james kahn’s scratchpad

There’s nothing like that feeling of hitting the gym and feeling strong.  Every rep slots into place.  You finish knowing you’ve put in your best effort.  I just had it.  Beautiful.

All things must come to an end, and in my case, the scattershot nature of my blog is changing to one of focus - IT Infrastructure Management. What do I mean by that?

In general, I’ll deal with the tools, concepts and techniques of implementing and managing a business IT Infrastructure. Expect a fair amount of:

• General conceptual articles, such as my previous posts Strategy vs Tactics and Infrastructure Planning: The Road to Success;
• Commentary on IT Infrastructure trends;
• Information on the Microsoft System Center range of infrastructure management products; and,
• I might throw in a couple of best practise guides along the way.

Don’t expect a lot of knowledge base article style technical detail - that’s what vendor’s knowledge bases are for. And of course, I’ll still pepper in the occasional personal post - I’m far too vain to avoid it!

I’ve decided to migrate my blog from my general purpose website to it’s own domain - jameskahn.net.  There might be a few headaches as I move everything.  If your feedreader doesn’t automatically update, the new RSS feed location is http://jameskahn.net/blog/feed.

Bullshitty - Used when something is mostly made up of bullshit, usually to make something sound more complicated or grandiose than it needs to. For example: “Is this how it actually works, or is this just bullshitty marketecture?”

If you’re anything like me, you spend hours in front of a computer at work, and then spend a bit of time in front of a computer at home as well. Any fool can tell you that this isn’t good for your posture, and wreaks havoc with any number of muscle imbalances that show themselves as inflexibilities, and often, the dreaded back injury. Not to mention that poor posture looks terrible, even if you’re physically fit.

The excellent sports training website Testosterone Nation have released a series of articles about what training you should do in the gym to counteract the effects of sitting at a computer for hours a day, and also provide some practical advice as to what you should do when you’re not at the gym.

The first article, (De)-Constructing Computer Guy, what exercises to do in the gym in place of more popular ones so that your body can correct posture imbalance, rather than exacerbate it.

The second article, (De)-Constructing Computer Guy - The Other 23 Hours, gives a series of tips we can use in the office or at home to prevent injury from all this un-natural sitting.

Microsoft have updated the System Center Essentials website overnight, and have now included pricing and licensing details.

When first looking at it, I was a bit shocked at the pricing - until I noticed that the base SCE server license includes 10 managed server and 50 managed client licenses. Not bad!

Although the official website doesn’t yet mention it, Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 has hit RTM and an evaluation is available to download.

Microsoft System Center Essentials is a single-server environment management solution for mid-sized businesses containing some of the functionality of Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and Windows Server Update Services.

I’m no closer to solving the CPU dramas that we’re having with our test installation of Systems Center Operations Manager 2007.

So far, I’ve removed the agents from the environment and removed most of the management packs from the SCOM server. The Operations Manager Health Service on the SCOM server still goes nuts periodically, and it’s only monitoring itself. Restarting the Health Service results in 100% CPU for 10 - 15 minutes.

I’ve run Process Explorer to investigate what is causing the CPU usage - it appears to be some routines within HealthServiceRuntime.dll, launched by MonitoringHost.exe. While that might be useful to a SCOM developer, unfortunately, it doesn’t help me get any closer to the solution.

Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Unfortunately, I won’t have much time to look at it over the next few weeks.

Via Parkie:

Techlog have screenshots of the new System Center Service Manager (codename “Service Desk”). The public beta is due out in a couple of weeks.

It looks like it has self-service and approval functionality that you could previously only get with a highly customised installation of Zero Touch Provisioning - I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this one. Third-party helpdesk vendors should watch out.

I’ve been spending some time mucking around with the new edition of MOM, now and forever branded by the Microsoft marketing machine as “Systems Center Operations Manager”.

Systems Center Operations Manager, or Ops Manager for short, has gone RTM and an evaluation edition is available for download. I figured I’d check it out and deploy it to our new internal infrastructure. It looks really good - a lot of stuff that was reasonably rough in MOM 2005 has been refined. I’m really loving the console, and the ease of configuration.

The only problem was that it totally killed our servers.

After importing the included set of management packs (and the Citrix Presentation Server MP) and rolling out the client, Ops Manager must run some kind of inventory process, because it spiked all of our server’s CPU utilisation to 100% for a good 15 minutes. After that, it cooled down a bit, until it periodically spiked them again, and it seemed to do it to all servers simultaneously. We run our servers on VMware ESX Server, so all of them hitting 100% CPU simultaneously is a real issue. After a day or two we ripped the Operations Manager agents out and, lo-and-behold, the CPU utilisation returned to normal.

I haven’t had a huge amount of time to look into the cause or a resolution. We are running our servers on brand new hardware, where the average CPU utilisation across the VMware ESX hosts is around 10 - 25%, so it’s not caused by hardware limitations. I’ll post again when I know what the cause is.