Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager: High availability and performance tuning

Not so long ago, I’ve got yet another book from Packt Publishing – “Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager: High availability and performance tuning“, written by a fellow MVP, Marius Sandbu.

As someone who is not an Configuration Manager expert, I’ve really enjoyed reading this book.

Why? Because it provides great reference list of all the things that make Configuration Manager deployment highly available (from Active Directory and SQL to the Configuration Manager components), packed in a great format (not too long, about 150 pages), and well-written. It also provides, from my perspective, high-level steps that can be taken to fine-tune your deployment – an aspect of the deployment which is usually forgotten.

I would recommend this book to anyone that needs to learn about the principles of high availability and performance tuning of Configuration Manager – it’s not a long read, it will save you some time and certainly help you get started right away! However, if you need deep-down information about specific component, in a “Bible” format, you’ll need to grab at least one additional book…

You can order this book here.

Free eBooks from Microsoft!

Just a quick word about something both great & totally FREE from Microsoft. 🙂

Most of you already know some of the free titles that Microsoft has been giving out for free. Now the guys at Microsoft have gone a bit further, and provided one convenient location for this great titles – Microsoft Virtual Academy!
More specifically, you can find the current list and downloads here.

Happy reading!

Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager

Well, it’s here – the first Update Rollup for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager. J

Among other things, it fixes these issues:

  • System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager cannot deploy a new or imported VMWare template
  • A virtual machine with that uses VHDX cannot be refreshed correctly in System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager, and you receive error message 2912: “The requested operation cannot be performed on the virtual disk as it is currently used in shared mode (0xC05CFF0A)”
  • During the discovery of a network-attached storage (NAS) provider, the credentials that are used do not include a domain name
  • Database operations sometimes fail with “FailedToAcquireLockException”
  • A new virtual machine template from a template that specifies an operating system profile doesn’t use credentials from the operating system profile
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager service crashes if you disable one of the teamed network adapters
  • Template deployment fails, and you receive the error message 2904: “VMM could not find the specified path on the server. The system cannot find the path specified (0x80070003)”
  • Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) cannot be mounted on a host because VHD conflicts with other disks because of a stale entry that was left in the dictionary of Virtual Machine Manager memory
  • Differencing disk based deployment may fail because the parent disk is being refreshed as non-cached

You can find out more & download it here.