james kahn’s scratchpad

Microsoft have released a series of quizzes for some of the features of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 beta 2. It’s a great way to test your knowledge, and learn a bit more about this feature-packed up and coming environment management product.

Grab them here.

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.

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.

One weakness of the Citrix client drive mapping is that you can’t automatically connect a client’s network drives. For some reason, Citrix don’t supply an option to do this, even if you want to - you’re supposed to write a script.

I’ve written the below script in PowerShell that will go through and map all client drive letters that aren’t already mapped. To run it, you’ll need PowerShell installed on your Citrix Servers. Get it here.

Save the below script as “mapClientDrives.ps1″ and execute it via PowerShell. Wordpress is being a pain and not letting me upload the script.

# mapClientDrives.ps1
#
# Maps all client drives in Citrix, including network drives,
# which are not mapped by default.
#
# Author: James Kahn, http://liet.net/blog
# Version: 1.0

$target = $args

if ($target.length -eq 0) {
Write-Host “Maps all client drives that aren’t currently mapped.”
Write-Host “Usage: mapClientDrives.ps1 ”
Write-Host “On Citrix servers, you should use ‘mapClientDrives.ps1 CLIENT’”
}

$defaultDrives = “C:”,”D:”,”E:”,”F:”,”G:”,”H:”,”I:”,”J:”,”K:”,”L:”,”M:”,”N:”,”O:”,”P:”,”Q:”,”R:”,”S:”,”T:”,”U:”,”V:”,”W:”,”X:”,”Y:”,”Z:”

# Get a list of the current logical drives
Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk | % {$drives = @{}}{$drives.add($_.DeviceID,$_.ProviderName)}

# Build list of available drives
$availDrives = @()
$i = 0
do {
if ($drives.Contains($defaultDrives[$i])) {
# Do Nothing
}
else {
$availDrives += ,($defaultDrives[$i])
}
$i++
}
while ($defaultDrives[$i])

# Map Client Drives

$i = 0
$j = 0
$erroractionpreference = “SilentlyContinue”
do {
$curTarget = “\\” + $target + “\” + $defaultDrives[$i][0] + “$”
$error.Clear()
$oldErrCount = $error.Count
if ($drives.ContainsValue($curTarget)) {
$i++
continue
}
$net = $(New-Object -Com WScript.Network)
$net.MapNetworkDrive($availDrives[$j], $curTarget)
$i++
if ($error.Count -eq $oldErrCount) {
Write-Host “Mapped” $availDrives[$j] “to” $curTarget
$j++
}
}
while ($defaultDrives[$i])

This is seriously amazing stuff. The amount of integration between Microsoft System Center 2007 and Longhorn Virtualisation is starting to get into the self-healing infrastructure region.

Via Dugie’s Pensieve.

If you’re in IT, Windows Vista is the biggest thing to arrive since, well, since the last version of Windows. It’s huge, it’s redefining the Windows desktop, and you’re not going to be able to avoid it. If you haven’t noticed it’s release, you must’ve been living in a hole. If you haven’t seen it, you’re behind the times. And if you don’t think it’s a major improvement over any existing operating system, you’re a luddite.

Here is where I must admit that I absolutely love Windows Vista. It’s a major step forward in Windows computing. I love the way it looks. I like the fact that there are oodles of improvements under the hood. I think the extra group policies, deployment tools and security are fantastic from an enterprise point of view. And it really is a pleasure to use the operating system.

So why are so many people on Internet forums criticizing the improvements (most noticeably, the luddite zone, slashdot)? Sadly, too many people that work with technology are small-minded, hate change and think that making computers pleasant to use shouldn’t rate highly on software company’s targets.

The biggest complaints I’ve noticed are:

1. The hardware requirements are too high! I’m going to have to spend $3000 on a PC to run the thing! Boo, yah!
2. User Account Control (UAC) is a pain in the ass! I want security to be seamless, yet still useful!
3. I don’t want all this eye candy, it slows my computer down! Why’d they have to go and change how things look!?
4. There’s not enough here to make upgrading worth it! It’s more of the same, in a different shade of blue!

Unfortunately most of these complaint are misguided, either from a lack of understanding or from stubbornness.

The Hardware Requirements are too high!

It’s amazing that this is seen as an issue. At work, I’m running Windows Vista on a notebook that is 3 years old. I’ve upgraded the RAM from 768MB to 1.5GB to make it run a lot faster with all the eye candy turned on, but other than that, it’s excellent. At home I’m running it on notebook I bought from Dell a year and half ago, and it runs fine. Windows Vista is an operating system released in 2007, for the computers of 2007 and beyond. If you want to run a computer from 2001, run an operating system from 2001. Or alternatively, run Windows Vista and turn all the eye candy off. It would be ridiculous for an operating system vendor to release a new operating system that runs on old hardware. New features take more processing power and system resources. If we’re ever going to reach the stage where computing can be like Minority Report, we have to keep moving forwards.

User Account Control is a pain in the ass!

One new component of Windows Vista is called User Account Control. Pretty much, it asks for your permission before doing something that requires administrative permission, so you know if something could be destructive to the computer. It works in one of two ways:

1. Either, you’re running as a standard user account, and when you want to do something that requires administrative permissions it pops itself up and asks for your credentials; or,
2. You’re running as an administrator, it just asks for your permission - you don’t have to enter a password

The whole point of User Account Control is to protect the computer from potentially harmful operations. And it does this by running everything with standard user permissions, even when you’re logged on as an administrator. It’s a great idea - administrator rights aren’t required for 99% of things that you’d do with your computer. Without any extra effort, it protects the computer and your data from accidental or malicious damage. There is always a trade-off between security and convenience, and this a couple of dialog boxes every now and then is not a major one. If you still don’t like it, you can turn it off.

Admittedly, there is one annoying characteristic about UAC - it should cache your credentials for a number of minutes when running as a standard user, rather then making you type them in every time. But remember, even if you’re running as an administrator, you’re actually running with standard user privileges most of the time - so why not do that?

This eye candy slows my computer down! It’s a waste of system resources!

This kind of comment really boggles my mind, because it’s usually from someone that considers themselves “technical”. I’m in front of computers for 8 - 12 hours a day - I want things to look good, and I want the experience to be as pleasant as possible (well, except for the 8 - 12 hours a day bit…). Unless your computer is drastically underpowered, or part of a grid computing cluster, your CPU is probably not doing much most of the time. Let it use some of those spare cycles to make things look better.

Or hell. If it bothers you that much, just turn off the pretty stuff!

There’s not enough new stuff in Vista to make upgrading worth it!

Again, this kind of comment is usually from a “technical” person who knows less than they think. It’s usually made by somebody with enough knowledge to install and configure an operating system, but little else. And it’s usually combined with a complaint about how all that was changed was the way things look.

What a load of bullshit.

Massive amounts of changes have been made to the core operating system architecture in Vista. Oodles of security enhancements. More secure networking, with firewall profile zones. A new driver architecture to increase system stability. A graphics card driven desktop environment - faster and slicker. IPv6, and a rewritten networking stack. Fast, I mean really fast, desktop search. That’s only a few. There are loads of new features in Vista, and it’s well worth the upgrade.

So why do so many technical “gurus” in forums complain?

Simple - they’re either Luddites, or they don’t understand what improvement is. Or perhaps they just don’t like change.