Tonight I have been thinker with ACS forwarder failover. You can read more about Audit Collection Services (ACS) in prior posts, but the fundamental is that the agent can be a ACS Forwarder which forward security events to a ACS collector (management server). My thought what is happening if a ACS collector goes down? What will the ACS forwarder do?

When you enable Audit Collection on a machine, in the “Run Task – Enable Audit Collection” box, there is a Override button (if you have multiple ACS collectors). If you click that one you can manually input collector servers. If you input “opsmgracs01.contoso.local, opsmgracs02.contoso.local” bot of these machines will be written in your ACS forwarder registry as AdtServers. You can verify that in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\
Microsoft\AdtAgent\Parameters\AdtServers

If you disconnect the first machine, opsmgracs01, from the network you will get a event (ID 4369) in the event viewer at the ACS forwarder. This event tells you that the agent can not connect to any ACS collector, but a couple of seconds later you will see a event (ID 4368) telling you that the ACS forwarder is now connected to the other ACS collector, opsmgracs02.

I have been waiting around 30 minutes, after I reconnected the first ACS collector, and I have not seen a event telling me that the ACS forwarder has return back to the first ACS collect. You could control this with a extra script.

Summary: If you use the override button during enable audit collection you can setup multiple ACS collectors for your ACS forwarder. Remeber that if the agent failover, you will have ACS data in two different databases.

 

The high level themes of the System Center Operations Manger 2007 Service Pack 1 are:

• Address critical customer initiated issues including roll-up of all hotfixes
• Make the product easier to support
• Make the product easier to use
• Make the product easier to deploy

In the beginning of November there will be a public Release Candidate  (RC). This release (RC) is fully upgradable to the final RTM version of the Service Pack. The reasons the product team is making the RC of the Service Pack generally available are:

• To give customers evaluating OpsMgr 2007 advance access to the SP to aid in their evaluation and proof of concept deployments
• To give current OpsMgr 2007 customers that may have hotfixes in their environment an opportunity to test the Service Pack and provide feedback on it
• Ultimately to make sure that the final RTM release of the Service Pack is of the highest possible quality.

The final RTM version of the Service Pack is targeted for mid-February 2008. This version of the Service Pack will be able to be applied to upgrade the originally released RTM version of Operations Manager 2007 and it will also upgrade Operations Manager 2007 running the Release Candidate of SP1

 

 

SC Ops Mgr 2007 Resource Kit – Operations Manager Inventory

A command-line utility that captures the configuration of your Operations Manager 2007 Management Servers and stores it in a .cab file that can be sent to Microsoft support to assist in problem analysis.

link

A command-line utility that enables you to remove any or all of the components of Operations Manager from a local computer in cases where the normal method of uninstallation has failed.

link

A command line utility that will allow you to perform end-to-end validation of Agent-less Exception Monitoring to verify that AEM is properly configured and operational.

link

A sample script that enables you to extract a list of computer names from your custom SQL Server database and add them to an Active Directory security group. The security group can then be referenced in the Agent Assignment and Failover Wizard to automate agent assignments to Management Servers.

link

A Management Pack that enables you to identify generic errors sent by Windows Error Reporting (WER) clients to Management Servers that are AEM-enabled. Without this mapping function these errors appear in Operations Manager as “unknown application” and “unknown version”.

link

A tool that displays the set of rules and monitors that are running on a computer, distributed application, or any other managed entity after any configured overrides have been applied.

link

A PowerShell script that allows you to set the action account on groups of computers.

link

A Vista Gadget that enables you to view the active alerts and health states for a specified set of objects from a computer running Windows Vista.

link

This weekend I have been thinker with Exchange 2007 and Ops Mgr 2007. I am running Exchange 2007 on a Windows 2003 ENT X64 machine. I converted the Exchange 2007 MP for MOM 2005 and imported into Ops Mgr 2007, no problems so far. I followed this post about the converting MP. 

After reading about the management pack at this page,  I ran the following scripts

1. new-testCasConnectivityUser.ps1 (create the test mailbox and setup user for tests)
2. set-owaVirtualDirectory (modify the properties of Outlook Web Access virtual directories )
3. After this I still received a lot of URL check errors, so I re-run new-testCasConnectivityUser.ps1 and also verified that the account was unlocked in Active Directory. This the result was different and the error stopped.

If you receive alerts that the agent cant check exchange URLs, for example the OWA site, make sure you can connect to the site with Internet Explorer. I had some problems because the IIS was in the wrong “mode”. I did reconfigure that with this KB. 

There were some other alert telling me to configure external owa URL and so on. The alert description and knowledgebase includes information how to fix them.

My plan was first to run the Exchange Management Pack Configuration Wizard to setup test mailboxes and so on, as we did with MOM 2005 and Exchange 2003. I downloaded the wizard and started it, and I got this:

“The CDOEXM library is not installed on this computer. The application depends on this library to run. To install CDOEXM you need to install the Exchange System Manager. Setup cancelled.”

Unfortunately Exchange 2003 does not support X64 OS, so it is not possible to install the Exchange 2003 System Manager on this Exchange 2007 machine. My next plan was to install the MP wizard and the Exchange 2003 tools on my XP X86 machine. The installation was no problem, but when I started the MP wizard, no exchange servers was found. I found a interesting KB about create all the settings manually, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924152 

This weekend I also tried setup notification with the new Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. No real problem was found, I configurated everything with default values. It was even easier then deploying Live Communicator Server 2005.

Summary: You can convert the Exchange 2007 MP for MOM 2005 and make it work in your Ops Mgr 2007 environment. But you will lose some functions, for example there will be no Exchange reports. If you have a urgent need for the Exchange 2007 MP you can convert the MOM 2005 version, else I recommend you to wait. The Exchange 2007 MP for Ops Mgr 2007 is planned to Q3 2007.  

You can use the Database Configuration Wizard (dbcreatewizard.exe) to install multiple Operations Manager databases on a single instance of SQL Server. But before you can start it you need three files from a Ops Mgr installation.

• C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.UI.ConsoleFramework.dll
• C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ Microsoft.MOM.UI.Common.dll
• C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ Microsoft.MOM.UI.Wrappers.dll

As many have question, how can I have the files if I not even have installed the database? You can copy these files from a machine that has Operations Manger 2007 Console installed, so install only the console on a machine that you will use as a management workstation later.