Upgrading System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to 2012 (pt.2)

It has been a while since my previous post about upgrading SCOM from 2007 R2 to 2012. Apologies to my oversight in the post earlier, you will need at least CU4 to proceed with the upgrade, together with other required pre-requisites.

Well, glad to say that now I had a production upgrade before and guess I can share more experience here. What I have was a multiple Management Server environment with more than 300 agents.

The whole upgrade exercise was divided into a few stages, from reinstalling the SQL server again, from 2008 to 2008 R2 (for future SP1 upgrade) and upgrading the management servers by stages, starting from the secondary management servers

While upgrading the management servers, it should be quite straight forward as the SCOM 2012 installer will be able to determine whether it is a fresh installation or an upgrade, something like below and the follow the wizard to complete the upgrade.

Once done, you should be able to see the version number changes of the management server that has been upgraded to SCOM 2012 via your 2007 R2 Operations Console and during the upgrade exercise, the 2 versions of SCOM can actually co-exists pretty well if you are doing the upgrade similar to what I had done.

However, if there is an Operations Console installed in the upgraded management server, you will not be able to access it and you will be prompted with the familiar “Data Access Service is not initialized…”.

Once the upgrade stabilized, you can now proceed to upgrade the SCOM agents which are reporting to this management server. As for the manually installed Agents, you will to manually upgrade it. Please take note that in certain circumstances, the agent update might be failed, IF it does not meet the requirements of a SCOM 2012 agent.

SCOM Installation Headache !!! (pt.2)

In my previous post, I was not able to test out the kb974886 hotfix since I was not able to reproduce the error in my lab environment. Well as of today, I got the luxury of simulating the problem using a live data.

A few things to keep note before applying the fix in the DC is that, firstly it is better for you to check out the version of the samsrv.dll file in the DC (under %systemroot%\system32 directory.) The current version should be less than 5.2.3790.4250.

Next, proceed to install the hotfix. Installing the hotfix should be straight forward whereby the installation wizard will leave you an option “not to reboot the server” after the installation completes. But if you do no check this option, the wizard will automatically reboots your DC, once the installation completes.

When the DC is back online, you may check the version number of the samsrv.dll again. By this time, the version number should be 5.2.3790.4250.

Now, proceed with the SCOM installation. At first you might be hitting the same old authentication problem again, when the SCOM installation wizard prompts you for the SCOM action account credential. If you have the similar experience, what you need to do is to relogin to the SCOM server again and re-initiate the SCOM installation. By this time, your credential should be successfully authenticated.

The same goes to other SCOM servers, if you are installing the components in different servers.

Activating SCOM 2012

Be default, even after you had successfully installed SCOM 2012 into your environment, it will be in Evaluation version.

Searching around the net, you might have found the ways to inject the productID but unfortunately for me, it does not seemed to be smooth for me. After a few tries, the following should be the easiest way (at least to me ) to apply the product key.

• run the PowerShell via elevated permission
• follow the commands as attached above

Once successfully done, repeat the steps in all other SCOM servers you have in your environment. Once done, it is best to reboot your SCOM servers. After the server is reboot, launch the SCOM console again and check if license key had been successfully registered. If it is, then you will see the status similar to the below

SCOM 2012 Cumulative Update (CU) 1

The CU 1 for SCOM 2012 has been released. Thank god, this time around, the installer size seems to be less than 100mb, (75mb to be exact), where you can get it here.

Cutting the story short, once extracted to a desired folder, there will be several .MSPs and .MPBs files extracted. It also comes with readMe.txt file which refers you to the KB2674695 article.

The installation order for the patch should be started by Server, then followed by each of the components installed in your SCOM Management Servers. Final step will be importing the updated management packs bundled with this update.

Apart from the update dll updates for console and webconsole, another thing to take note is that once the “KB2674695-AMD64-Server” patch has been applied, the patch for the SCOM agents will be automatically extracted to the AgentManagemt\amd64 folder

With SCOM 2012 CU1, you do not have to manually patch the Agents, once the Management Servers has been updated. In fact, this can be done automatically whereby what you need to do now is to open the “Pending Management” tab, you will be able to see a list of the Agents that need to be updated.

Once approved, for the update, a job will be invoked and display you the status, similar to what we have when installing a SCOM Agent

From here, you have the option to select all the agents from the same Management Server to perform the update at one go.

To check if all the Agents had been successfully patched, at the SCOM Console, go to OperationsManager –> Agent Details –> Agents by Version, and you should be able to see the patch list information

To have a complete listing about the SCOM 2012 CU1, please visit here.

Changing Management Servers for SCOM 2012 Agents

I think most of the SCOM experts out there already know how to switch the Management Server a SCOM 2012 Agent is reporting to. Nevertheless, I am posting it again as a handy quick reference if is it needed eventually.

Imaging on a scenario that your existing Management Server is a little tied up with the resources and you now have a new Management Server to ease things a little bit. This first thing you decide is to move some of the agents to the new server. At the existing SCOM Management Server, highlight the agent that you would like to move, and select “Change Primary Management Server”

Once done SCOM will then display you all the Management Servers within the Management Group, together with the Agents there are managing.

Select the desired Management Server and click OK

Once done, Agent of the selected server is now pointing to another Management Server

SCOM Installation Headache !!!

I am now slowly picking up my SCOM skills and what i can say is that, it never fails to surprise me each time , where chances are, you might get stuck in the simplest thing you can imagine.

In another posting which i was supposed to implement SCOM 2012 infrastructure, installation of the SCOM servers should be straight forward, but in end, it took me almost 3 days to find out what’s wrong. I got hit by the error below.

With the error message like this, you might think that it is probably due to incorrect passwords or the length of the password might be a bit too long. Had made sure that the passwords are correct and even reduce its length for testing. In the end it still won’t work.
Sensing something is not very right, i opened up the SCOM installation logs located in  “C:\users\<SCOM installation account>\AppData\Local\SCOM\LOGS” , which shows you the below

Open up the “OpsMgrSetupWizard”, try to see if the following entries are logged,

If it is, chances are you might want to check with your client to see if there was any “Authoritative Restore” done to their AD recently.
You may want to refer to this kb974886 article. Since i was not able to re-produce the problem in the lab environment, i am not able to comment if this hotfix does resolve the issue. If anyone of you out there who had the similar problem as mine and tested this hotfix, appreciate your valuable comments.
The reason why it took me a while before realizing this was because there isn’t much documentation on this, and I've decide to make a post for this so that this could be for reference in the future.

Upgrading System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to 2012

With the launching of System Center 2012, you might be tasked to upgrade existing SCOM 2007 R2 infrastructure to 2012. Information relates to the upgrade can be found here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh205974.aspx . To cut the story short, this is what you need to make sure that the upgrade is successful

In your existing SCOM 2007 R2, (well, at least in my testing environment) it should come with CU 5 installed. Next, before the upgrade, make sure that the server is running 64 bit OS. (can refer to list of support configuration for 2012 here). Next, you will have to install all the pre-requisites needed for SCOM 2012 such as the .Net Framework 4, ReportViewer and Silverlight. (for this, the SCOM 2012 setup wizard will run a pre-requisite checks for you, before you proceed.)

It is told that the agents will need to be upgraded, before monitoring can be resumed. But how are you going to upgrade the agents, if your environment monitors a large number of servers, for e.g. more than 100 servers ? If you are going to manually upgrade it, then it might take time.

Another way you may try is to upgrade the agents, after the RMS and MS had been successfully upgraded to 2012. When you launch the SCOM 2012 console, under the “Pending Management” section, SCOM 2012 will actually show you the list of Agents that require update. What you need to do is to manually approve the upgrade for the agents and it will be automatically handled by SCOM 2012 after this.

Performance of SCOM Agent

We know that in order to have a machine / server to be monitored by SCOM, you will have to install an agent on the target machine / server, only then, monitoring will start to kick in, provided that the Agent Service is started.

Next, how do you know if the performance of the Agent is affected over time ? Recently involved in another project which gave me an opportunity to implement SCOM monitoring in a larger environment, I came across the following alert.

Thanks to my helpful senior who is always ready to guide, I do not have the spend to much time searching over the net for solution. Apparently the alert above might be due to the cache of the Agent has exceeded the threshold. you may try to restart the Agent service again, but if you are still encountering the similar alert, probably you can “rebuild” the cache of the SCOM Agent again.

Here’s what you can do.
1 – login to the server that raised this alert

2 – locate the “Health Service Store” folder in the <SCOM Agent Installation folder>\Health Service State folder.

3 – Stop the Agent Service.

4 – Once Stopped, rename the current “Health Service Store” folder to another name.

5 – Start the Agent Service. Once started, you should see a new “Health Service Store” folder created by itself, and looking at the even viewer, the SCOM Agent will now start to download the MPs from the management servers again.

6 – Refresh the Health Explorer or Reset that specific monitor and let it settle for a while and you should a Healthy state for this monitor.