Posts by Mike Resseler

Introduction

In our final part of this blog series we are taking managing and monitoring with System Center to the next level.

For those who have missed the previous posts, here are the links:

Part 1: Management PacksPart 2: Pre-work & Importing Management PacksPart 3: Exploring discoveriesPart 4: Fine-tuning methodologiesPart 5: Pro-active monitoring & maintenance tasks

In part 6, we are going to take it one step further and start creating our own dedicated views to make our work even easier.

Setting the scene

The Veeam Management Pack for System Center already has fantastic views in it, but sometimes you ... Read more

Mike Resseler and Maria Levkina continue the series by leading you through hands-on technical demos for managing the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2012 R2. You install the Hyper-V role to enable the native Microsoft virtualization technology built into Windows Server.

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Introduction

In our next part of this blog series we are going to talk about proactive monitoring and maintenance tasks.

For those who have missed the previous posts, here are the links:

Part 1: Management PacksPart 2: Pre-work & Importing Management PacksPart 3: Exploring discoveriesPart 4: Fine-tuning methodologies

In many cases actions are taken when the environment already has an issue and end-users are suffering from an outage. However, System Center Operations Manager and more specifically our Management Pack is written around pro-active monitoring. Instead of the traditional fire-fighting that happens in many environments, you can use the different MPs ... Read more

Introduction

In part 1 of these series we talked about MPs and in part 2 we did our preparations, imported an MP and created an override MP. In part 3 we explored the discoveries.

Now that we understand the discoveries, we can start by looking at various other parts of the management packs. One of them will become very crucial and that is overriding monitors and rules. Overriding doesn’t mean disabling or enabling alone. It can also mean adapting the default thresholds so that they match your infrastructure better.

There are different ways of doing this or starting with this. I have seen different people ... Read more

Introduction

In part 1 of these series we talked about MPs and in part 2 we did our preparations, imported an MP and created an override MP. So now we are ready for the next steps… Investigating the discoveries…

What? I want to fine-tune now…

While I can perfectly understand that, I always believed it is better to start looking at the discoveries first to understand what exactly is being discovered in your environment. If you know what is being discovered, you will also make it much easier for yourself to understand what is being monitored and when alerts arrive, how you can address them.

Many MPs have a very thorough manual that includes the discoveries ... Read more

Introduction

In the previous blog post we went through System Center Operations Manager as a framework, we talked about management packs, and that importing a management pack isn’t stopping the work you need to do.

We talked about fine-tuning and the importance of it to make the framework fit your environment.

In this blog posts, we are simply going to import a management pack(s) and then immediately create an “override” management pack to store our customizations. Just a few best practices that you need to do before you actually do the import.

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Every Windows administrator knows task manager. It is one of these tools we use on a daily basis and is used for many different troubleshooting purposes. The task manager tool is embedded in every Microsoft Windows Operating system. The first taskman.exe, which actually showed a list of running applications, was introduced with Windows 3.x. Windows task manager with its view of processes, applications and resource usage was introduced in Windows NT 4.0.

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Today, we are very happy and proud to announce another great free tool coming from Veeam: Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V.

If you are a Windows administrator, then you need to check this one out. We all know that opening task manager on a windows server running Hyper-V only gives you the compute of the parent partition and not what resources the virtual machines are consuming.

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Introduction

System Center Operations Manager is a great component of the system center suite. It’s a framework that helps you monitor and manage all of your components in your infrastructure. From the hardware like compute, storage, network to the virtualization layer, VMs, OS and applications. It can be your single pane of glass to view & manage your infrastructure in a single glass of pane.

And it gets better, in combination with the other system center components such as Service Manager, Orchestrator and more it is your window to manage the entire lifecycle of your infrastructure.

But as always in infrastructure management, life isn’t always as shiny as you hope. Operations Manager is actually a rather “dumb” framework. With “dumb” I don’t mean ... Read more

Watch this video where Mike and Maria represent a small company with a tiny budget that decided to virtualize its physical workloads and chose Hyper-V. Read more