Anthony's space

I  checked on the Volume Licensing Web site earlier and SCOM 2007 R2 is now available for download. I am looking forward to getting this into production as soon as possible.

One thing to watch out for is some new licensing for the System Center Server Management Suite CAL kick in when you start using SCOM 2007 R2. Another article on the transition and migration path is here.

In my weekly update email from Dell there was a link to a Dell Server Pro Management Pack link.

Under the important information it had the following

“Dell Server PRO Managament Pack version 1.0 is compatible with System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 / System Center Essentials 2007 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 only.”

To download the management pack, click here and you should end up on the download page on the Dell website

The System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 documentation is available for download or for your reading pleasure here.

Want to learn how to dual both between Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 from VHD, Keith Combs has posted a blog post on how to do that. The post has a 23 minute screen cast as well. I have not viewed the screen cast yet but I plan to take a look at it.

The blog post is here.

The trial version of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is now available here. The product will be generally available from the 1st of July.

On the Windows Vista Team blog they announced that Service Pack 2 has been released to manufacturing (RTM).

Some of the key benefits of Windows Vista SP2:

• Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved relevancy in searches
• Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack supporting the most recent specification for Bluetooth Technology
• Ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Windows Vista
• Adds Windows Connect Now (WCN) to simplify Wi-Fi Configuration
• Windows Vista SP2 enables the exFAT file system to support UTC timestamps, which allows correct file synchronization across time zones.

It comes in a single installer for both Vista and Windows Server 2008. It is expected to be publicly available in Q2 2009 (i.e. by the end of June).

I was watching the first keynote speech of MMS 2009 (Microsoft Management Summit) by Bob Kelly. Bob announced the availability of System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 in 30 days. This is a product I have really been looking forward to for a while for the support for the management of Linux servers.

The other thing that Bob mentioned was the availability of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 will be released 60 days after the RTM of Windows Server 2008 R2.

There was some demos of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 managing Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2. There was also a demo of application virtualization running on servers and where MS are going with product.

To see the MMS keynotes, click here and as far as I know the keynotes will be available for viewing later. There is a second keynote tomorrow, not sure if I will watch it as I was only keeping my eye on this for news on System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

It looks like some good upgrades to the System Center products in the next little while and I will be busy with the upgrades.

Since I have not posted in a while I thought I might post a few links to some products and guides that may be useful and are of interest to me.

Hyper-V Planning and Deployment Guide 1.2 released

SCVMM 2008 R2 Beta released and can be downloaded from Microsoft Connect.

Microsoft and Red Hat have recently signed agreements to test and validate their server operating systems running on one another’s hypervisor. More here on the Port 25 blog.

RichCopy is a bulk file copy utility.

Virtual Machine Manager Configuration Analyzer Update 1 released and available to download from here. There is information about the original release of the product here.

A article on creating a Windows Server 2008 template in SCVMM 2008

I came across this article on how to migrate from a Windows 2003 DHCP server to a Windows 2008 DHCP server. The article is from the DHCP Team blog.

http://blogs.technet.com/teamdhcp/archive/2009/02/18/migration-of-dhcp-server-from-windows-server-2003-to-windows-server-2008.aspx

In my last post I had got quick migration up and running. When I went to look at getting Live Migration working, I had to select a disk for the Cluster Shared Volume to use. Having allocated a VM to the LUN already I was initially unable to select the LUN for Cluster Shared Volume use.

Once I deleted the virtual machine and the LUN was back as available storage in the cluster it was easy to add the LUN as a cluster shared volume disk. This created a directory on each node in the cluster called ClusterStorage on the C drive. The LUN was created as a directory called Volume1 under the ClusterStorage directory.

I then created a new virtual machine in c:\ClusterStorage\Volume1 and went into failover clustering snap-in and made the machine highly available.

So to test the Live Migration I was pinging the virtual machine and I then opened a remote desktop session as well. I performed a live migration to the other node in the cluster and I did this a few times bouncing the virtual machine from node to node. In this time I would see an occasional ping dropped but the remote desktop session never dropped while trying to perform task in it

As a comparison I repeated the same tests but I used quick migration this time. In this case the remote desktop session dropped and the ping loss was multiple ping packets dropped during the failover but the remote desktop session resumed ok once the VM was running on the other node.

Anyway that is all for now, I must go take a look at the hot add of storage next.