SCCM 2012 SP1 Pre-Stage Content on a DP

In this post we will look at how you can pre-stage content on a DP.  As per all the other videos they need to be watched on the you tube setting of HD. as per the clip below

User Device affinity Video

This blog is a video blog on User Device Affinity in SCCM 2012.  UDA is the ability to link a machine to a user.  When we link the user account to the computer account we can target software to the user yet not have that software apply to every machine they log on to. 


All of these videos are supposed to be watched on HD.

Host Agent Fail Error ID:26263 Adding new storage

In a LAB environment its not that easy to get access to enterprise storage and as such it sometimes takes a bit of trial and error to get the SMI-S provider working as we cant practice it in a LAB.  I was recently working with a EMC VNX 5300 SAN and so here is what I did to get the provider working.  (I will add that I got a bit of help from EMC support but I would not have got it going with the information on TechNet)

No matter what I did I kept getting the following error when importing my storage.  There was almost no information on the web except other people with the same error.

 

 Lets firstly understand what is the point of this SMI-S provider.

Lets start off with the SMI-S provider and what it does.  With a large disparate amount of storage manufactures all with different ways to communicate with there storage devices it difficult for other vendors to make products that can manage or monitor storage devices through one interface.  The SMI-S therefor is an independent group that produce a vendor neutral solution for managing storage providers.  So how do they communicate?  Well when you install the SMS-S provider it essentially creates a HTTP server that can parse XML so that for example when an administrator in the VMM console requests a LUN for new storage for a cloud then that request will be sent to the provider and in turn it will translate that request into the creation of a new storage LUN on the SAN.  If you try and consider the impact of that we can easily have a configuration whereby the VMM admin can control Storage, Hypervisor and Network components in one place.  That’s a really powerfully admin position in terms of reducing the admin overhead .  Have a look at what Microsoft wrote about it on TechNet.   http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/06/25/introduction-to-smi-s.aspx

Before we get into the storage add here is a diagram to explain in overview what you are supposed to be doing. 

  

Firstly you will need to get the SMI-S provider from EMC

The one I used was se7507-Windows-x64-SMI

 Then follow through with the install as shown below, but be sure and install the provider on something like one of your Hyper-V clusters and not on the VMM server.  You can install it multiple times as its just essentially brokering a connection to your SAN and your SAN doesn't care it there is another one installed.

  

Once you have the install done there are two command sets we need to run and they are all in %Program Files\EMC, then they two areas you will need to go to are

For Authorization

%Program Files\EMC\SYMCLI\bin

And to check the deployment

%Program Files\EMC\ECIM\ECOM\bin

I am assuming that you are running this on Server 2012 and so you are going to need to open any CMD secessions from an elevated command prompt. 10.201.0.83

Enter the command that I have here replacing the host IP address with your own.

 

If you get the command wrong it will just prompt you to let you know that you have entered the command incorrectly as show below

   

Then navigate to the  %programfiles%\emc\ecim\ecom\bin  and  enter the Disco command.  Now its important here to understand that there is a bit of a design fault with the way EMC has designed this as the only account that works for setting up the connection is the account that has full admin access to the storage device.  Lets hope in the near future this is changed.

Now we are going to change to the second folder set and verify the SMI-S connection.  In the CMD screen below if I have not entered a value then I just accepted the defaults.

 The last thing that needs to be done now is enter "Disco" to discover your storage provider.  As you can see from the value below 0 means you are connecting OK.

Now that we have the SMI-S provider talking to the SAN we can go to VMM and add in the storage array.

Now lets go to VMM and get this storage in.

At a high level here is what is needed

1. Create a RunAs account
2. Add the storage provider (its supper important to understand that it’s the host where you have installed the provider on and not you VMM server)
3. Once the storage is added you can create LUN's
4. The new LUN'S needed to be added to your clustered in VMM

To begin the process we need a RunAs account.  I used my generic admin account as per the steps above.  As this is not a domain account you do not want to validate the domain creds. 

  I added the storage by its network name, and to do this I had to add that name to DNS, the protocol is SMI-S CIMXML and the port number is what was specified in your provider test in the previous section, this is usually 5988

  

 The storage array gets discovered and you can verify that the provider is working OK.

I get a conformation of the storage addition and the provider address. 

Now when I go to create the LUN I can do so from within VMM.  In this case I am using thin provisioning on the LUN as there is now need to commit all the disk right from the start.

You can now go to the fabric in VMM and add the storage

You can now see that there are 3 LUNs being made available to the cluster.

 Following these steps I was able to add the storage and manage the LUN through VMM.  When I saw this all working the way its supposed I was really impressed with the working reality of this product.

Just one last note,  there is a way to test the SMI-S provider and its a source forge download that you can get here.

PK

Visual checklist for Windows Azure Services

Thinking of installing Windows Azure Services for Windows Server or having some issues with your deployment?  Well here is a visual checklist to help you get the deployment going successfully.  The majority of the actual settings are focused on the SPF install,  the reason for this is that the portal really just front-ends the VMM requests so focus on how you have SPF installed will pay off.

If you are still trying to get your head around the product then have a look at the overview post on Windows Azure Services  

To begin with before anything happens with Windows Azure Services you need to have VMM working fully.  So what does that mean?

1. A cloud that is fully configured in terms of network, storage and Hypervisors
2. Be able to deploy VM's to a cloud (not a host, Windows Azure Services will only deploy to a cloud)
   
   
   
   
   

SPF needs to be installed and tested,  to test SPF enter the following 2 URL's into your browser.  In the two examples below I am using localhost so the test needs to be done local.  If you want to run this remotely then just enter the name of the SPF server instead of localhost.  If the result is successful you will see two XML screens, examples of which are below.

https://localhost:8090/SC2012/VMM/microsoft.management.odata.svc/

https://localhost:8090/SC2012/Admin/microsoft.management.odata.svc/

The  SPF VMM IIS Application Pool identity running as domain user (not network service account)

Configure the  SPF IIS web site to use  Basic Authentication

Create a local user on your SPF server, add it to the SPF local security groups and then use that local user to register the Service Management Portal

The SQL instance that you are deploying to must have SQL authentication enabled and the SPF Application Pool identity must have admin access  the SPF SQL DB and VMM

Just a note in terms of deploying this inside an enterprise environment is that its not supported to use the portal with an AD user that is in the same the domain as the VMM server.  The point is that at the time of writing (March 2013) the current version does not support an AD user so this is a moot point I think.

Thanks to Marc Umeno for this great advice at the MVP summit.

SQL Server Guide for System Center 2012

Some time ago I have an issue where a customer was complaining that the performance of their SCCM install was not what they were expecting.  Upon closer inspection there SQL environment was not what we had agreed upon to host their SCCM SQL data bases.

After much discussion I decided to take it upon myself to write a guide to SQL with the following goals 

1. Provide some SQL guidance to the System Center community on how to install and troubleshoot SQL.
2. Correlate as much information on SQL for all the products into one single guide. 

You can be the judge if the guide helps you but it has been well received by the community.

Best wishes 

Paul 

You can download the guide here

Windows Azure Services for Windows Server

Windows Azure Services for Windows Server is one of the most exciting new updates for System Center and Private Cloud computing.  The first thing you may think when you see the client portal is "That looks just like Azure", and that's because the Windows Azure Services team get access to nearly all of the Azure code.  Nearly all because its missing some critical components like billing.  If you think about getting access to Azure code that's a really big deal.  It means that you can get a lot of the Azure code and run it local in your own IT environment.  So lets start off with an explanation of how this works.    We are going to start off with a very simplified view of the Windows Azure Services environment,  it is intended to give you an overview of how it works and is not recommended for a production web hoster for example

So what we have here is a Hyper V cluster (but you could also be using ESX or ZEN) that is acting as a hyper visor, Virtual Machine Manger (VMM) is managing your hyper visor environment and into this environment you have deployed at least one cloud.  This is the standard System Center cloud stack.  The next two components are the magic that make this work.  The first component is Service Provider Framework (SPF), SPF is a web services that connects to VMM and exposes VMM admin tasks to the web.  SPF has become a simple install that requires almost no configuration and requires that the VMM console be installed and configured to connect to the VMM server.  Lastly we have the Windows Azure Services installed on a single server (not recommended for production).  The install creates a ton of web sites, 12 to be exact and there are 2 that are of interest straight away, the admin portal https://servername:30091 and the tenant portal on https://servername:30081.  Using the admin portal you can:

1. Connect to your VMM environment, define your plans and link them to your clouds
2. Configure user accounts to access the tenant site.  Right now the user access is only through an email/password combination and is not AD integrated (yet). 
3. Configure your data base servers SQL or MYSQL
4. Configure a connection for web site deployment 

From the tenant site you will have access to;

1. Create and manage VM's 
2. Create virtual networks 
3. Create SQL DB's 

In the image below you can see the tenant portal connected to a VM.  Once a VM has been created in the portal we get a performance view of CPU, Storage and Network on the top, with VM management tools like a RDP to make a console connection and a number of VM tasks direct from the portal, and lastly we get the quick glance view to cover things like the VM name, IP and OS type.

So we are not using AD integration for user access is this really suitable to the enterprise? With this version there is no AD integration but you could use a  System Center Orchestrator to import users from AD and pre-populate accounts for us.  The features and power of this product make it a fit for the Hoster and Enterprise client alike and future releases of Windows Azure Services are only likely to get better. 

So what are your next steps?  Well to start off download the bits you need to get started with the portal and you can get them here

Dynamic Data Center Toolkit

The DDTK for System Center 2007 is almost a dead duck with the release of System Center 2012, that being said here is a video I created on the toolkit,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YowznQ_zXGQ