SCOM placed in Leader Quadrant

Operations Manager 2007 R2 and its AVICode acquisition has been placed in the Gardner Magic Quadrant as a Leader. However, reading the review, there is a little error in their comment about licensing. In the Weaknesses description, it states that OpsMgr licenses can only be acquired with the System Management Suite. This is not right as OpsMgr can be purchased as a standalone product. Read it here

Opalis Integration Packs for FTP, Telnet and HTTP (by Quest)

Quest has released some FREE Opalis Integration Packs. They are for FTP, Telnet and HTTP.
http://blogs.inside.quest.com/management-extensions/2011/01/26/quest-software-opalis-integration-pack-utility-for-http-telnet-and-ftp/

Opalis Video Demos

This is a good post on demos surrounding Opalis. Check out the 8-minute video demos at  http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2010/09/21/opalis-8-minute-demo-video-series-now-on-microsoft-showcase.aspx

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3

I believe the only product which has ever gone to an R3 version.. :)

SCCM R3 is now released. http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2010/10/14/system-center-configuration-manager-2007-r3-unleashed.aspx

Opalis Customer Experience program announced. Sign up Now

The CEP for Opalis has been announced. Check out the team post here. This is a good program to participate together with Microsoft on your Opalis experience. Sign up here

Windows Intune first steps

Started the Beta 2 of Windows Intune yesterday. Installed the 64-bit agent that was downloaded from the Management Console. It took a couple of hours for the whole setup to initialize. Here is some of the stuff that was noticed:

• My Forefront Client was uninstalled and replaced by the Intune Malware Protection
• Windows Intune Center was added
• Files were installed in C:\Program Files\Microsoft\OnlineManagement
• Noticed several common client based management packs imported into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\OnlineManagement\Monitoring\Management Packs folder

Error: 'Element not found'

While setting up an Operations Manager 2007 R2 image on Hyper-V, I came across an error when I tried to START the virtual machine.

An error occurred while attempting to start the selected virtual machine. Could not find a usable certificate. Error: 'Element not found'

I manually stopped and started the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management Service

net stop vmms
net start vmms

... and now the virtual machine could startup.

Why did this happen??

Extend Schema Log 'Failed to create attribute cn=. Error code = 8206.'

Had a bit of an issue today at a customer site while trying to extend schema for SCCM. The environment was on Windows 2000 Active Directory so the ExtAdSch.exe tool could not be run directly on the DC. Since the SCCM server was running Windows Server 2003, i ran the tool from there.


Logged on as Administrator (member of Schema Admins) but the schema extension failed. checking the logs and there was a skew of 'Failed to create attribute... Error code = 8206'

Looking around I saw some help from Wei King's blog post.

Failed to create attribute cn=. Error code = 8206.

If you get this error while trying to extend your schema for Configuration Manager 2007, it may be because your account may not have enough privileges to do so...yes even if you are the administrator (check the C:\ExtADSch.log). To do this, make sure you have your schmmgmt.dll registered before you can add this console into MMC. Once opened, add the Active Directory Schema console into your MMC. From there assign the account you are using to have rights to update the schema.

When trying this, I had an issue where I could not modify the permissions on the AD Schema snap-in. This was on a Windows 2000 DC. I realized that for this, I needed to do a Right-click --> Operations Master... and select the option for 'Schema may be modified on this Domain Controller'. But after assigning explicit permissions to the Administrator account, the ExtendAd Schema still failed with the same error.

After checking AD, I noticed that there were a few orphaned domain controllers still sitting in AD. After using the ntdsutil tool to remove the DCs from AD and clearing the replication topology, the ExtendAD Schema worked successfully!! Which leaves me to assume that the AD had replication sync errors which prevented it from updating schema.