MMS 2008 Live

Its official... i'm no longer an MMS virgin. My first time here is a wonderful experience. Being able to meet such high calibre experts in the Management Space is a dream come true. Sessions that i attended were deep technically and done by some of the more experienced folks in the world.

As I blog about the sessions i'll be attending in the next couple of days, my fellow MVP Maarten Goet from the Netherlands is doing an excellent Live commentary on this blog.

check out www.techlog.org

Stay tuned..

Penguin in the Windows

Today at MMS, Microsoft released news that they will be supporting Cross Platform Monitoring through Ops Mgr 2007. To give you a feel of what this means?... Through the X Platform Monitoring component, Ops Mgr is able to monitor the non-Windows OS environments such as Unix and Linux... out of the box.

I had the privilege of speaking to the product team behind the development of this and got to see a demo and i must say its looking pretty impressive. Yes.. its developed in-house. The Agent is developed using Open Source standards such as WS-MAN

This will allow Ops Mgr to natively receive alerts and report data direct from a Unix/Linux box and partners can then build management packs on top of this to support applications that sit on the non-Windows operating systems.

The BETA is available at the Connect site http://connect.microsoft.com/

A Team blog was also released today at http://blogs.msdn.com/scxplat/

The second announcement was the improved connectors for HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli

MP Catalog Update

The Windows 2003 Cluster Management Pack has been updated. Hurray Hurray! Time to pop yet another bottle of champagne! .. damn.. where are the glasses..

go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AC7F42F5-33E9-453D-A923-171C8E1E8E55&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Take note however that the previous MP has to be uninstalled prior to installing this one. The following has to be removed:

Microsoft.Windows.2003.Cluster.Management.Monitoring Microsoft.Windows.2003.Cluster.Management.Library Microsoft.Windows.Cluster.Management.Monitoring Microsoft.Windows.Cluster.Management.Library

If you are unaware of steps to delete.. follow this simple to follow guide.. :)

1. Locate all management packs that reference MP to be deleted. You can use MPViewer
2. Export those management packs (to back up)
3. Delete all management packs, including your custom MP files
4. Import new MP files with more recent version
5. Re-import backed-up custom management packs (referencing older version of MP within your custom MP is not a problem when newer version of that MP exists in the system)

Cluster Monitor away!!!

Vista Gadget for Team News

There can't be anything better... up to date news on System Center right on your desktop?

http://www.systemcenternews.com/SCNews.Gadget

This tool publishes information in a Vista Gadget. So if you're waking up in the middle of the night worried about missing the latest news from the product team? Look no further! :)