Mike Resseler and Maria Levkina continue the series by leading you through hands-on technical demos for managing the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2012 R2. You install the Hyper-V role to enable the native Microsoft virtualization technology built into Windows Server.

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Introduction

In our next part of this blog series we are going to talk about proactive monitoring and maintenance tasks.

For those who have missed the previous posts, here are the links:

Part 1: Management PacksPart 2: Pre-work & Importing Management PacksPart 3: Exploring discoveriesPart 4: Fine-tuning methodologies

In many cases actions are taken when the environment already has an issue and end-users are suffering from an outage. However, System Center Operations Manager and more specifically our Management Pack is written around pro-active monitoring. Instead of the traditional fire-fighting that happens in many environments, you can use the different MPs ... Read more

I’ve seen lately many requests in our forums, and I personally received some, about how to generate and manage SSL certificates on Windows Machines. It seems one of those topics that is always hot, especially these days with all the services available over public internet connections, and all the scary stories about security breaches.

Whatever “web” service you are willing to execute and publish over internet, an SSL certificate can protect you as a provider, and your users connecting to it. It’s extremely important to deploy properly configured SSL certificates, yet many don’t do this. Why? Maybe because only Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services) has an easy wizard to accomplish these tasks. But if you follow this quick tutorial, SSL certificate ... Read more

Introduction

In part 1 of these series we talked about MPs and in part 2 we did our preparations, imported an MP and created an override MP. In part 3 we explored the discoveries.

Now that we understand the discoveries, we can start by looking at various other parts of the management packs. One of them will become very crucial and that is overriding monitors and rules. Overriding doesn’t mean disabling or enabling alone. It can also mean adapting the default thresholds so that they match your infrastructure better.

There are different ways of doing this or starting with this. I have seen different people ... Read more

Introduction

In part 1 of these series we talked about MPs and in part 2 we did our preparations, imported an MP and created an override MP. So now we are ready for the next steps… Investigating the discoveries…

What? I want to fine-tune now…

While I can perfectly understand that, I always believed it is better to start looking at the discoveries first to understand what exactly is being discovered in your environment. If you know what is being discovered, you will also make it much easier for yourself to understand what is being monitored and when alerts arrive, how you can address them.

Many MPs have a very thorough manual that includes the discoveries ... Read more

Hyper-V replica was introduced in Windows Server 2012 as a new feature for Hyper-V environments. It has great potential and is very helpful in virtualized systems. If you are looking for an introduction to Hyper-V replica and want to learn more details, keep reading. I’m going to present the 5 most important things to know about Hyper-V replica. Read more

Aside from being on the Veeam Product Strategy team, I also have a role in managing the Veeam community. This includes keeping in touch with bloggers, social communities and of course Twitter. Recently, I got a message from one Twitter user in immediate need of some help. The result is good, and no Active Directory domains were harmed in the making of these blogposts. Sound interesting? Read on!

A fellow vExpert Tim Smith sent me a Twitter direct message asking if I could send him an updated copy of the Veeam Explorer for Active Directory beta. I thought at first the request was odd, as I was pretty sure there wasn’t an updated copy. ... Read more

It turns out the answer for that question is not as easy as you may think. It absolutely depends on the Hyper-V environment you have. Shared storage, failover cluster, Windows Server version number — everything should be taken into consideration. The combination of those factors can be tricky, but it’s essential and the only way to find out the truth. Let’s have a quick look at some options. Read more

Introduction

In the previous blog post we went through System Center Operations Manager as a framework, we talked about management packs, and that importing a management pack isn’t stopping the work you need to do.

We talked about fine-tuning and the importance of it to make the framework fit your environment.

In this blog posts, we are simply going to import a management pack(s) and then immediately create an “override” management pack to store our customizations. Just a few best practices that you need to do before you actually do the import.

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Every Windows administrator knows task manager. It is one of these tools we use on a daily basis and is used for many different troubleshooting purposes. The task manager tool is embedded in every Microsoft Windows Operating system. The first taskman.exe, which actually showed a list of running applications, was introduced with Windows 3.x. Windows task manager with its view of processes, applications and resource usage was introduced in Windows NT 4.0.

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