SCUG and System Center Solutions Summit 2008 (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

For many many moons we have had to travel halfway across the world to attend a great event called the Microsoft Management Summit. For those of us in this part of the world (Asia) having to travel 23 hours isn't exactly something that i look forward to. But it was always worth it when i finally arrive and bask in the vast amount of knowledge shared at such an event.

So... why am i ranting about this?

Well...

SCUG.my is proud to be organizing the first ever System Center Solutions Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia! (do you hear the drums??)

Together with Microsoft Malaysia, we are bringing you 2 days of hardcore speaking action! Of what you ask?... well all about System Center of course!

Sessions will be conducted by Microsoft Technology Specialists, Regional Experts and Microsoft MVPs.

We are on the verge of finalizing our speakers and sessions so the final agenda will be out very very soon!

Book your calendars now! December 22nd and 23rd 2008 @ the Microsoft Auditorium (29th floor, Petronas Towers)

This is a must attend event if you care for your System Center career!! :)

And to cater for all of you who are far away and tried you ultimate best to make it but simply can't, the whole event will also be available through Live Meeting!!

.. of course.. those that attend the actual event will have the benefit of gorging themselves on the food, snacks and prizes that will be up on offer!

If you would like to be invited to this event, please send a mail to ask@scug.my

High CPU Utilization issues when importing the DHCP Management Pack

Some of us experienced a very high CPU Utilization issue after importing the DHCP Management Pack (6.0.6383.0). It was due to some heavy usage of discovery scripts.

I'm glad that its now all fixed with the release of the new 6.0.6452.0 version that is now in the MP Catalog

Here are some of the changes that was made by the product team. (Thanks guys!! sending you the some beer vouchers soon)

• Changed the discovery script so that it discovers same instances every time and does not cause changes in their properties (it causes changes in OpsMgr configuration each time).
• Rewrote script-based module in the following way – now it returns all data for all components (scopes, superscopes, etc.) instead of returning data only for requested one. It allowed SCOM to cook it down and now instead of 1000 scripts only one instance is run.
• Rewrote script-based module in the following way – instead of returning many property bags (4000 for 1000 objects) it returns only one big property bag. It allowed to lower significantly transferred data.
• Added performance mapper for unit monitors based on huge property bags. It allowed to significantly improve performance since now only small package of data is transferred between MonitoringHost and HealthService.
• Removed On-Demand-Detection for monitors based on huge property bags since SCOM SP1 does not support cook down for such scenarios and it leads to very high CPU consumption upon any changes in configurations/restarting HealthService.
• Optimized script populating all data from DHCP server (it analyzed with regex expression big output upon iterating through all objects every time, now it does it only once). It allowed to significantly improve performance for this module (it consumed 100% of one CPU for minutes).

New Active Directory MP 6.0.6452.0 released

Not sure about you... but I've been waiting for this for awhile. I had some issues with the previous AD MP and was told that it would be addressed in this one.

The new Active Directory Management pack (ver. 6.0.6452.0) has been released to the MP Catalog

It boasts a couple of improvements:

• Discovery of Windows Server 2008 DC and Read Only DC (RODC). Including also the discovery of FSMO roles
• Windows Server 2008 replication monitoring. Including a cool Multiple SLA workflow that can be configured
• Forests that have 2-way transitive trusts can now be discovered and reflected in the improved topology views (Forest, Domain, Site, Site-Link, Replication Connection)
• New essential services roll-up to accurately reflect services such as Sysvol, DFS, NetLogon, DCLocator
• of course.. support for Windows Server 2008 32-bit and also 64-bit

I've just imported the MP and will be updating this post after a some drives down the fast lane.

Operations Manager R2 announced at Tech ED Barcelona!

I wish i was there... sigh.. Barcelona.. the sun... spanish girls in bikini... OH and of course.. Tech Ed.

Thanks to those that posted in comments about what they wanted to see in R2 in an earlier post. I'm happy to inform that some of those comments were taken very seriously and it was announced in Barcelona that R2 would include some very nice additions and improvements.

Some of which are the Cross Platform inclusion that allows monitoring of Unix & Linux, Service Level Dashbard improvement and some new features. The announcement was made by Barry Shilmover.

You can view the video here... http://edge.technet.com/Media/Operations-Manager-with-Barry-Shilmover/

And the official announcement... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/opsmgr/dd239186.aspx

Timeline?... within H1 of 2009. Watch this blog for updates once we've got more info :)