Citrix has released a Technology Preview for the equally new Microsoft Operations Manager 2007 Release Candidate 1. There's three separate Management Pack files:

• Citrix Library Management Pack
• Citrix License Server Management Pack
• Citrix Presentation Server Management Pack

The Technology Preview of the Citrix Presentation Server Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 helps customers to maximize their investment in Operations Manager 2007 by enabling system administrators to monitor the health and availability of server farms running Citrix Presentation Server Enterprise Edition. The Management Pack enables all the new functionality introduced in Operations Manager 2007 such as service-oriented state monitoring, automatic topology discovery, and real-time event and performance data collection.

The Citrix Presentation Server Management Pack is delivered as three separate management pack files. All three must be imported into Operations Manager 2007 to use the full functionality of the Citrix Presentation Server Management Pack. See the Management Pack Administrator’s Guide for more details.

Read more and download here. (MyCitrix account required)

 

Have fun, learn OpsMgr 2007!!

 

Looking for a great class to get yourself and your clients up to speed quickly on

MOM 2005 or Operations Manager 2007? Check out our MOM 2005 bootcamp coming to a city near you.

The all of you compute cluster uses out there, you can now monitor your compute clusters with the newly released MOM Management Pack. 

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=53AE834A-7369-4655-82E5-1C2563CEC677&displaylang=en

 Overview

The Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Management Pack monitors performance, health and availability of Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster 2003 (CCS) versions 1.0 and later. This management pack includes rules that monitor critical CCS services, capture operational errors, and collect important cluster performance counters. By alerting on critical operational issues, this Management Pack highlights problems with the Windows compute cluster early so administrators can take action quickly. And by collecting and providing views of important performance counters, this Management Pack increases the ability of cluster administrators to monitor cluster performance.

Feature Bullet Summary:

This Management Pack includes the following functionalities:

• Capturing critical system and application events and errors.
• Monitoring Compute Cluster Pack services and alerting on service outages.
• Monitoring overall compute cluster metrics such as statistics on jobs, tasks, nodes, and processors.
• Reporting of compute cluster statistics and alert history.

Release History:

11/14/2006 Release published

Have fun, learn MOM!!

Looking for a great class to get yourself and your clients up to speed quickly on

MOM 2005 or Operations Manager 2007? Check out our MOM 2005 bootcamp coming to a city near you.

Check out a presentation I gave recently on the Branch Office Infrastructure Solution.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Branch Office Infrastructure Solution and Windows Server 2003 R2
Date: Friday, November 10, 2006
Time: 1:00 PM Pacific
Presented by: Rory McCaw
Event ID: 1032314362

Replay Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032314362&Culture=en-US

Silect Studio MP Studio 2.1

Are you running scripts via your MOM agent on Windows 2000 Servers running Citrix? If so, you might want to read this to avoid some problems we ran into recently.

 

Here's the scenario.... we are using MOM to call a batch file stored locally on our MOM agents. The batch file in turn calls a list of VBScripts that we use to enumerate security information on each of our MOM agents. Testing went fine outside of MOM when running the same process while logged on locally to the server as an adminstrator and when run remotely against the agent as a member of domain admins using psexec.

 

What we didn't anticipate was that when the MOM agent (and the same would be true of the SMS agent) when running in the context of the local system account creates a local system profile (SID 1.5.18) and this SID is associated with Windows Installer. Well, on our Citrix servers we have a scheduled task that runs daily and has run daily for years to run delprof.exe in the early morning hours to purge old profiles on our Citrix servers. Well after running a WMI query in one of our security scripts that queries (no writes, just reads) the stdprov.dll (02-Sep-2003 19:48 Version 1.50.1085.110, Size 180,312 Stdprov.dll) a system profile is created when the query is run in the context of the local system account. This is not an issue on Windows Server 2003, only Windows 2000 based on the file version in question. Then when delprof.exe kicks off, the local system profile is purged and all Citrix user start receiving the error message "This application must be installed before you can use it" when they try to start a program that was installed by using Windows Installer in Windows 2000.

So the problem here is that when the local system profile is removed, the registry hive for all applications installed via Windows Installer is removed as well, hence the error message. Nice!!!

 

Well the good news is that there is a hotfix for this, two in fact and a knowledge base article KB890212.

 

The installation of the hotfix listed in KB890212 will stop the deletion from occurring

 

Microsoft has confirmed that some WMI queries could create the System profile which could then be deleted by Delprof.

Well here's a new scenario to add to our pre-production deployment testing!

 

Have fun, learn MOM!!!

Looking for a great class to get yourself and your clients up to speed quickly on MOM 2005 or Operations Manager 2007? Check out our MOM 2005 bootcamp coming to a city near you.

Interested in learning how MOM 2005 can be used to monitor security and how the Secure Vantage MPs can make that so much easier than doing it yourself, then check out the following presentation I delivered recently with Jeremiah Beckett of Secure Vantage Technologies at Microsoft Canada.

 

 

Have fun, learn MOM!!!