A good part of having a blog that sometimes you are being contacted to have a look at new solutions. Fro such new solution I was contacted by F5 and Comtrade. Comtrade is developing a Management Pack for SCOM that will monitor F5 BIG-IQ devices. Trough monitoring BIG-IQ the soloution provides also monitoring for BIG-IP. Continue reading “Sneak Peak at Comtrade Management Pack for F5 BIG-IQ”
Tag: NLB
Kemp LoadMaster Monitoring Management Pack (Community MP)
Recently I was looking how to monitor Kemp LoadMaster devices with SCOM. I was able to discover them trough SCOM as Network Devices but that was the only thing and it was not enough. Fortunately fellow MVP Daniele Grandini decided to help me and develop Kemp LoadMaster Management Pack. He was the main driver for this MP to exists as he was the main developer and I’ve took the task of testing it and fixing some small bugs that we’ve encountered. This is initial version of the MP and contains some know issues some of them are due to kemp loadmaster others are internal for the MP. Consider this version somehow as beta as we have some plans to re-write the MP in the future if we can. You will find the MP here along with some documentation. You can log any feedback you have on the Codeplex page.
Making System Center 2012 SPF SP1 Highly Available and Scalable
The overall architecture of Service Provider Foundation is very simple. SPF have two components Web Service and Database. As the database is SQL database it can be made highly available by making SQL Cluster and putting the database there. There is no information if SQL Always On is supported but the SPF database is not a complex one and Always On should be an option. After all SPF is part of Orchestrator and Orchestrator is supported on SQL Always On. But let’s talk about how to make the Web Service highly available and scalable. The Web Service is a static application which is front for the database. So it should be easy to install to install more than one instance of the web service and just put NLB to combine them. But lets test it.
I will not show you how to install SPF as there is a great guide by Marc van Eijk here. Lets say I have 3 servers:
- SPF01
- SPF02
I’ve already installed SQL Server 2012 SP1 on SPF01. Installed SPF in SPF01 and for the SPF database I’ve used the SQL on SPF01. I’ve installed the database and SPF on the same server just because it is home lab and I didn’t want to create another server.
Next step is to populate some data in SPF in order to have some information before deploying the second SPF server. I’ve added a VMM server and associated it with Stamp. You can see that information directly in the database.
Now lets install SPF on SPF02. I’ve installed all prerequisites so I am ready to go.
For database server I am pointing SPF01 where we have SPF database already deployed.
Next Next Next
And we push Install. Installation is started.
As we are at the step of deploying the database we see message: UpdateDatabase instead of CreateDatabase.
After successful install we can query the database to see if our records are still there.
As we can see all the records are there as we left them.
Let’s add another server and another stamp from SPF02
No errors during adding. Records also show in the database.
Lets see if the records are visible from SPF01.
Both SPF01 and SPF02 are working ok.
Installing more than one SPF Web Service servers is supported scenario just not well documented.
The rest is to configure IIS and NLB the right way. There are some challenges that could be met there.
New MP: Windows Server Network Load Balancing Management Pack
Another management pack for Windows Server role or feature is updated. If you open the download link you will see that the page and the title says “Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007” but actually the management pack monitors any NLB from Windows Server 2008 till 2012. Also the management pack is supported on SCOM 2012 also. You can find all this information in the guide of the MP. So definitely read the guide before importing this new MP.
How to Configure the Self-Service Portal SharePoint Site or the Web Content Server for Load Balancing
Another article from Travis Wright from SCSM team: How to Configure the Self-Service Portal SharePoint Site or the Web Content Server for Load Balancing. Some of the steps of this article can be used to configure NLB cluster for you SM management servers.
Cloud Administrator in Azure World 