I went about doing this today and to be honest, the instructions are non-existent.  You'll need a bunch of updates.  Note that the hotfix rollup includes X64 and X86 updates and there are individual downloads for the x86 and x64 versions on the other KB's.  Here's how you can get an Operations Manager 2007 agent working on W2008:

• Download and "install" KB954049 (a hotfix rollup).  This "install" is a messy extraction.  Note where it installs and copy the contents to somewhere safe.  You can "uninstall" the hotfix now.
• Upgrade all of your OpsMgr server components to service pack 1.
• Install KB951116, KB952664, KB953290 onto the W2008 server that you want to install an agent on to.
• Reboot the destination agent server.
• Install the OpsMgr Agent.  Make sure it is the SP1 agent!
• Stop the OpsMgr Health Service.
• Browse to where you saved the contents of KB954049.  Install the update.
• Restart the server.

Your agent should now be able to communicate with the management server assuming that all the security side of things is OK (the same rules apply).

You'll also find that you need to install the Windows Server 2008 Discovery Management Pack in order to be able to manage the OS on these new servers.  This management pack also appears to be a pre-requisite for role/feature management packs for Windows 2008, e.g. you'll be unable to import those other management packs.  This is probably quite logical, i.e. there is a discovery dependancy for Windows Server 2008 objects.

Note that there's a 4th fix (KB951327) required for any machine running a OpsMgr console on Windows Server 2008.

This is all a very manual thing.  You can probably script this pretty easily.  If you have System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM / ConfigMgr) or SMS then you can create a sequence of package programs with prerequisites to take care of this for you.  I've an example of this in my SCCM 2007 beta whitepaper on software management.

EDIT:

Remember that Windows Server 2008 has its firewall turned on by default and that it blocks both inbound and outbound traffic.  You'll need to configure rules to allow your required traffic (e.g. TCP 5723) either manually, by script or by Group Policy.

This is quite a frustrating problem.  The origin was that some of the XML files that define my VM's were locked by AV on a test Hyper-V server.  This caused Hyper-V to fail to load the VM's.  OK.  That's not a biggie  - fix the problem and then start up the VM's is what you'd think.  Uh-uh!  Hyper-V had managed to unload all knowledge of those VM's.  OK - maybe I could just reopen the VMs?  Hyper-V does not have an "open" function.  Finally, I tried setting up a new VM with the existing config and disks.  That's a monotonous manual task.  The problem here is that I lost my saved snapshots.

I opened a call with MS.  I also tried using the TechNet forums.  Let's see what I got there before I get back to the call.  The MS staff on there gave me comments such as "why were you scanning?" and "don't use snapshots in production".  Hmm.  Most people put AV on their servers.  The reason is to PROTECT them.  I'm sure if the Hyper-V team talked to the ForeFront team they'd be told the same thing.  I had put an exception in for the VHD files but didn't know to do the same for the XML's until it was too late.  However, even if I had, there's always a chance a junior member of staff could accidentally override that exception.  What am I to do then, lose half of the VM's on all of my hosts?  Is that acceptable to MS? 

I nearly choked when I saw a video of Steve Riley at TechEd talking about the potential of scanning VM's using AV.  DONT TRY IT!

And as for using snapshots: A big use of virtualisation is setting up test environments.  Whether it's for software development or infrastructure deployments, virtualisation earned it's acceptance this way and continues to be a strong player there.  MS should understand this seeing as they think everyone in IT is a programmer.  Snapshots are a convenient way to get a VM back to a known state.  No tester will want to use backups for this because it's too cumbersome, expensive and slow.

Back to the call.  After the usual chain of mails to get the engineer to understand the problem I finally got him on board.  In case anyone from MS is reading, here's the case number: SRX080721602387.  I learned something from this call.  Hyper-V knows what VM's and snapshots exist via shortcuts:

• %SYSTEMDRIVE%\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines: This contains shortcuts to the XML files of each VM.
• "%SYSTEMDRIVE%\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Snapshots: This contains shortcuts to the XML files of each snapshot.

Here's where it gets nutty.  The missing VM's were defined in these locations.  Now we had no idea why Hyper-V wasn't loading my VM's (reboots and all).  We tried recreating this shortcuts via Explorer and via command prompt.  No joy.

I eventually gave up because the ticket was now running around in circles.  I needed a working test lab back, despite losing my snapshots which will eventually lead me having to recreate my lab environment from scratch.

What to learn from this?  Hyper-V badly needs a simple way to open an existing VM.  Virtual Server has it.  Virtual PC has it.  VMware has it.  Why doesn't Hyper-V?

It was a successful photography trip.  And wow, Oslo is one screwed up airport!  Transfers there are a nightmare: (A) They're different to everywhere else (think like entering the USA but worse when it comes to logistics) and (B) there's no signs.  Still, nice people and fantastic countryside.  I can't remember when I last sat somewhere and couldn't hear the sounds we associate with mankind - people, machinery or traffic.

And I got to get up close to White-Tailed Sea Eagles!

OK ... back to our regularly scheduled programming ...

This just came in the mailbox:

"Join Mark Russinovich and a panel of industry experts for a LIVE virtual roundtable to explore your top of mind performance issues, common misconfigurations, and tips on how to fix them. From boot times and applets to disk performance and battery life, find out how to optimize Windows Vista and what you can do to improve overall system performance. 

Submit your performance questions live during the event or send them in advance to vrtable@microsoft.com.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
9:00am Pacific Standard Time".

I had a problem with a faulty health status showing up on my System Center Operations Manager 2007 console.  An agent (the SCOM server itself) was telling me the "Local Application Health Rollup" under "Performance" was unhealthy.  There health in the underneath objects was healthy.  There were also no associated alerts on the server itself and performance was OK.  Therefore there was a glitch in the health status rollup.  I tried to reset and refresh the health but that did nothing for me.

I did two things to resolve this glitch and get everything back to green:

1. I navigated to the Computers view in Monitoring and double-clicked on "Health Service" on the affected agent.  This opened a new window showing the state of the health service on this agent.  On the Actions menu, I selected "Health Service Tasks -> Flush Health Service and Cache".
2. I restarted the OpsMgr Health Service.

A few minutes later I the health status in Health Explorer was reset to green.

BTW, it's strange that the MS spell checker in Windows Live Writer does not recognise the word "Rollup".  It's valid in MS Word.

As techies, we tend to look at business applications as components, e.g. disks, CPU's, servers, services, etc.  However, the owners and consumers of those applications see them very, very differently.  My first experience of this was when an old boss wanted to bring in some of the concepts of ITIL into the organisation.  ITIL is a British government standard for guaranteeing the quality of IT services.  I used the Wikipedia link instead of the official site because the official site does a bad job in describing the standard - a common fault of web sites!  It has gained acceptance from organisations globally and Microsoft has tailored it for MS centric networks in the form of the Microsoft Operations Framework or MOF.

ITIL gets us to view everything as services.  A CRM application is a service.  It consists of web applications running on web servers, databases on servers, networks and storage.  If one component fails or performs poorly then the service fails or performs poorly.  That's all that the customer or consumer of the service cares about!  They don't care about a CPU running at 100% because it means nothing to them because they are not techies.  They only know that they are losing productivity or profit because a service is performing poorly.

OpsMgr 2007 was designed to allow the ITIL/MOF view of services to be modelled in the form of distributed applications.  You can either use one of a number of templates or create your own distributed application to drop in monitored components to model your service(s).  This is great for operators or more tech savvy people to monitor.  However, how about the business or service owners?

Microsoft recently released the Service Level Dashboard for SCCM 2007.  This allows you to define Service Level Agreements (SLA's) for your applications, measure and report on them.  The dashboard allows you to use historical data on your defined distributed applications to see how those applications measure up against your agreed SLA's.  There's more information on TechNet about the service.

So Barak Obama claims to herald and era of change, eh?  If the Democrats website is a sample of it then maybe it's true.  It's running SilverLight 2.0.

While I was offline in Norway two things broke:

• Windows 7 is in fact R2 of the current releases of Windows.  This follows up the commitments we got from MS, i.e. every 4 years we'd get a major release with minor (software assurance) updates every 2 years after that.
• SBS 2008 was released.

I manage a growing number of OpsMgr agents on un-trusted networks.  This means I have to assign these agents the CA cert and an OpsMgr cert instead of using Kerberos authentication.  It's a painful manual process but once it's done I don't have to go back to it for several years to replace the certs.

Someone in MS just came up with a wizard to "simplify" the process.  To be honest, reading the page made it sound like things just got more complicated.  Feel free to have a look but I think I'll stick to the CertSrv web page.

Microsoft has released SCUP 4.0.  This allows you to create and maintain your own catalogue of updates for software update maintenance.

"Update Publisher enables administrators to do the following:

• Import catalogs created by non-Microsoft organizations or created from within the administrator’s organization
• Create applicability and deployment metadata for software updates.
• Export software update catalogs so that they can be imported by Updates Publisher at another location, or export a test catalog to verify that the rules for the updates work as expected.
• Manage software updates information

• Ability to import and publish the following update types: bundle, driver, detectoid and updates with pre-requisites.
• New “Software Update Details” view with “Dependencies” tab that displays update dependencies (prerequisites for a single update or children of an update bundle).
• Note: none of the above update types can be duplicated or edited in the SCUP console (only export ,import, flag for publish, expire, delete and publish is available)"

Here are Microsoft's statements on support for their software on virtualised environments.

I've been thinking about how I'm going to automate builds of Hyper-V servers in a Hyper-V cluster.  There's lots of options now - I can create an image and sysprep it.  If I use diskless servers then I can snapshot that LUN in the SAN or I can use Ghost, ImageX or WDS to capture the image and deploy it.  Alternatively I can build up an unattended install using WAIK and scripts to slipstream the Hyper-V update and configure it.

We're starting to see some posts hit the net on the subject now.  These 3 are interesting reads:

I'll be off the air for a week after a hectic period at work ... and before an even more crazy couple of months!

I'll be in northern Norway dodging Scandinavian gods and demons.  The purpose of the few days is to photograph White-Tailed Sea Eagles while they hunt for fish.  In my spare time I like to get out and do a little bit of photography ...

Osprey, Virginia Beach, USA

Southeast Motocross, Ferns, Ireland

So I'll be offline and sat somewhere in a Fjord waiting for raptors with an 8 foot wingspan to come calling.  Hopefully I'll make it back in one piece.

Why do I prefer Hyper-V, a version 1.0 hypervisor, over the more mature VMware ESX?  It's quite simple; management.  This is where the "religious" VMware nutters scream about Virtual Center and ESXi web consoles - hold on to your hats, girls, this ones gonna be a bone shaker!

I am a "laxy admin".  I do not like to be poking and prodding in machines and consoles on a constant basis to do repetitive work.  There's better things that I can be doing such as actual engineering projects or working on the business side of things.  I also like to know when something has gone wrong, either before it happens or before the customer calls us up.  The traditional solution seems to be to have lots of management consoles all over the place.  Honestly, that doesn't work.  Once server and application crawl takes over, there's too much fire fighting involved in working with lots of management solutions.

Here's why I like HP (Dell play nice too AFAIK) and Hyper-V.  The fit in nicely with the concept of Optimised Infrastructure by being very manageable, more than their competition.  The idea is that you design your network, servers and applications so that they are easy to manage.  This means using integration and automation so there is less manual work to be done, the service is fault tolerant and reliable, you can focus on developing/enabling the business and the service that IT provides can be counted on.  We also reduce our operating costs.  Understanding these concepts and being able to use them is the difference between employing 15 IT staff and 77 IT staff (based on a real-world example).

So back on point ... what's all this got to do with Hyper-V?  MS's System Center family of products are an integrated set of management tools to designed to build that automation and expertise into your network.  Yes, in the past they were MS centric but partners did expand them to include 3rd party solutions, e.g. *NIX and Cisco.  Now, MS is even doing this themselves.  One of the core products they sell is OpsMgr 2007, the monitoring solution.  Using an OpsMgr agent with management packs, I have expertise on different products that knows what to monitor, what is acceptable, what faults to watch for, best practices, etc.  I can even extend this or tweak it with exceptions.  This allows me to sit back and know that someone ... or something ... is watching my hardware, OS and applications. 

Here's the fun bit.  There's soon going to be a management pack for Hyper-V.  That means we get in-depth expertise for monitoring the health and performance of the virtualisation platform using the same single pane of glass that I use to monitor everything else.

So those VMware marketing types who try to sell ESXi off as being equal to Hyper-V, answer me this?  Where do I install an agent on a machine with no OS?  I've heard that I can monitor the hardware using cards in the server; what good is that for monitoring the hypervisor?  You answer me that the hypervisor has a web console.  Fantastic!  Do I really want to log into lots of little web consoles?  Ah ... Virtual Center ... so now I need to use it and my console that manages everything else?  Virtualisation is meant to be good for a lazy admin like me ... you know .. less work, put my feet up, more time for playing games, etc. 

Microsoft's answer to Virtual Center is Virtual Machine Manager 2008 which is being launched on September 8th.  VMM 2008 gives us management over the VM's on our Hyper-V servers or cluster.  It includes the ability to audit physical machines to see if they're candidates for virtualisation (don't even have to pay for that agent license!) and a P2V conversion tool.  VMM 2008 integrates with OpsMgr 2007 SP1 via PRO or Performance and Resource Optimization.  You can read much more about that here.  The idea is simple.  OpsMgr monitors performance/health and understands the relationship between VM's and hosts.  VMM 2008 manages VM creation and placement.  PRO links the two to share that knowledge and act on it.  What's really cool is that we're getting cradle-grave management of hosts and VM's.  But not only at the hypervisor, but all the way through the "stack" from the hardware, the host virtualisation, the VM and the VM's OS and applications.

That means I have a single integrated management solution for my entire network.  I'm a big believer in infrastructure optimisation.  I've witnessed it working and making my life easier.  I've also witnessed the opposite where there was no management despite there being lots of junkware being installed to "manage" points of the infrastructure.  Automation, expertise and integration are the keys to success.  For me, that's why I like HP servers/storage and Hyper-V because they can be easily managed using Microsoft System Center.

There's an interesting entry on the TechNet blogs about how to further reduce the amount of disk required for running Server Core.

Server Core is tiny compared to a full installation of Windows Server 2008, sacrificing the GUI and .NET to reduce RAM & disk requirements as well as reducing the attack surface.  It supports a number of roles whose install files are on the hard disk.  You can uninstall those packages using the instructions on the linked blog entry.

This is a one-way deal.  You cannot re-install those packages.  To get them back you have to re-install the OS.  You will no longer be able to install the functionality of the packages once you remove them.

Why would you consider this?  If you're installing Core, you've probably got a very set idea of what the server will do, e.g. it will be nothing but a file server, or a DC, or maybe even a Hyper-V host.  In fact, a Hyper-V host is a perfect example.  It should be nothing but a Hyper-V host.  Uninstalling the other packages will guarantee that and you'll have minimised how much disk the OS needs, thus freeing up space for VM's ... although it's not going to all that much!

Microsoft has released a document detailing common scenarios for System Center Configuration Manager 2007.  As you'll soon see, ConfigMgr is very scalable.  They are rating a single site server with dual CPU and 4GB RAM for up to 10,000 manage clients.  That might be a small site by MS/USA standards but that's a pretty large deployment by mine!

It's official.  Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be launched on September 8th.  MS is having a big launch event in the USA.  Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization, AKA SoftGrid and probably still only for Software Assurance customers (BOOOOOOO!) is also being launched.

Microsoft has released a ConfigMgr Desired Configuration Management template pack for auditing the energy saving settings of your computers.  Whether you believe in global warming or not, there's no denying that oil reserves are reducing and energy costs are rocketing.  Governments are also considering carbon footprint charges.  Anything you can do to reduce energy costs, i.e. reducing that carbon footprint, will save the business money.

Make use of the power control settings in Vista (via group policy) and make use of Configuration Manager DCM to monitor them and you might just reduce the operating costs of your business.

I'm delighted to announce that Alex Yushchenko will be giving another Windows 2008 Terminal Services Class in association with Windows Server 2008 Users Group Ireland.  Like the previous one in May this one will be completely free.  However, Alex can cover a lot more and get into much more detail this time around because he's doing the event for an entire day! 

Agenda

Alex will be including the following subjects during the day:

• Windows 2008 Terminal Services what's new
• RDP Client
• TS Gateway
• TS Session Broker
• TS Easy Print
• TS Remote App's
• TS WebAccess
• TS & Windows System Resource Manager
• Terminal Services Licensing
• Troubleshooting Terminal Services
• Terminal Services with 64 Bit - benefits & design
• Profile and User management
• TS & Softgrid 4.5 Virtualization
• Get the best out of it with Free Tools
• And More!

Prerequisites

This is a "Level 200" event so some knowledge of Terminal Services on Windows 2000/2003 is required.

Where and When

The event will take place in Guinness Storehouse on October 3, 2008 from 9.30 to 16.30 with lunch.  We're restricting this to 50 people so book your place as early as possible.  There will also be free admission to the Guinness Store House as well a free pint of Guinness in the upstairs Gravity bar :-)

Attending The Event

The class is free to attend for members of the Windows Server 2008 Users Group.  Membership and joining the group are free.  Once you are joined, we will send an invite out to you - assuming there are places still free. 

This event is a "must attend" if you run or are planning to run Terminal Services on Windows Server 2008.  Alex is a world recognised expert on the subject.  I'd also recommend that you check out the next PubForum event (Nice, 7-9 Novemeber 2008) that Alex is organising.

ALEX YUSHCHENKO

Better known as "Dr. Conti" to his peers, Alex is one of the top posters to the official Citrix support forum.  He's also the organiser and host of the server-based computing technology experts conference called "PubForum" held annually in different locations throughout Europe – London, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, Nice.  Alex has over 9 years of Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services experience and is a true Microsoft Technologies evangelist.  Alex holds a Citrix Technology Professional designation and was awarded the Microsoft Terminal Services MVP designation in 2006 and 2007.

Cancellations

We'd ask that you please let us know if you cannot attend so that we can free up spaces for others.

Credit

A big thank you must go out to Alex for arranging this event!

The Windows Server 2008 User Group (Ireland) will be running an event on Hyper-V and System Center VMM 2008.  There will be 3 sessions:

• Dave Northey (Microsoft): Hyper-V - we can get a little deeper on this topic now that the product has been released.
• Aidan Finn (ME) (C Infinity): Lessons I've learned about Hyper-V - Aidan will share his experiences with the product and things you should be aware of when setting up a lab or production environment.
• Mark Gibson (Microsoft): Virtual Machine Manager 2008 - System Center VMM2008 is due to be released in Q3 2008.  It is Microsoft's answer to VMware's Virtual Center and will be an essential tool for managing production Hyper-V deployments.

Attending The Event

The session is free to attend for members of the Windows Server 2008 Users Group.  Membership and joining the group are free.  Once you are joined, we will send an invite out to you - assuming there are places still free. 

Places are limited to 20 so book now while you can.