For those of you that didn't have the opportunity to make it to MMS this year or those of you that did but slept through the key note after a late night of fun in Vegas, you may not have heard the fabulous announcement about cross platform support announced by Microsoft for Operations Manager. In order to be the true monitor of monitors, Microsoft has been working diligently on the creation of a non-windows agent to make their operations management offering truly cross-platform and allow it to be the monitor of monitors within any organization.

 

To stay up to date on the latest on the xplat changes, check out http://blogs.msdn.com/scxplat.

 

For great training on Ops Mgr 2007, check out www.infrontconsulting.com/events.htm.

Well, I can now say that I have done it. I have installed and configured my first virtual server in our Hyper-V lab and I know that Hyper-V is still in beta so I really hope that a LOT of the issues that I had to endure are things that are fixed in the final RTM.

The Hyper-V interface really isn’t that much different from what I am used to in Virtual PC or Virtual Server. The creation and configuration of a virtual server is quite straight forward and easy however that’s where I found the simplicity at this point stops. The first thing that I tried was simply adding a VPC image to Hyper-V and booting. During the boot, the whole lab server crashed (never a good sign) and this was the only thing running on it. As a persistent IT guy, I tried again only to find the crash mid-boot corrupted me AD database file and that resulted in having to wait 30 minutes for the indexes to rebuild. Once I was finally able to get in, I found that the virtual machine additions that had been added in VPC could not be uninstalled in Hyper-V. (Note to PG: This really needs to change. BIG PAIN POINT)

So I thought I would just build a new virtual server. That’s easy enough. In less than two minutes, I have a new virtual server booting and running through an installation of Windows Server 2003 and 30 minutes later, I am ready to go. The only limitation at this point is that I have no mouse or network in the virtual server and at the time I wasn’t sure why but through the keyboard I launched the installation of the ‘Integration Services’. This is the new name for the virtual machine additions. This led me to learn my second frustrating lesson. The Integration Services require that SP2 is installed on Windows Server 2003. Note to PG: This REALLY needs to change. BIG PAIN POINT)

So now the dilemma, with no NIC and no ‘Shared Folder’ functionality, how do I get the .exe for W2k3 SP2 into the virtual server? So the solution to this is fairly obvious, just download w2k3 SP2 to the host, download and install Nero, burn an iso image of the SP2 file and attach that to the virtual server. But all the while I am thinking to myself (and this is 4 hours into this process) ‘this is not the time saver that I had originally hoped for’. In the back of my mind I was really thinking that had I used VMWare I likely would have already been installed, configured and had my virtual systems built and functioning without dependency issues.

So, I must say that there is still definitely room for improvement and as this is still in beta I am really looking for to seeing some of that simplicity built into the RTM version. It seems to be more and more common these days with Microsoft technology to see dependencies built into Microsoft applications that really just end up driving the people that work with the technology crazy and asking the question WHY?

Gpupdate Failing on Windows Server 2008 with Event ID 1006

 

Planning to Write the 70-400 – System Center Operations Manager 2007 Exam?