MMS 2011 News

Microsoft has announced a few new system center products and public betas available on Microsoft Connect.

• System Center Concero
  Self service portal for the end user to manage his cloud applications/ machines
• System center advisor RC
  Cloud advisory system to proactively check for configuration flaws
  www.SystemCenteradvisor.com
• Microsoft Bitlocker administration and monitoring Beta
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta
• System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta 2 public available
• Microsoft Intune released to the public
• The Configuration Manager P2V Migration Toolkit

Name changes.

Opalis is now System Center Orchestrator.

Forefront news

Forefront End point protection has been moved to the core CAL licensing. This means that if you have configuration manager you are also licensed to use Forefront Endpoint protection.

 

Configuration Manager News

System Center Configuration Manager 2012 is going to be able to manage iPhone, iPad, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone, Linux, Unix.

More News later
Arne

mms 2011

As we are still a few days away from MMS 2011 it is time to start packing my gear.

Tomorrow morning I will be flying to Vegas.

I can’t wait attending the Microsoft Management Summit 2011.

I’ll try to keep you all posted on this Blog.

mms session list:  http://www.mms-2011.com/topic/list

Kind Regards,

Arne

An error Occurred while retrieving policy for this computer (0x80072EE7)

 

Today I stumbled against following problem after trying to perform an OSD.

The network drivers in the Boot environment were ok.

But I was not able to resolve the server from within the Boot image.

So I fixed DNS resolving by adding the correct entries to DNS.

When I was able to resolve the configuration manager server, the task sequence went ok.

Hope it Helps.

Kind Regards,

Arne Peleman

Stop a Disaster advertisement

A while ago I was called by a customer. Something was going wrong. Workstations were being  reinstalled with no reason.

What now…. 
There is no red Stop Button? ….

So we just deleted all the advertisements which could causing this issue.
Result: All tracking of the advertisement was lost.

After some digging on the internet I stumbled across the following MyItForum  blog.

———————————————————————————
Scenario: An advertisement went out for a package that is causing havoc. Let’s say, it is rebooting servers and workstations. How do you stop it NOW!?!?! With a Big Red Stop Button (BRSB).

Below are 5 scenarios with varying speeds and success rates.

Method 1: Stop the IIS service or the SMS_OFFER_MANAGER service on all servers.

Upside: Everything stops
Downside: Everything stops including normal client communications or any other distribution

Method 2: Delete the source package files off the DP(s) update: change the ntfs folder permissions to deny any client from reading the source files.  Thanks jnelson

Upside: All clients trying to run errant advertisement will say “Waiting For Content”
Downside: Copying the package source back to the DP after everything calms down.

Method 3: Delete the Advertisement (Do not do this)

Upside: Makes you feel better
Downside: Does not stop any clients until a policy refresh is triggered. You also lose all tracking of the damage you have wrought.

Method 4: Disable the Program

Upside: Prevents further execution
Downside: Does not stop any clients until a policy refresh is triggered.

Method 5: Expire the advertisement

Upside: Prevents further execution
Downside: Does not stop any clients until a policy refresh is triggered.

Summary: Best solution for Big Red Stop Button (BRSB) appears to be Method 2. Delete the files off the DP. You will need to know the PackageID / advertisement ID. (see reports below) and the location of the DPs (see reports below).

Best order of execution to achieve BRSB

1. Identify PackageID
   See console command line below
2. Identify DPs that you will need to target
3. Run a script to delete the files off the DPs
4. Disable the program
5. Disable the advertisement (change the execution expiration time)
6. View reports on advertisement success rate so you know who to go fix

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Configuration Manager Console\AdminUI\bin\adminconsole.msc” sms:debugview=1

So next time something goes wrong bare this post in mind.

Kind regards.

Arne

Ferranti Computer Systems–Seminar

Ferranti Computer Systems will hold a seminar ‘”Upgrade your IT Service”.

Mostly aimed at potential Benelux-customers.

This seminar will focus on the System Center stack, but will also touch Forefront Endpoint Protection and Hyper-V.

I will be talking about 3 subjects.

• Upgrading to Windows 7 / Office 2010 using System Center Configuration manager 2007
• Co-presenting the SCOM-Opalis solution.
• Offer a preview about System center Configuration manager 2012 and user centric management.

Here’s a short summary about who and what to expect:

Jan Van Meirvenne will be talking about monitoring with system center operations manager in combination with auto remediation by Opalis.
Valerie Siroux will give a tour about DPM and how it can interact with Opalis to create a self-sustained backup solution.
Frederik Baert will provide a session about Service Manager and how you automate your incident management.
Stijn Verhoeven will present the Hyper-V platform and why you should consider virtualization.
Chris Millian will be available to answer your questions about System Center, and if necessary provide a short demo.

Full Program Description

If you’re interested, don’t hesitate to signup!

Kind regards,

Arne

QFE 2 DPM 2010

Microsoft released QFE Rollup package 2 For DPM 2010.

download: click here

The Kb article 2465832 has not been published yet.

Overview

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This rollup resolves the following issues:

• When you change the ports that are used by the Data Protection Manager 2010 Remote Access service, recovery jobs may fail.
• On some client computers, the System volume runs out of space when local shadow copies are created and when the shadow copy storage is set to UNBOUNDED.
• When you try to protect more than 1,000 client computers from one Data Protection Manager 2010 server, you receive a warning that you cannot protect more than 1,000 client computers by using Data Protection Manager 2010, even though Data Protection Manager 2010 can protect up to 3,000 client computers.
• When you try to protect more than 1,000 client datasources from one Data Protection Manager 2010 server, you receive a warning that you cannot protect more than 1,000 datasources by using Data Protection Manager 2010, even though Data Protection Manager 2010 can protect up to 3,000 client datasources.
• Data Protection Manager 2010 does not support the IBM System Storage® TS2900 Tape Autoloader backup, recovery or detailed inventory operations. The tape is left behind in the drive after any of these operations.
• When you use Data Protection Manager 2010 Replication Agent to protect a 1.2 terabyte SQL server that has approximately 200 .ndf secondary data files, Data Protection Manager 2010 Replication Agent crashes.
• If you are not the administrator on a client computer, you cannot perform an end-user-recovery of protected data on the client computer.
• When there are many client computers trigger client back up or client recovery operations, corresponding jobs are not triggered on the Data Protection Manager 2010 server. When the Data Protection Manager 2010 server enters this state, any later client back up or client recovery operations are not triggered on the Data Protection Manager 2010 server.
• Data Protection Manager 2010 experiences slower performance if you try to protect more than 300 client datasources on a secondary Data Protection Manager 2010 server.
• Data Protection Manager 2010 does not keep a recovery point for a client datasouce that was not synchronized during the retention period.
• If there are many list items within of a SharePoint List in a SharePoint Content Database, then the generation of a SharePoint Item level catalog will fail continuously for the SharePoint Content Database.