When using System Center Configuration Manager sometimes managed devices disappear from the Console. These devices may still be in use und therefore should not be deleted, but continue to be managed via SCCM. The disappearance is controlled by a concealed option within the Site Maintenance of SCCM.
The Site Maintenance Options in the SCCM Console can be found at Administration -> Site Configuration -> Sites. Right click on the Site and select “Site Maintenance”.
Here are several Maintenance Tasks that can be activated and will start actions in defined periods.
The task “Delete Inactive Client Discovery Data” will delete inactive Devices after a defined number of days. Standard setting for this task is “deactivated” and when activated the period is 90 days.
Before setting this option you should think about the usage of your devices. Sometimes field workers or simply colleagues on holidays can easily be more then three or four weeks offline before connecting to the network again. In these cases the period should not be set to low.
About inactive devices: A device will be set inactive if it does not communicate with the SCCM server anymore. The communication can be Heartbeat, System or Network Discovery.
A corresponding Microsoft TechNet article can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb693646.aspx (article is for SCCM 2007, but is still valid for SCCM 2012).
I hope this helps during the next troubleshooting.
Robert
With this second blog post regarding Splunk and Helge´s uberAgent I want to share my experiences during installation and configuration.
I will start with an overview of the uberAgent installation, will then switch to some configuration settings and give you a quick overview about how it can be licensed and which operating systems are supported. At the end I will describe how you can clean up your Splunk server to start with a fresh data collection.
Today I want share the steps that are necessary to install the prerequisites for Helge Klein´s uberAgent. We will start with the installation of Splunk. After this first step is done we will go on and install the server components of uberAgent.
[ + ] Weiterlesen
VMware released their Mirage 5.0 Reviewer´s Guide. It can be downloaded here: https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-horizon-mirage-reviewers-guide.pdf.
Topics covered are:
There is also a Reviewers Guide available for Horizon 6.0. It can be downloaded here: https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/view/VMware-View-Evaluators-Guide.pdf
Topics covered are:
Cheers,
Sinisa
At first I want to wish you all a happy new year. I had planned a different blog post as the first one but I had no chance of preventing me writing down these thoughts about the installers of Citrix XenDesktop (respectively XenApp) and VMware Horizon View.
Both companies have large-scale installations out there and both are on the market for a very long time. But although they should have experience with enterprise environments and customization possibilities for their software components they still have room for improvement.
[ + ] Weiterlesen
On the 8th of december a new AppSense DesktopNow release was made available by AppSense. This blog post may give you a short overview of what is new or updated.
If you need information about specific bugs fixed in the components please refer to the documentation found in myappsense.com.
This release consists of the following components:
COM Elevation
Support for Elevation of common COM component areas within Windows Vista or above.
Policy Change Requests
Two major new functional areas introduced to Application Manager allow for users to initiate Change Requests via:
Additionally
Configuration Change Tracking
Other Changes
Replication Support for SQL Server 2014
The Personalization Database now supports SQL Server 2014 for replication scenarios.
Personalization Server Performance Improvements
The Personalization Server has been optimized to improve its performance, resulting in faster access when storing and retrieving Personalization data.
EMPMigrate Tool Command Line Interface
The EMPMigrate tool has been updated to include a new command line interface that can be used as an alternative to the existing UI, allowing the tool to be used in scripts.
For details of the new command line arguments please see the Environment Manager Tools documentation.
Nested Computer Groups
Environment Manager 8.5 introduced the option to search nested computer groups within the Computer Group condition. For certain AD configurations, this nested search can be resource intensive and could cause performance issues on the Domain Controller.
In Service Pack 1, this functionality is only available if the EnableNestedComputerGroupQueries engineering key is enabled on the endpoint. If the engineering key is disabled (the default) then the “Search nested groups” option will be ignored.
Windows 8.x and Server 2012 Support
Provide MSP Packages
Save to System Center Configuration Manager 2012
Capability to save Performance Manager Configurations directly into System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012.
Enhanced User Experience
Refreshed console interface consistent with all existing AppSense DesktopNow products.
Default Configurations
New default configurations for the following environments:
Non-persistent VDI
Installation and Configuration
Performance and Scalability Enhancements
Significant scalability increase over previous versions – the Management Server is now able to support in excess of 3 times the number of client computer on the same hardware
If you need to troubleshoot your environment it is often crucial to have as much information about the environment you can get. If you need to troubleshoot XenDesktop or XenApp environments and especially the services you can start the service executables with the -logfile switch and the path where you want to store the log files:
“C:\Program Files\CitrixAdIdentity\Service\Citrix.ADIdentity.exe” -logfile “%temp%\ADIdentity.log”
This should give you some more insights about what these services are doing. To check for common configuration issues of a Controller you should also take a look at the XDPing tool at https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX123278
Every service has additional options. I have consecutively enlisted the services with their parameters on a XenDesktop 7.x Controller. This way you can see that there is more to configure than the log file location. Ports, Firewall-options, installations and uninstallations can be done this way too.
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\AdIdentity\Service> .\Citrix.ADIdentity.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\Broker\Service> .\BrokerService.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\Configuration\Service> .\Citrix.Configuration.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\ConfigurationLogging\Service> .\Citrix.ConfigurationLogging.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\DelegatedAdmin\Service> .\Citrix.DelegatedAdmin.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\EnvTest\Service> .\Citrix.EnvTest.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\host\service> .\Citrix.Host.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\MachineCreation\Service> .\Citrix.MachineCreation.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\Monitor\Service> .\Citrix.Monitor.exe /?
Parameters:
PS C:\Program Files\Citrix\Storefront\Service> .\Citrix.Storefront.exe /?
Parameters:
All information without warranty for any failures in your environment.
Cheers,
Sinisa
Microsoft announced the CPS in a joint venture with Dell at the TechEd keynote in Barcelona. I first thought of something similar to the Nutanix boxes or the VMware Evo:Rail. But after visiting the Microsoft booth in the TechExpo I knew I was wrong.
Microsoft CPS is a ready to run Azure consistent cloud in your datacenter. It is a Microsoft validated design and was developed by Microsoft with standard components available from Dell. It comes pre-integrated and pre-deployed to you based on Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Microsoft Azure Pack. It´s single point of support is Microsoft that opens up a Dell call in hardware related issues and takes the necessary steps if software related issues occur.
Later yesterday I attended a session with Vijay Tewari who is the Group Programm Manager for CPS at Microsoft.
I am really hard to be impressed but the specs and the thoughts and experience that seems to be integrated in this solution are just awesome. Even if you don´t have the necessary money – a thing I will come to later in this post – you can take the specs and the concepts behind it as blueprint for your own solution.
Microsoft has been working on CPS for the past 18 months and there are some really big customers like Capgemini using it already in production.
The experiences made in Azure should help in building a robust and effective solution. Therefore only proven ideas and concepts were used.
All management functions are virtualized. Efficient packing of storage and VMs should be used in combination with state of the art network offloads. Dynamic scaling is a key architectural component.
The whole applicance is build and delivery within days because it makes only sence in terms of agile scaling.
Lets spend some words about the specification of each rack and the hardware that is used. Again, all of the used hardware components are standard components everybody can order from Dell. You have to start with one rack.
Each rack has:
It weights/needs/consumes:
Hardware components within each rack consist of the following components:
Networking
Compute Scale Unit (32x Hyper-V hosts)
Storage Scale Unit (4x File servers, 4x JBODS)
Maximum Scale of four racks consists of:
A single rack can support up to 2000 VM’s (2 vCPU, 1.75 GB RAM, and 50 GB disk). You can scale up to 8000 VM’s using a maximum of four of these racks. Of course these numbers vary if using different machine sizes. All hardware components in the rack are hot-pluggable.
That are impressive numbers.
Lets digg a little bit deeper in the clusters, that are build in this solution:
Networking cluster
Networking performance of VM to VM connections could be maximized to 18 Gbps. Offtrack Forwarding to 10 Gbps. Offtrack NAT runs up to 8 Gbps and Offtrack 25 with 1,8 Gbps. All these numbers are achieved trough the usage of LACP Teaming, RSS enabled on Host and Guest, VMQ enabled and NVGRE offload being enabled.
Management cluster
This Cluster is the heart of the rack. It consists of 30 VMs on a 6 node Hyper-V failover cluster. It runs:
If you ask yourself were the fileservers are. They are the only components that are not virtualized.
Management Cluster Services
The management services are roughly devided into the following services:
The Storage cluster
Space available
4 JBODS
Storage spaces configuration
4 File servers
The Management host group, Edge host group, Compute host group and Storage host group are spread over all available racks. But there is only one instance of the Management host group that resides on one rack.
The biggest operational cost in cloud environments is patching. Therefore Microsoft has made a great step forward in Patching & Updating infrastructures like this. Hopefully these experiences will float into future versions of WSUS and/or SCCM.
The Process is as follows:
Patches are validated on Microsoft internal stamps > Then deployed on the internal DEV and TEST cloud > Then the customer starts Patching > Runs an Inventory on ist racks first > then updates what is needed on FW, Drivers and BIOS side > then Updates & Validates Windows Server systems > then Updates and validates System Center > in the end updates and validates Windows Azure Pack.
Microsoft itself has an infrastructure for thesting purposes were every day about 20.000 VMs are being deployed. The tests are done through the Windows and System Center teams.
The primary focus is a wide range of use cases. I asked one of the guys at the booth if they would support also VDI workloads. At that time they could not make any announcements. Also if you could use a CPS rack as Azure Backup location was not confirmed. But Microsoft said every use-case that would have been tested successfull internally would later on officially be supported.
The CPS systems can be ordered in November 2014 in US, Canada, Europe & South Africa. Additional countries will follow in 2015.
Server core installations are installed wherever possible to maximize performance. GUI versions are used were ever it is needed.
The whole solution comes predeployed to the customer. Putting racks together isn´t that interesting but what´s interesting is the way how the software is deloyed.
VMM is deployed before all other systems because the infrastructure is built through images. PowerShell is used to automate tasks
During the development of the solution a private cloud simulator was developed to automate the simulation of certain failures in the infrastructre. It would be great if Microsoft would spread information about it or release it someday to the community.
The folks at TechEd doesn´t wanted to talk about prices. But I found a Whitepaper on the Microsoft CPS Site with some examples in US Dollar. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/cloud-platform-system/
Rack costs
The price for one rack is about $1,635.600 based on list prices from Dell.
VM costs
The Whitepaper comes to the conclusion that an average VM costs round about 4300 Dollars.
This is excatly what I have been praying for years. These solutions can only work with a huge amount of automation just to be sure administrators and operators can focus on the things they really need to do every day.
The CPS solution for example does automatic consistency checks after restoring data. The reset and the rotation of passwords can be run in full autmated mode or with an alarm through SCOM.
Isn´t that really cool?
Microsoft theme self say that they hide all of the arising events for the whole environment that are not needed for normal operation because they know what the infrastructure does. They show only important messages related to the infrastructure.
That is excactly the point that we need to achieve. Proactive Systems Management with full automation instead of manual reactive systems management.
If you are running App-V without the complete infrastructure or SCCM you normally have all your packages on a file share.
Attached you find a small script that connects to a given file share, searches for all .appv files in it and loads all the found packages on the target system. If you have connection groups this script also loads these groups afterwards.
The file structure on the file server looks like this:
App-V Packages reside here: \\FILESERVER\Appv
Connection Groups reside here: \\FILESERVER\Appv\AppV_Connection_Groups
You should take care that all of the packages in an Connection Group are available and loaded before loading the respective Connection Groups.
Here is the script. Be sure to save the script and declare the file server name as parameter when starting the script (e.g. load_appv.ps1 FILESERVERNAME):
param($fileserver="fileserver")
$Apphub='\\' + $fileserver + '\Appv'
# Import necessary Module vor App-V
Import-Module AppvClient
# Get loaded Connection Groups and remove them first
Get-AppvClientConnectionGroup | Stop-AppvClientConnectionGroup | Remove-AppvClientConnectionGroup | out-file -append $LogFile
# Get loaded packages and remove them
Get-AppvClientPackage | Stop-AppvClientPackage | Remove-AppvClientPackage
# List all files with the suffix .appv
$Result =Get-ChildItem $apphub\*_appv -recurse -Force | Where-Object { $_.Extension -match ”.appv” }
# Add, mount and publish these App-V applications
$Result | ForEach-Object {
Add-AppvClientPackage -Path $_.FullName | Mount-AppvClientPackage | Publish-AppvClientPackage -Global
}
# Add Connection Groups
# List all files with the suffix .xml and store them in array $CG
$CG =Get-ChildItem $Apphub\AppV_Connection_Groups -recurse -Force | Where-Object { $_.Extension -match ”.xml” }
# Add, mount and publish these App-V Connection Groups
$CG | ForEach-Object {
Add-AppvClientConnectionGroup -Path $_.FullName | Mount-AppvClientConnectionGroup | Enable-AppvClientConnectionGroup -Global
}
Further information can be found here:
https://www.virtualvibes.co.uk/app-v-5-0-standalone-mode-adding-and-publishing-a-package/
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj713474.aspx
https://stealthpuppy.com/creating-app-v-5-0-connection-groups-with-powershell/
Aus eigener Erfahrung möchten wir folgenden Sachverhalt bei der Nutzung von Task-Synchronisation mit Sharepoint Online erklären. Dieser Sachverhalt wird auch im Microsoft KB-Artikel https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2876938 beschrieben.
Tasks, die im Outlook Client in der Sharepoint Task Liste erstellt werden, werden nicht auf den Sharepoint übertragen. Wir hoffen Microsoft wird diesen Umstand kurzfristig beheben, da es die Arbeit mit den Listen unnötig umständlich macht.
Bleiben Sie mit uns in Kontakt und finden Sie heraus, was gerade jetzt passiert.
