The IT Crownd

So one of the attractive features of CU5 was the ability to now use SQL 2008 R2. I also found that Windows reporting was now no longer working - after a quick Google I found that the new reporting pack was only compatible with 2008 Report Services. I was running 2005.  Now before I get going I'd like to point out I am NOT a SQL guy.  I know a bit about databases, enough to get me in trouble but I am NOT a SQL guy. Ho hum.  Time for a SQL upgrade then.  With my paperwork and Change Request (ITIL rules here) in place I dutifully made backups off all the DBs running on the SQL 2005 box. I followed the Microsoft documentation : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd789004.aspx which basically says run, SRSUpdateTool.exe, then run the SQL upgrade and then run SRSUpdateHelpr.msi and finally re-run SRSUpdateTool.exe This all sounded pretty simple, next, next and finish.  I'll have me a shiny new SQL install in no time. A week later and I finally got things worki

Ok so we've been running SCOM with CU5 for a couple of months now and things are working nicely. We do have a recurring issue when notifications fail, there is not alerting/events raised for this notification just stops.  So we do reboot the services every now and again - no biggy.  However this is a bit annoying. Anyways I followed Kevin Holman's excellent blog here... http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2011/08/03/opsmgr-2007-r2-cu5-rollup-hotfix-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx plenty to read and although it is cut-n-paste job from CU4 (and CU3) it does show how Microsoft are working towards a standard process for upgrading SCOM.   Shame we are nearly at RTM for 2012! We had no surprises and thing went very smoothly. Upgrading the SQL box to 2008 R2 from 2005 was a very different matter...

I'm alive.  Honest.  Just very busy. Struggling to get net 4.0 to install....grrrr....

Currently the implementation of our Exchange 2010 SP1 installation is holding my time from Blogging about stuff. I am still active and hopefully will have some things to write about...VDI and FusionIO come to mind..:) Or even the install of CU5 for Ops Manager...just gotta get the time... Oh and if you read these pages please comment it would be good to get your views on things too.

Ok so we've been running this little test environment (see previous post) for about two weeks (almost out of the trial license (15days!)) To recap we have a SCOM environment consisting of an SQL server, a RMS server and a MS server, so a pretty simple set up infact I only have an MS server as it is advised to not have users connecting to the web console on the RMS. Also will post something about getting Kerberos working in this environment as it does - since R2 anyways so you do not need to have the web console running on the RMS - and if you have the excellent SaVision LivesMaps (which we do) then you can use the same kerberos technique to get SSO working on that too - despite what the SaVision instructions say! We also have a software Serial-over-Ethernet solution to provide connection to the SMS modem which is in a location with a signal :) this has a second benefit of failing over if the RMS is taken out for some reason. So here's how we do it: I found the most su

We've had Operations Manager here at work for some time now.  We like it.  Warts and all.  One thing we did think of was how do we get notified that email is down.  There is a solution to this, SMS! So we purchased a nice SMS device and Ops Manager gladly informed us that we had issues via the wonders of text messages.  Hoorah!  You cannot escape!!! mwwhahaha! This was all good until we moved office.  Lovely as this office is we found that our Blackberries weren't picking up emails as often as they used to.  This office had no signal!  This was compounded by the location of the server room.  This meant that no Ops Manager alerts got through.  We only found this out when something went wrong (isn't that always the case?) Ok so we looked into either 1. Moving the RMS server as the modem HAS to be connected to the RMS. 2. Not having SMS messaging alerts (my boss wasn't keen) 3. Figuring something else out. Yes you guessed it we went for option 3.  I found a n

Recently an odd thing happened on the way to The Forum.  We are still trying to figure out why these things happened however the upshot was that we lost connectivity to our OCS server. The trouble with OCS is that it is one of those technologies which is quite involved yet once put in properly it also just works.  This has the double nightmare of when things go wrong they are normally something you have seen before but can't remember and also require you to relearn all that you forgot - remembering the best way of learning is making mistakes....so yes you do all the same mistakes again. Well that's what happens if you don't write things down.  So I am. First thing I did was reboot the box as to my knowledge nothing had changed.  Can you see where this is going? Red Herring:   Still no joy so I checked the services for OCS and they wouldn't start, the event log showed that our evaluation license for OCS Enterprise has expired.  Great.  So I checked Microsoft Li

<RANT ON> VMWare documentation is pretty poor at the best of times (see the replacing the self signed certificate documentation for confirmation) and registering a simple plug in is also one of them. There is pretty much no "easy" way of doing this.  However the documents do not really tell you this. <RANT OFF> Google to the rescue and a rather naff looking but effective application by the name of... Plugin Wizard for vSphere vCenter let the naffness begin!  From http://www.virtualizeplanet.com/ . Rubbish interface (tab groups anyone?) and unwieldy name aside this was the ONLY application/script/cmdlet that I could find (in a days browsing) that actually did what it should...or more to the point what I needed. The first "Step" is to make an xml file describing your plugin to vSphere, I didn't use this application to do this as this is pretty easy and notepad is miles better...however "step 2" is something which none of the other w

Some pretty decent blogs out there on this subject so not really much to add other than you need to be pretty patient when waiting for discovery to happen (or restart the health service) One thing I will say though is that to get things fully working I needed to install CU4 - I haven't deployed the agent as have read that this can cause reboots and hangs.  Also I removed an older version of the management pack and installed the new one rather then do an upgrade. Initial opinion is the pack is really comprehensive and if the correlation engine does what it says it does this will be an impressive addition to the SCOM *killer app* list.

Sounded like a bit of fun.  Tussling with SSRS has always been a bit of a tiresome hunt around google finding caveat here, note there and undocumented feature after undocumented feature.  So I thought I'd put somewhere what I have found. Firstly and this one is a biggy: SSRS R2 DOES NOT WORK WITH SharePoint 2007 This is really strange (or at least counter-intuitive) as we have SQL 2008 R2 so downloaded to accompanying SSRS R2.  A few fruitless hours later... As SSRS R2 is for SharePoint 2010, instead of fixing SSRS R2 to work with SharePoint 2007 they fixed SSRS SP2 to work with SQL 2008 R2.  This is shown in one section of the "fix-list" in SSRS SP2.  Thanks. Anyways, here is another gotcha: If you have a multi-server environment (who doesn't?) then you need SSRS on each server...sounds ok, except the install doesn't care or ask about this so goes ahead and not only installs the binaries but activate the feature too.  This causes all many of nightma

Yes I copied the annoying spelling error.  Anyways this is to do with the other wise superb AD management pack for Operations Manager 2007. You may get the warning alert on a DC (as I did) saying that the AD Op Master Roles monitor has failed.  This is my case resulted in the afore mentioned, AD Op Master Respone monitor to be set as warning within the health explorer of my DC. Upon a quick investigation it turns out the OomADs.msi hadn't been installed, yes this happens more often than not!  A quick check of the HelperObject folder within C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\ showed no sign of the OomADs.msi at all.  I copied this from a working DC and ran it. No reboot but a restart of the System Center Manager service and you are back and running.  You don't even need to clear the health status of the affected DC.  Now things are green across the board!

There are quite a few web pages out there detailing how to get Office 2010 to stream using Citrix Profiler.  I know.  I think I found most of them :) However try as I might I couldn't get Office to consistently work from a streamed profile.  Until I just installed the thing throwing all config and extra installs out.  It just works.  I ran the setup.exe from the profiler and didn't run anything.  I have a KMS server issusing out Office licenses and now my streamed Office 2010 is activated and working. *phew* Edit: One thing I didn't mention was that this was all completed on a bare Windows 7 machine, absolutely nothing was installed - bar the Citrix Profiler. Edit: Also I had to run the installer on a second Windows 7 machine, again clean but this time 64Bit so that I could stream the resulting profile from the XenApp Server if needed.

Morning, I am currently looking into getting AppV working on our XenApp 6 farm.  We use both Citrix and XenApp to deliver applications to our users, this works brilliant for our Windows desktops and laptops however this fails to deliver the same seamless experience for those users without the required client software. This user base of non-Microsoft clients is increasing and the demand for accessing applications irrelevant of which device a user has is also increasing.  So trying to "cut them off at the pass" I'm loking at providing all applications on a platform agnostic delivery mechanism.  XenApp. Sounds pretty simple when I first looked into this, however, as with most things it turns out that it is not.  First I had to get my NetScaler working, weirdly this broke when I put on the SharePoint AppWizard template.  Once working my BB Torch showed my XenApp delivered applications just fine thank you. I followed various websites on delivering AppV applications v

So yet more fun at work!  Crikey this year has started well :) Got my hands on a Citrix Application Gateway appliance, well the VPX version as I wrote last post. Finally had some time to play around with the thing and found that while it was pretty simple to get the simple stuff working the documentation (again!) was confusing when setting up some components. AD authenication was pretty tricky, once I'd figured out what the documentation was on about things started working fine.  Here are my gotchas for AD authentication on CAG v5. 1. You MUST have the correct license!  You need the Universal and Platform Licenses installed (I used a licesne server) 2. You MUST use an AD group, I found the "help" really un-helpful in this regard. Anyways once you get these two things sorted you are pretty much set to go.

Been working with the Citrix Access Gateway VPX.  However we have ESX 3.5 not ESX 4.0 (vSphere). This means we get the error Line 25: Unsupported hardware family 'vmx_07' when importing the OVF.  Grrrrr.  So how do you get round this?  Pretty simple really - hey that's becoming a catch phrase!  There are a couple of ways I used this one using OVFTool. Download and install the OVF Tool (I used version 2) from VMWare. Next convert the non-working OVF to a VMX like this ovftool citrixappliance.ovf citrixappliance_conv.vmx Make sure you name the out file something different to the original ovf name otherwise this wont work the tool fails to create a file as it already exists - i think this is the vmdk file Once you have your vmx (and vmdk and mf) you can happily edit the vmx xml file in notepad.  Change the line: virtualhw.version = "7" to virtualhw.version = "4" save the vmx file and convert it back to an OVF using the following

Morning.  Working on backup exec from Symantec I found that a backup job was failing due to a "Folder not found" error.  This was strange as the selection looked correct.  However when the selection summary came up we saw that an old location was present.  This location was not un-selectable in the Selections area as the actual disk had been removed. Until that is you click on the View Format -> Text radio button.  This shows you a text view of the selection which you can edit directly.  Removing the incorrect location. Hoorah. I guess a way to avoid this in the future is to remove the selection before removing the device.  Or check the text radio button :)

Following on from my previous post I thought about how to show the resulting information from the PowerCLI one liner in vCenter. This is actually pretty simple.  You need to make a couple of files and then you are done. First make your web application or page.  What I did was to schedule a run of the PowerCLI script from the last post piped to ConvertToHTML and put the file under the UI folder within the Tomcat installation on my vCenter server which is C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ui Here is the actual script with some CSS added to so you can adjust how things look, a note if you are cut-n-pasting please make sure you don't add any line breaks as this will break the code. # Add VMWare Snap In Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core # Connect to vCenter Connect-VIServer -Server vcenter # Set up the styles $a = '<style>'; $a = $a + 'BODY{background-color:#eeeeee;}'; $a = $a + 'TABLE{border-width: 1px;border-style: s

Why oh Why did VMWare rebrand PowerShell to be PowerCLI?  I'm pretty sure this is to ties things up with their offering using PHP and the Service Console shell but come on.... Anyways rant off.  This is a great thing.  Being able to use PowerShell to control and query vCenter is genius.  Here is a script-ette I wrote to obtain the amount of guest machines running under a host.  This is useful - I think :) as DRS kinda makes the hosts themselves irrelevant from a capacity planning point of view so you need to look at the clusters, yes I know you can click on the cand you get a list of all the machines and a count too.  However this is a basic HTML page to show how you can avoid paying ££££ for some capacity planning 3rd party tools and just write them yourself! Anyways here's the code....you'll need PowerCLI installed and need to know how to connect to vCenter...aww shucks I'll show that here too :) Download and install PowerCLI from VMWare.  You need a valid VMWar

Recently ran into this one so posting this here for those Citrix Farm admins... We have two farms, an XPe (I know!) and a PS4 (yes I know already!!) which both work fine.  Clients use PNA v8 (!!) to connect and the web application allows both farms to be shown.  Cool. Some XP clients (and again I know!) stopped working on the XPe farm ONLY.  All application from he PS4 farm were fine.  After following procedure we found that this occured directly after a patching weekend.  Bingo.  Seems SP3 and some other patches (we didn't look to hard after we found the solution) change the permissions on a registry key.  Oh thanks.  This stops Citrix client 8 from connecting to the XPe farms.  Odd but true.  We changed the permissions back to allow the users access and things returned to live.  We did this using GPO but I guess manual would work too. HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing We gave everyone full control, however use your security policy to determine this!

I've been looking into this Server 2008 feature and have run the Microsoft labs which annoyingly (although understandably) consists of two documents, the first you find is as you would expect about DirectAccess test lab, the second you find by actually reading the first document.  This second document details how the server environment is actually configrued so effectively you need this second document first! Anyways here's links to the documents in question.  Microsoft are now using a groovy name TLG, Test Lab Guide.  Cool :) The config for the servers TLG Setup... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ab6c61af-9c34-4692-815c-4396b482d31b And the Lab Document, TLG Demo... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8D21A4EE-6B60-4D6A-B789-E47139A43A3C Annoyingly you do repeat a few things in both documents - like joining servers to domains etc...but if you follow each step things DO work! So well worth the 2h

We have a Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 (MOSS) farm and I was asked to add a new web front end (WFE) server to help with capacity. Pretty simple process so I built a 64bit Windows 2003 server.  Fine.  Installed the MOSS binaries.  Fine.  Installed the language packs.  Fine.  Ran the Configuration Wizard.  oh. I got an interesting problem where the wizard couldn't connect to the database, and infact caused a .Net exception!  After some Google-ing I couldn't find anything which directly mapped to my issue, mainly based on permissions.  Then I remembered that we are running MOSS SP1. So I installed SP1 for MOSS and everything worked.  Hoorah.  Just a stupid error message which could led you down the garden path.

Herein lies the experiences and ramblings of me through my adventures with IT .  hopefully these pages will help someone avoid the issues and trauma and lead to at least one persons IT experience being like it should i.e things work first time :)