:46.0061652Z [UTC] [1 (Startup) - 297 ms]’ above the view. The startup time is the time the application needed to initialize and load the views tree.

Drawing view

Now if you select a drawing view you see the following performance trace information:

[1 (Load MonitoringView object) - 146 ms]

[1 (Open view) {

  [2 (Check license) - 75 ms]

  [2 (Create menu urls) - 29 ms]

  [2 (Load unplaced members) - 33 ms]

  [2 (Generate drawing view) {

    [3 (Load drawing view data) - 128 ms]

    [3 (Render bitmap) - 20 ms]

    [3 (Disk I/O bitmap) - 17 ms]

    [3 (Generate hotspots) - 604 ms]

  } – 771 ms]

  [2 (Load alerts) - 26 ms]

} – 942 ms]

At first it looks kind of cryptic, but if you copy/paste the info to a text editor and reformat it a bit like above it is much more readable. As you can see some actions contain multiple sub actions that’s why every action starts with a number. 1 is a root action and a higher number is a sub action. If you sum all the times from the actions with number 1 you have the total load time. For this example it is 146 + 942 = 1088 ms.

Except for ‘Render bitmap’ and ‘Disk I/O bitmap’ all actions are retrieving data from Operations Manager. The reason why ‘Generate hotspots’ is taking a lot of time is that for all the objects on the view the tooltip text is created. And for this text all property values of that object are used.

If you wait some time the view will get refreshed and you get the following information:

[1 (Refresh) {

  [2 (Load unplaced members) - 74 ms]

  [2 (Generate drawing view) {

    [3 (Load drawing view data) - 131 ms]

    [3 (Render bitmap) - 20 ms]

    [3 (Disk I/O bitmap) - 17 ms]

    [3 (Generate hotspots) - 502 ms]

  } – 672 ms]

  [2 (Load alerts) - 20 ms]

} – 774 ms]

For the refresh a subset of actions, that are also needed for opening a view, is done.

List view

After a list view is selected you see the following information:

[1 (Load MonitoringView object) - 200 ms]

[1 (Open view) {

  [2 (Check license) - 110 ms]

  [2 (Create menu urls) - 71 ms]

  [2 (Load list members) - 1972 ms]

  [2 (Load alerts) - 235 ms]

} – 2390 ms]

In this example I have chosen for a slower network connection between the Live Maps web console and the RMS of Operations Manager. As you can see the time needed for loading data is about 140% higher. The total load time is much higher than the previews drawing view because there are a lot of Operations Manager objects on this view.

Windows Gadget

A particular customer had the feeling that the performance from a view opened in the Windows Gadget fly-out was slower than when it was opened in the normal Live Maps Web Console. That is why we made it possible to enable the performance trace functionality in the Windows Gadget fly-out.

This is how you can enable this feature in the Windows Gadget.

Open the settings.ini file from ‘%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\livemaps.gadget\settings’

The content of the file looks something like:

Source code

Automatically generated by SettingsManager 
 
 vrijdag 6 januari 2012 9:48:25 
 
 [global]  server="http%3A//localhost%3A11424" 
 
 showTrace="true" 
 
 userName="Administrator" 
 
 domain="contoso" 
 
 integrated="false" 
 
 useBrowser="false"

Change the showTrace=”false” to showTrace=”true”.

If you now open the fly-out in the gadget you see the same performance trace information as described above for the Live Maps web console.

I hope this feature will help you get more understanding how Live Maps works in case you need this knowledge for solving performance issues.

This feature is available in Live Maps for System Center Operations Manager V5.1.1 and higher.

For more information about Live Maps click here, or contact us!

How do you install these tasks? Once you have carried out the one-time integration between Operations Manager and Vital Signs, simply bring up the context menu within Vital Signs and choose “Add Tasks”. Vital Signs will then insert the launch tasks into Operations Manager for you.

Are you running Live Maps to visualize your IT environment? If so, then you can launch Vital Signs from within your maps as well. Simply bring up the context menu, select “Open”, and then “Vital Signs.”

While this may be a minor feature, we believe it is important to do whatever we can to speed you on your way to problem resolution.

For more information about Vital Signs click here, or contact us!

Nick Hebert (Savision, head of Americas sales): What is the greatest value you see in the Live Maps product?

Seth Steward: “Bringing a visual component to a very data-driven side of technology.”

Ryan Durbin: “The largest value I see in Live Maps is the ability to add a tailor-made custom interface to SCOM with the ability to create as many custom views as you like that are easy to understand for non-techy individuals such as upper management, etc.”

NH: How has Live Maps improved employee access to critical SCOM data?

RD: “Live Maps has given me the ability to create an overview of the current state of health of our operations so that at any given time we feel confident in looking at the high level maps and knowing that we are doing well. When there is an issue we can then drill down into the maps as far as needed to find the issue and seek answers from our knowledgebase to engage the issue in a timely fashion.”

SS: “Live Maps has enabled our operations employees to be more efficient at responding to alerts because of the visual aspect Live Maps brings to SCOM. Instead of solely relying on e-mail alerts, our employees can now visually see which server in a rack is experiencing issues and with just a click, can see the alert and begin troubleshooting. Live Maps also provides context so you can easily see the trickle-down effect an outage on one or more devices may have.”

NH: Help me understand how Live Maps has changed your alert problem resolution flow.

RD: “Before Live Maps our operations department had a convoluted aspect of what the current health of our environments were. Now that we have Live Maps in place, the state is available at a glance.”

SS: “It’s much easier to be proactive once you have Live Maps for a system built out. Instead of being reactive to e-mail alerts, you can create dashboards of the systems you manage and glance at them frequently to ensure you’re in a healthy state. If you do receive an e-mail alert notifying you of an issue, Live Maps can help you quickly pinpoint the effect that issue may have as well as provide shortcuts for problem resolution such as reattaching a database or restart a web service.”

(Live Maps popular Drill-Down function)

NH: What are you most excited about for Live Maps 2012?!

RD: “The most exciting things for us as a company for 2012 would have to be Service Manager integration.”

SS: “Given our heavy focus and dependability on System Center products, the integration between Service Manager and Operations Manager in the next version of Live Maps is paramount to our business. The ability to actively sync our 500+ Business Services without having to wait for the SCOM CI Connector to run will ensure our CMDB is always up to date.”
(end of the interview)

Want to learn more about what Savision has in store for 2012? Click here to schedule your personal demo for Live Maps 2012, or download our Beta 2 Version Live Maps for SCOM 2012! Also learn more about Vital Signs, a product which is a realtime troubleshooting program and instantly pinpoints the root cause of your IT problems. Vital Signs also integrates seamlessly with Live Maps.

For more information contact us at Sales@savision.com!

To be able to also use Windows Authentication on a non-RMS server, we need to setup Kerberos constrained delegation. In this article the steps required to allow for Windows Authentication while having the Live Maps Web Console installed on a standalone Web Server are described.

Verify the Service Principal Name (SPN) Registration

A service principal name (SPN) is the name by which a client uniquely identifies an instance of a service. Kerberos authentication uses the SPN to authenticate the domain account used by the OpsMgr SDK Service, so first we need to verify the SPN’s attached  to the SDK account. In this example setup, the OpsMgr SDK Service (System Center Data Access) account used is: VSDEMO\Administrator.

We can check the SPN’s of this account as follows:

If, for any reason, these are missing, we need to add those. This article on Microsoft TechNet describes how to do this. In this setup it would require the following:

setspn /A MSOMSdkSvc/VSDEMO-OPSMGR VSDEMO\Administrator
setspn /A MSOMSdkSvc/VSDEMO-OPSMGR.VSDEMO.local VSDEMO\Administrator

Verify the Domain Functional Level

When setting up constrained delegation, the domain controller should operate at a Domain functional level equal to Windows Server 2003 or higher. This can be verified by launching the ‘Active Directory Domains and Trusts’ MMC snap-on and right-click the domain to select the Properties from the context menu:

Verify the SDK Service Account options

Verify the user account options by launching the ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’ MMC snap-on, select the Properties of the SDK Service Account and navigate to the ‘Account’ tab. Ensure that ‘Account is sensitive and cannot be delegated’ is NOT checked:

Configure the Web Server for Constrained Delegation

To configure the Web Server for Constrained Delegation, find the Computer Account of the Web Server where the Live Maps Web Console will be installed on. From the Properties context menu, navigate to the ‘Delegation’ tab and check the option ‘Trust this computer for delegation to any service (Kerberos only)’:

Install the Live Maps Web Console with Windows Authentication

As we have constrained delegation set up for our standalone Web Server, we can now install the Live Maps Web Console on this server and select ‘Windows Authentication’ during the installation:

If you previously installed the Live Maps Web Console using Forms Authentication on this server, it is advised to uninstall it using ‘Programs and Features’ and then reinstall it using ‘Windows Authentication’.

References

In this blog article from Kevin Holman a similar procedure is described for the installation of the OpsMgr Web Console with Windows Authentication on a non-RMS Server. This blog article also lists some details on achieving the same on a Windows 2003 server.

More details on Live Maps for System Center Operations Manager can be found here.

• Task Manager on the Hyper-V host
• Task Manager on each virtual machine (assuming they are running Windows)
• Hyper-V Manager
• Performance Monitor through the Processor, Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor, Hyper-V Hypervisor Root Virtual Processor, and Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor object

It can be difficult to grasp what each of these mean, and ultimately determine if the processors on your Hyper-V host are saturated.  Let’s go through each one in more detail.

1) Task Manager on the Hyper-V Host

Outside of Hyper-V, determining CPU usage on a Windows Server is pretty straight forward when using Task Manager.  However, this all changes if the Windows Server is also a Hyper-V Server.  I’ve seen many users of Hyper-V get confused when they open Task Manager on a busy Hyper-V host to see a very low number reported as the current CPU usage.  This Hyper-V host runs many busy virtual machines, so how can this be?  The key here is that when the Hyper-V Server role is installed, the Windows OS that runs Hyper-V is actually just another virtual machine (albeit a special virtual machine).  Since a virtual machine has no idea what resources are being consumed by other virtual machines, what you see in Task Manager on the Hyper-V host only pertains to the CPU being used by this special virtual machine, and not to the physical server or any of the other virtual machines being managed by Hyper-V.  In general, this method is not terribly useful in determining how busy your Hyper-V host is.

2) Task Manager on a Virtual Machine

Looking at Task Manager on a virtual machine will tell you how much CPU is being used by that virtual machine.  However, what does this really mean?  A virtual machine is allocated some number of virtual processors, and these virtual processors will share the Hyper-V host’s logical processors with the other running virtual machines.  Task Manager in this case, will let you know how much of the virtual processors are being used, but provides no insight into how this is affecting the logical processors on the Hyper-V host.

3) Hyper-V Manager

It’s easy to get confused when looking at the CPU Usage as reported in Hyper-V Manager.  As an example, consider a virtual machine that shows 100% CPU in Task Manager from within the virtual machine.  However, in Hyper-V Manager, it only shows 11-12%.  What is the reason for the large discrepancy?  Hyper-V Manager is showing CPU Usage of the virtual machine, but as a fraction of the available logical processors on the Hyper-V host.  So, when a virtual machine that has 1 virtual processor is pinned at 100% on a Hyper-V host that has 8 logical processors, Hyper-V Manager will show CPU Usage as roughly 12% (100% / (8 logical processors / 1 assigned virtual processor)).  If one were to assign 2 virtual processors to this same virtual machine, and the CPU would remain pinned at 100%, Hyper-V Manager would now show roughly 25% (100% / (8 logical processors / 2 assigned virtual processors)).  Unless you have memorized the number of logical processors on all your Hyper-V hosts, and the number of virtual processors assigned to all of your virtual machines, quickly making sense of this data is challenging to say the least.

4) Performance Monitor

As mentioned above, there are a number of performance objects that report CPU usage.  I’m going to focus on the Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor and Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor objects.  The Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor object shows how much of the logical processors are being used, and the Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor object shows how much of the virtual processors are being used.  Within each of these performance objects, the % Guest Run time counter is the most important.  It shows how much of the logical or virtual processor is being used by virtual machines.  Looking at this counter for the Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor object will give you an accurate picture of how much of the logical processors are being used to serve the needs of the virtual machines.  Tracking this counter is key to ensuring optimal performance of your virtual machines.

In the context of the previous example, the Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor – % Guest Run time counter is reporting values of 90+%, which is a much more accurate representation of what is actually occurring within the virtual machine.  The Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor – % Guest Run time counter is reporting roughly 25%, providing insight into how much of the logical processors are being used to serve the needs of the running virtual machines.

Of course, instead of trying to remember which counters are important and what they mean, you could use Savision’s Vital Signs for Hyper-V Server to do that for you!  Vital Signs does the heavy lifting of aggregating the right counters for you, so you can quickly determine how busy your Hyper-V host is, and what virtual machines are contributing to that load.

With Vital Signs, it is easy to see the impact virtual machines are having on a Hyper-V host as shown below.

Additionally, moving to the Virtual Machines page within Vital Signs, one can also easily determine which virtual machines are responsible for the bulk of the load on a Hyper-V host.

You can evaluate Vital Signs in our online demo environment right now, by visiting http://www.savision.com/login-vitalsigns.

Savision customers that (are planning to) work with System Center Service Manager (SCSM) 2010/2012 will see even more benefits from their Live Maps investment with the ability to model and visualize their business applications with Live Maps for Operations Manager.  For example, wouldn’t it be great if:

• you could automatically keep your SCSM Business Service in sync with your service definition in SCOM without difficult technical procedures?
• you could open a real-time service map from the SCSM console for quicker root cause analyses and resolution times?
• incidents were automatically associated with the affected SCSM Business Service(s) to determine direct impact of the outage?
• you could run a what-if scenario if you are planning a change and would like to see which SCSM Business Service(s) would be affected?

Well, this would all be great! And the good news is that it is going to become reality with the new version of Live Maps for Operations Manager! Our current beta customers have confirmed that this new integration saves them an enormous amount of time in impact analyses, root cause determination and that it accelerates resolution times.

Furthermore it will be much easier to measure and report performance related to the Business Services they are responsible for.  If you have already modeled your business applications with Live Maps, you will be up and running with this new integration in no time!

The pictures below shows an overview of the new integration.

The SCSM Business Service is created and updated automatically when apllication components change:

Incidents created from SCOM alerts will be automatically associated with the affected Business Service(s).

If you are interested in participating in our beta program please send your details to info@savision.com.

PowerShell
Microsoft did a good job by making the data accessible through PowerShell. Vital Signs doesn’t use agents on the target machines to collect data. So we need to run the PowerShell commands remotely. For Exchange Server 2010 they made this easy, but for Exchange Server 2007 this is not possible by default.

PowerShell remoting for Exchange Server 2007
The reason why running the Exchange cmdlets from a remote machine doesn’t work is because Microsoft is blocking the use of impersonation for most of the cmdlets by default.

There are a view ways to solve this and the official way is to install the Exchange Management Tools. This solution has some big disadvantages. We had to install the Exchange Management Tools on the Vital Signs web server and this only works if the Vital Signs web server is in the same or a trusted domain as the Exchange Server 2007 machine is in.

Another solution is to only support Exchange Server 2007 SP1 with Update Rollup 1 or later. We don’t like the fact that the customer has to make changes to their machines before Vital Signs is able to operate but the big advantage is that this solution is working for machines in an untrusted domain and we don’t have to make the Exchange Management Tools a prerequisite for the Vital Signs installation.

Now it is possible to make a normal remote session to the exchange server and add the microsoft.exchange.management.powershell.admin snapin with the exchange cmdlets.

PowerShell remoting for Exchange Server 2010
Connecting to an Exchange Server 2010 with PowerShell is a little different. Microsoft has developed a dedicated Shell schema for this http://schemas.microsoft.com/powershell/Microsoft.Exchange and a different Virtual Directory to connect to Microsoft.Exchange.

The snapin with the exchange cmdlets is now called Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010

Connecting to a server in an untrusted domain
Under strict security requirements it is possible to connect, with PowerShell remoting to a machine in an untrusted domain or workgroup. When a new Dashboard is registered in Vital Signs to an Exchange or Hyper-V machine the registration wizard will check if the machine is in an untrusted domain or in a workgroup. If this is the case it will add that machine to the trusted host list on the Vital Signs web server at this stage Vital Signs also makes sure that PowerShell remoting is enabled on the target machine. More information about the requirements to make a remote PowerShell connection can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347642.aspx

Used cmdlets by Vital Signs
Every configuration item can be read, changed and removed using the Exchange PowerShell cmdlets. Vital Signs is only using the cmdlets that is reading data from Exchange. This is the list of cmdlets that are used by Vital Signs:

• Get-ExchangeServer
• Get-Mailbox
• Get-MailboxStatistics
• Get-MailboxDatabase
• Get-Queue
• Get-Message
• Get-MessageTrackingLog

How to execute Exchange PowerShell cmdlets from your own box
I like to end this blog post with some examples how to access your exchange data from your own machine using PowerShell.

First start the Windows PowerShell application. Then we need to make a remote connection to the machine where Exchange is running. This is different between Exchange Server 2007 and 2010.

Exchange Server 2007:

Source code

$s = New-PSSession –ComputerName -Authentication Kerberos -Credential (Get-Credential)
Enter-PSSession $s
Add-PSSnapin microsoft.exchange.management.powershell.admin

Exchange Server 2010:

Source code

$s = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri http:///PowerShell/ -Authentication Kerberos -Credential (Get-Credential)
Import-PSSession $s

After the connection is made the cmdlets are almost the same between 2007 and 2010

Here are some examples:

Source code

Get-ExchangeServer -DomainController | fl
Get-MailboxDatabase -DomainController | fl

The -DomainController parameter is mandatory for 2007 and optional for 2010.

There’s no doubt that increasing IT capabilities are strategic for your business. How do you ensure the maximum productivity from your company’s investments and meet rising demands with an ever leaner team and sub-optimized infrastructure?

In the end, business and IT leaders are looking for tools that simplify their team’s work, help their people become more productive while at the same time reduce their costs.

Measuring IT Complexity
Is IT complexity a “gut feeling” or is it measurable. Well, measuring IT complexity is actually easier than you might think. Simply apply Glass’s Law that says for every 25% increase in the complexity of the problem, there is a 100% increase in the complexity of the solution. In IT systems, there are two contributors to the complexity of the problem:
1) The number of business functions in the system.
2) The number of connections that system has to other systems.

Time to Simplify!
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci

“Nature is pleased with simplicity.” — Isaac Newton

Psychological research on cognitive fluency shows why easy to understand equals more profitable, more pleasurable, more intelligent and safer. Here are a few studies on cognitive fluency (simplicity). They illustrate just how much can be explained by the feeling that something is easy to think about. (www.psyblog.com)

Simplicity gives us pleasure
Things that are easy to process give us a momentary burst of pleasure. When people look at objects which are easy to pick up, they produce tiny smiles compared with when they are shown objects which are difficult to pick up (Cannon et al., 2009—measured using electromyography). Sensorimotor fluency gives people a tiny twinge of pleasure.
Extrapolate this to IT Systems, organization, apps or whatever matters to you and the power of simplicity should be obvious. People like to feel pleasure almost as much as they want to avoid pain.

Simplicity allows effortless thinking
Fluency also affects the way we make decisions. Generally speaking our brains have two systems for reasoning. The system we are consciously aware of is slow and analytical, while the one that operates below the level of conscious awareness is quick, effortless and automatic. That’s our intuition.
When thinking about something that is easy to process, we tend to reason quickly and effortlessly (Alter et al., 2007). This isn’t necessarily a good or a bad thing, but one standard effect of automatic thinking is that we tend to go for the default option. On the other hand complexity kicks the mind into an analytical reasoning mode, making it more likely our decision will go off the path.

The Power of Visualization
“A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound.” – Russian writer Ivan Turgenev wrote (in Fathers and Sons in 1862)

“Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu’un long discours,” or “A good sketch is better than a long speech” – Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte

The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is meant to convey the idea that a complex notion can be delivered with just an image. It also characterizes one of the main goals of visualization; principally to make it possible to digest large quantities of data quickly.

Visualization has been an effective way to communicate ideas since the dawn of man. Examples from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci’s revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.

Why do Athletes use Visualization Techniques?
Athletes use visualization to rehearse their movements. Because the brain doesn’t make different between an imagined event and a real one, new scenarios or situations seem familiar to the brain. Athletes will even use visualization to correct weaknesses, improve their game and increase motivation.

The same holds true for IT systems. We in IT are confronted with data overload. Not to mention that we now have developed alerts for many of the (unexplained) anomalies in our data feeds.

With visualization tools, It makes it possible for architects, analysts, engineers, and the rest of us to obtain insight in these data in an efficient and effective way. This is the first step in simplifying and optimizing your problem resolution flow.