Tag: servers

IBM Hardware Management Pack v3.2 for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager

This just release new version of IBM Hardware MP adds support to monitor IBM System x Servers and Blades and BladeCenter Chassis with System Center Operations Manager 2012. Key features of this MP are:

  • Support Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012
  • Extensive monitoring of the health of hardware components for IBM System x servers and BladeCenter x86/x64 blades running Windows
  • Rich monitoring of the health of BladeCenter chassis and BladeCenter modules via the SNMP protocol
  • Comprehensive monitoring of the health of software stacks for managing IBM hardware
  • Easy determination of overall system health by the aggregation of hardware health monitors

The following additional features are part of the IBM Upward Integration for Microsoft System Center. Activation licenses can be purchased by contacting your IBM representative or an IBM Business Partner.

  • Power Monitoring of UEFI/IMM System X Servers and Blades running Windows 2008 & R2. Offers the ability to monitor overall system power usage, and generates alerts when power consumption rises above predefined consumption thresholds
  • BladeCenter and Blade hardware health correlation and event propagation providing BladeCenter specific hardware health condition monitoring under the Windows health explorer view.
  • Remote power on and off of Blades Servers via the Operations Manager console.
  • Hardware Management Software Configuration Advisor for IBM Systems detects the presence of IBM Hardware MP software dependencies in order to make appropriate configuration recommendations.
  • Set custom power consumption thresholds for Power Monitoring alerts via Operations Manager Agent task
  • Enable Power Capping and set the maximum power consumption wattage via Operation Manage Agent task

Download links:

Monitoring Workgroup server with SCOM 2012

Stefan Stranger wrote extremely good and useful article about Monitoring non-domain members with SCOM 2012. The article can be used for SCOM 2007 R2 as well. Click on the link and read.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_stranger/archive/2012/04/17/monitoring-non-domain-members-with-om-2012.aspx#3492755

The Journey begins…\ Deployment Part 1

In order to start building Cloud you have to have resources. Such resources are storage, network and compute power (servers). Let’s say you have those but the servers are nothing without operating system. The operating system connects these resources together. To get the OS on a server you have to install and configure it. But if you start to install and configure OS on every server manually it will be resource intensive and could lead to inconsistency in the configuration of your servers. Of course there is solution for this problem and it is called automatic deployment. Microsoft offers such solution and it is free – Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. MDT offers full automation in deploying Windows but it can be integrated with System Center Configuration Manager to increase its powers in automatic OS deployment.

In the video below offered by Microsoft you will see Session 1 from Deployment day on Tech Days 2012 conference in Belgium. Presenter is Rhonda Layfield which is Sr. Deployment Architect. Video is Level 200 according to me and will show you the basics around MDT and what is new in 2012 version. Click on the link below and watch.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/Hh852088