I’m building a new lab environment for my System Center stuff. Unfortunately I’m so busy lately, that it took a while to pick up where I left: Building my System Center SP1 Lab - Part 1: Domain Controller

In this blog post I want to install a SQL 2012 SP1 server on Windows Server 2012. I’ve never installed SQL 2012 so let’s see what happens.

Since I plan to use this SQL server instance as a shared instance for multiple System Center components I will use SQL Server Enterprise Edition to get some advanced stuff in Service Manager and I also need to be careful what collation to install. More about this later…

Why Enterprise Edition? In general, both editions (Standard and Enterprise) are supported for Service Manager but there are a couple of enhancements which are only available if your Service Manager installation is located on an Enterprise...

 

Microsoft published a section on TechNet which gives you an overview of what’s new and changed in System Center SP1: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj649385.aspx

Here’s my list of improvements/features from SP1 which are really cool and noteworthy:

Everyone who is working with System Center products should have a lab/test/staging/whatever-you-want-to-call-non-production environment. System Center SP1 “RTM’ed” and I thought, let’s build a new lab environment. Most of the time, you will use parts of your existing infrastructure (like Active Directory or maybe even an existing SQL server) to setup your lab environment. This time I wanted to build a completely isolated test environment with my own, dedicated AD and dedicated SQL server. So this part will focus on setting up a new domain for my lab.

Before Windows Server 2012 was released, there were some limitations/issues with virtualized DCs, especially if you had no physical DCs at all. Windows Server 2012 has many new features and improvements, especially when it comes to running DCs virtualized. Read more about these improvements here: http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=13171

You may also check out “Virtual Domain Controller Technical Reference (Level 300)” on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj574214.aspx

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A fairly common requirement from customers is to extend work item or configuration item classes and pull values from other systems (like Active Directory or some database) and put it into a new property of an existing class. Service Manager is very extendable and has some great feature to help you with that. To achieve a goal like this, you *just* need to “author” your own management pack and do some scripting or System Center Orchestrator magic.

Sounds complicated? Follow this blog post and you will see that it’s not that hard at all.

Here’s the high level overview of what to do: Identify the class you want to extend Create a management pack to extend the class Create a script (or Orchestrator runbook) to populate the new property/properties of your extended class 1. Identifying the class to extend In this example I demonstrate how to extend the Active Directory User class (which is used and populated by the AD connector) to have a dedicated property for the primary email address....

This release is mostly a maintenance release and includes several bug fixes. However, there are a couple of new things in this release which deserves some attention:

Ad Hoc Connection Improvement As mentioned in this blog post, we’ve introduced some convenient features around ad hoc connections and the credential picker. We’ve now further improved the handling which allows you to enter a credential name in the URI followed by an @ character and the URI (hostname).

So let’s assume you have a credential called “lab\admin” (in the display name) and you want to use ad hoc connect to connect to a machine which isn’t yet in your document(s). By simply putting the credential display name (lab\admin) followed by an @ character and the hostname (like vm198) you can tell Royal TS to use the existing credential:



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We’ve just released Royal TS 2.1.2 with a couple of bug fixes and performance optimizations. You can read the release notes here: http://www.code4ward.net/main/RoyalTS/ReleaseNotes.aspx

To download Royal TS 2.1.2, head over to our download page here: http://www.code4ward.net/main/RoyalTS/Download.aspx

This update is free for all Royal TS V2 license holders. If you experience any issues or want to provide feedback, please use our forums: http://www.code4ward.net/main/Forums.aspx

Best regards,
Your code4ward.net Team

code4ward.net released the first SCOM 2012 dashboard widget extension for SCOM 2012: Web View Widget Management Pack

Hopefully much more to come!

This weekend I had a little fun with SCOM and the new dashboards. Brian Wren posted a little (actually a huge!) guide on TechNet (including the files) about writing/authoring custom dashboard widgets. It wasn’t that easy because some parts of the guide didn’t quite match with the files and some things didn’t work as expected. Considering the size of the guide and judging from the screenshots, this guide was in the works for several months, maybe more than a year!...

Last week we released Royal TS 2.1.1 which includes a number of bug fixes but also one new feature worth mentioning. Since 2.1.1 Royal TS supports serial port communication (RS232) using the newly introduced Terminal Connection:



When you set the Connection Type to Serial Port, you can use the Serial Port configuration page to set up the port tweak various settings:



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Have you ever wondered how the Microsoft shipped management packs actually work? There are a couple of ways to look inside the Management Packs (MPs) and understand how they are actually working. Although you need a bit of PowerShell to get a glimpse inside the MPs, it’s worth a look…

Note: the code below only works on an Operations Manager 2012 installation – it will NOT work on SCOM 2007 (R2)!

Where are the Management Packs? Well, in general, MPs are stored in the database as soon as they are imported but when you look at the ManagementPacks folder on the installation media you’ll see that all by default installed management packs are in this folder (and more).

All the management packs which are installed in your management group can be exported to readable XML easily by a little PowerShell cmd-let using the Operations Manager Shell:

Get-SCOMManagementPack | Export-SCOMManagementPack -Path c:\SCOM_MPS_AS_XML



Make sure the path as specified above exists or use your own output path. After executing the command, all your installed management packs (sealed AND unsealed!) will show up in the directory as XML.

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Since the release of System Center 2012, there has been a bit of confusion about the authoring options to create your own management packs. The biggest problem with the System Center release was, that there were new authoring tools announced but they were not released until recently – a couple of weeks later after the System Center release.

The most frustrating part about authoring is to get started. First you need find out how to google/bing to get the Authoring toolset and then when you know, it’s still not easy to locate all your needed downloads. MS provides a great new Technet space with Wikis and Galleries, really a gold mine of information, but still, not easy to get all the tools for authoring.

So in the spirit of the famous “authoring Friday”, this post is my personal bookmark collection of all relevant downloads and tools needed for authoring. I will briefly discuss all the available options and hopefully this might be also helpful to get you started…

“Out of the box” – Authoring...