Tag: extensions

New MP: Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012

The Hyper-V MP provides good monitoring but certainly that MP can be extended to provide more advanced monitoring. For Hyper-V 2008 R2 MP some Microsoft employees extended that MP and provided this extension MP at codeplex site. Now they are providing us with similar extension MP for Hyper-V 2012 MP.

New features in this release:
VMs Integration Services Version monitor
Hyper-V Replica Health Monitoring Dashboard and States
SMB Shares I/O latency monitor
Included features from previous release
Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical processor monitoring
Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual processor monitoring
Hyper-V Dynamic Memory monitoring
Hyper-V Virtual Networks monitoring
NUMA remote pages monitoring
SLAT enabled processor detection
Hyper-V VHDs monitoring
Physical and Logical Disk monitoring
Host Available Memory monitoring
Stopped and Failed VMs monitoring
Failed Live Migrations monitoring

Keep in mind that the management pack is with beta status. You can download it from codeplex site.

System Center 2012 – Service Manager Component Add-ons and Extensions

After the general availability of SC 2012 SP1 there are some additional downloads that needs to be updated. This time IT Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) Process Management Pack for SCSM is updated to work with SP1. Along with this management pack usually System Center Cloud Services Process Pack is also released but this time this is not the case. On the download page it is marked as coming soon. Let’s hope we will have it in one or two weeks maximum. IT Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) Process Management Pack  can be downloaded from here.

Microsoft System Center Extensions: Security with Squadra Technologies secRMM

Squadra Technologies is a System Center Alliance partner and develops management packs specifically for System Center. In this video you will see demo of the product secRMM which provides monitoring and authorization for mobile and removable media devices.

System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager Component Add-ons and Extensions

Another set of add-ons and extensions this time for Virtual Machine Manager 2012. Here is what this download set consists of:

VM Recovery Tool
The stand-alone Virtual Machine Recovery Tool works with System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to temporarily remove a host, cluster, virtual machine, or service from VMM when that object is in a failed or persistent warning state due to environmental conditions, third-party applications, or other causes. After resetting the state of the object, once VMM refreshes, the object will appear as healthy in VMM. This tool does not repair a damaged or incorrectly created virtual machine or corrupt .vhd file. It deals with state information stored in the VMM database. For additional details about the tool, see Using the Virtual Machine Recovery Tool for System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

Virtual Machine Manager Configuration Analyzer (VMMCA)
The VMMCA is your first line of defense in troubleshooting an issue in the System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager environment. VMMCA is a diagnostic tool you can use to evaluate important configuration settings for computers that are either running VMM server roles or are acting as virtual machine hosts. The VMMCA scans the hardware and software configurations of the computers you specify, evaluates them against a set of predefined rules, and then provides you with error messages and warnings for any configurations that are not optimal.

Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tool (MPSRPT)
You can use the Virtual Machine Manager MPS Reporting Tool for System Center 2012 to gather detailed system status and configuration information from the VMM management server as well as all managed virtual machine hosts and VMM server roles.
The tool offers the ability to select the particular scenarios for which system configuration data will be gathered.
The Virtual Machine Manager MPS Reporting Tool for System Center 2012 gathers the following diagnostic data for the VMM management server, the virtual machine hosts and library servers that the VMM management server manages, and physical to virtual conversion (P2V) source computers:

  • Virtual Machine Manager traces
  • Virtual Machine Manager database
  • Windows event logs and virtual server event logs
  • IP address
  • Virtual Machine Manager setup logs
  • SQL Server setup logs
  • Registry information
  • Open ports information
  • System Information (msinfo)

OVF Import/Export
The Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is a packaging standard from Distributed Management Task Force, Inc., for portability and deployment of virtual appliances. The OVF Import/Export tool consists of cmdlets that enable VMM users to import and export single virtual machines that are packaged in an OVF 1.1 complaint format. You can use the OVF Import/Export tool to import a virtual machine from other virtualization platforms (currently VMware vCenter and Citrix XenServer) or to export a virtual machine from VMM for use on another platform.

Download them all from one link here.

System Center 2012 – Service Manager Component Add-ons and Extensions released

Another additional add-on to System Center stack is released – Service Manager Component Add-ons and Extensions. What download includes:

System Center Service Manager Authoring Tool
The System Center Service Manager Authoring Tool is a tool for customization and extension of the built-in functionality in System Center Service Manager. This release supports modifying existing Process Management Packs and creating new Management Packs that define extensions to the Service Manager database for tracking additional information, customizations of forms or new forms, and new workflows. This release is available in 10 languages.
This release is compatible with the System Center 2012. It contains the necessary changes to ensure the Authoring Tool is compatible with System Center 2012 – Service Manager but does not contain a new feature set from prior releases.

System Center Cloud Services Process Pack
This process pack will offer a self-service experience to facilitate private cloud capacity requests from your business unit IT application owners and end users, including the flexibility to request additional capacity as business demands increase.

IT Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) Process Management Pack
Microsoft System Center solutions assist medium and large organizations in managing and automating their IT GRC responsibilities; improving IT GRC program management efficiency while reducing costs; simplifying and consolidating IT GRC workloads; and increasing executive, audit, and management visibility into their GRC programs. The IT GRC Process Management Pack —combined with the IT Compliance Management Series—helps customers understand and bind complex business objectives to their Microsoft infrastructure in an operationally efficient manner.

Grab the downloads from here.