Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager: High availability and performance tuning

By Tomica Kaniski in Other, Review 0 Comment

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.

Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

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.

Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview – Upgrade tips

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

If you are planning to upgrade your Windows Server 2012 to the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview (and you are not planning to spend some time reading the documentation), here are some tips that can help you make this more quickly, and (hopefully) without errors:

  • CREATE A FULL BACKUP! (before proceeding with upgrade, of course)
  • you can only upgrade Windows Server installation which is installed onto physical disk (i.e. you cannot upgrade Boot from VHD(X) installation, as you will get error saying this in compatibility report before upgrade starts) (note that you still can upgrade Windows Server installation in virtual machines, though)
  • make sure that you have enough disk space available (the compatibility report says that at least 42609 MB of free space is required)
  • make sure that your applications (and drivers) support Windows Server 2012 R2 (unfortunately, site with the compatible apps and documentation (as it says inside the upgrade wizard – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=243105) still isn’t alive, so you can’t check your applications there)
  • make sure that you have enabled page file on C: drive (I’ve had one on D: only, and the upgrade kept failing until I’ve create one on the C: drive also)
  • make sure that you don’t go online and install updates during installation (as this will probably make the upgrade fail, saying that it cannot open Compatibility report)
  • remember – if you get error during upgrade, you can always check upgrade log files located in “$WINDOWS.~BTSourcesPanther” (or “%WINDIR%Panther”) folder

I will update this list as something new comes up (also, feel free to comment with your upgrade experiences).

Thanks for reading (and good luck)!

Windows Server 2012 R2: Hyper-V – What’s new (at first glance)?

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

Well, the new version (R2) of the best server operating system is on it’s way! Windows Server 2012 R2 brings many new & upgraded features as announced at TechEd: North America 2013 conference last week.

Although I like Windows Server 2012, I’m specially excited about the news coming in the next Hyper-V upgrade. Some of them are:

  • Gen2 VMs – imagine VMs that don’t have anything emulated – no emulated devices such as IDE disk controllers and NIC cards. Well, that’s coming in R2 – we will have the new virtual machines that will be capable of booting from SCSI disks, machines that can use Secure Boot feature introduced in Windows 8, etc. This will have one downside however – to use it, you will need to run Windows 8 (x64) or Windows Server 2012 as guest OS.
  • VM Direct Connect – the new feature that allows you remote desktop connection into the virtual machine, without using network and channels you usually use – this time, you are going into the machine from the “inside”, through VM bus.
  • Hyper-V Replica to a third site – now you can have two replicas of you VMs – pretty cool and veeeery useful, if I may say so!
  • Replica frequency – now you can control the replication frequency (no more fixed 5 minutes replication intervals which allows you to “fine tune” the replication intervals to your networking infrastructure).
  • Compression – allowing from 2x to 10x faster live migrations (depending on hardware used)… do I need to say more?
  • Dynamic Memory for Linux – finally we have support for Dynamic Memory on Linux virtual machines also.
  • Online VM exporting and cloning, VHDX resizing
  • and much, much more!

This is just a list of some features and improvements that caught my attention. More is available in Ben’s talk at TechEd – http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-B330.

See you soon!

The Tipping Point Webcast Series – Telenor (May 24, 2013)

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

In any decision process, there is a tipping point. As companies plan their cloud strategy, the tipping point of when to go to the cloud – and how – is mission critical. Development and test is a great way to step into the public cloud with Windows Azure.

Telenor is a Norwegian telecommunications company who needed to upgrade to the latest SharePoint solution across 13 business units and 12 countries. Traditional approaches would have exceeded their timeframe and budget, so they turned to Windows Azure, spun up their SharePoint 2013 farms and reduced their setup time from 3 months to two weeks, saving not only time, but money with a 70% cost reduction on their test environment.

Come learn more about their decision making process, the results they have seen to date and ask questions directly of the Telenor team.

PRESENTER
Andreas Hogberg, Director of IT, Telenor

REGISTER
Register for this Webcast

Microsoft MVP for another year…

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

So… I’m Microsoft MVP for another year – for 3 years in a row (and counting Smile).
This year I’ve also changed my expertise, and now I’m part of “Virtual Machine” MVPs.

Thanks to everyone that constantly supports me in my “IT adventures” (special thanks goes to my family – without them nothing of this would be even remote possible!).

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System Center 2012 SP1 CTP2 published!

By Tomica Kaniski in Other 0 Comment

Yesterday Microsoft published System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 CTP2. I was using the CTP1, and was missing some of the features, but now they seem fixed (however, it’s to early to tell, ‘cause the download is still running Smile).

One thing that I was missing just yesterday, during my training about Microsoft cloud solutions, was the support for Azure VM in App Controller – it’s on the list; can’t wait to try it out!

Other notable improvements and updates are:

  • Virtual Machine Manager
    • Improved Support for Network Virtualization
    • Extend the VMM console with Add-ins
    • Support for Windows Standards-Based Storage Management Service, thin provisioning of logical units and discovery of SAS storage
    • Ability to convert VHD to VHDX, use VHDX as base Operating System image
  • Configuration Manager
    • Support for Windows 8
    • Support for Mac OS clients
    • Support for Linux and Unix servers
  • Data Protection Manager
    • Improved backup performance of Hyper-V over CSV 2.0
    • Protection for Hyper-V over remote SMB share
    • Protection for Windows Server 2012 de-duplicated volumes
    • Uninterrupted protection for VM live migration
  • App Controller
    • Service Provider Foundation API to create and operate Virtual Machines
    • Support for Azure VM; migrate VHDs from VMM to Windows Azure, manage from on-premise System Center
  • Operations Manager
    • Support for IIS 8
    • Monitoring of WCF, MVC and .NET NT services
    • Azure SDK support
  • Orchestrator
    • Additional support for Integration Packs, including 3rd party
    • Manage VMM self-service User Roles
    • Manage multiple VMM ‘stamps’ (scale units), aggregate results from multiple stamps
    • Integration with App Controller to consume Hosted clouds
  • Service Manager
    • Apply price sheets to VMM clouds
    • Create chargeback reports
    • Pivot by cost center, VMM clouds, Pricesheets
  • Server App-V
    • Support for applications that create scheduled tasks during packaging
    • Create virtual application packages from applications installed remotely on native server

I’ll install them in my lab during the weekend and then we’ll see…

Have a nice weekend!