Earlier this week, Microsoft’s Kevin Holman published an excellent article and SCOM Management Pack that addresses the issue with SCOM 2012 and agent updates. Please have a read, and consider installing this MP to help alleviate the issues SCOM 2012 has created when it comes to understanding which version your SCOM agent is on….
My personal notes for installing SCOM 2012 R2 Update Rollup 12, Step-by-Step. UR12 (Update Rollup) has a lot improvements, please see below the many updates being provided in this UR. One thing to mention, UR12 also has resolved an issue with respect to Reporting — please see notes below. Also, it is rather nice to see updates (still) being pushed out for SCOM 2012R2 along with other System Center 2012 products.
It is highly recommended to upgrade your lab/Dev environments first before upgrading your Production environment(s). The step by step procedures below are the steps I took and in no way shape or form do I accept responsibility for any data loss, and/or issues within your environment. It is advised to always take a backup of your SQL databases and/or snapshots of your SCOM environment(s). Please take these notes as suggestions. Always refer to Microsoft’s KB (posted below) for full documentation steps.
Here are the key updates for UR12 (source Microsoft):
Once you are ready to begin your upgrade, it is recommend you do the following server/roles in the order below:
Once you have downloaded the rollup files, I like to extract and only keep the language I need, in this case, ENU (English). You will need to install these with Administrative rights, I like to use PowerShell as Local Administrator. It really does frustrate me, as there is no indication that the rollup installed correctly, (other than looking at the file version number change via File Explorer).
Personally, I prefer to execute the MSP files via PowerShell (RunAs Administrator) console.
Again, the order needs to be:
Once the updates are installed, server(s) are rebooted, etc., you will now need to apply the SQL scripts. First update the Data Warehouse, then followed by the OpsMgr DB.
The scripts can be found here, “%SystemDrive%\Program Files\System Center 2012 R2\Operations Manager\Server\SQL Script for Update Rollups”
Please note, the user executing these scripts needs to have read and write permissions to the database(s).
Execute the SQL queries in the following order:
Once you have successfully executed the SQL scripts, you will now need to import the updated Management Packs (MP). These MPs can be found here, “%SystemDrive%\Program Files\System Center 2012 R2\Operations Manager\Server\Management Packs for Update Rollups“.
You will need to import the following MPs, please see below:
Once the MPs have been imported, you should now go back to your Pending Management view, under the Administrations pane, and update all servers.
And that is that! You are now on the latest and greatest System Center release for SCOM 2012 R2 Update Rollup 12!
Launch the PowerShell console, and Run as Administrator:
Import-Module OperationsManager Set-SCOMLicense -ProductId "XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX" Start-Sleep -s 10 Restart-Service healthservice, omsdk, cshost
Don’t forget, in order for the Product Key to be applied, you will need to restart all SCOM Services, (or you can run the code above (there is a 10 second delay after the key is applied before the services are restarted)):
Cheers!
The following PowerShell code is to install all the necessary IIS components for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2016 Web Console on Windows Server 2016.
Import-Module ServerManager Add-WindowsFeature Web-Server, Web-WebServer, Web-Common-Http, Web-Default-Doc, Web-Dir-Browsing, Web-Http-Errors, Web-Static-Content, Web-Health, Web-Http-Logging, Web-Log-Libraries, Web-Request-Monitor, Web-Performance, Web-Stat-Compression, Web-Security, Web-Filtering, Web-Windows-Auth, Web-App-Dev, Web-Net-Ext45, Web-Asp-Net45, Web-ISAPI-Ext, Web-ISAPI-Filter, Web-Mgmt-Tools, Web-Mgmt-Console, Web-Mgmt-Compat, Web-Metabase, NET-Framework-45-Features, NET-Framework-45-Core, NET-Framework-45-ASPNET, NET-WCF-Services45, NET-WCF-HTTP-Activation45, NET-WCF-TCP-PortSharing45, WAS, WAS-Process-Model, WAS-Config-APIs, web-asp-net -restart
You can also find this in Microsoft’s TechNet Gallery, HERE.
Earlier this week, I posted on how the OMS/Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) can be dual-homed for multiple OMS Workspaces.
A good question from the community came up (thank you @ Manoj Mathew), “Have you noticed any performance impacts on the Agents when they are multi homed to OMS?“
In the OMS Query below — making use of OMS’ Log Analytics, I checked the performance data in the last 48 hours. Unfortunately I cannot go any further, since the MMA was deployed earlier in that day, and the second OMS workspace was added later that afternoon.
There are a few spikes in the Memory and CPU, but this is also a result of a few factors:
The query I used to collect the data is here,
Computer="COMPUTERNAME.FQDN" Type=Perf (CounterName="Available MBytes" OR CounterName="% Processor Time") (ObjectName=Memory OR ObjectName=Processor)
A second question being asked here is, “how many OMS Workspace IDs can be added to “dual-home” the MMA agent?“
Unfortunately I only have 3 OMS Workspace’s to work with at the moment in this environment, but with that said, I can surely say a minimum of 3. If you have the ability to test more than 3, I would love to find out!
Today I learned that the MMA (Microsoft Monitoring Agent) has the ability to be “dual-homed“. Similar to what we have seen in the past with the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) agent and dual-homing it to multiple SCOM environments/Management Groups, the same can be said for the Operations Management Suite (OMS)/MMA agent. By going into the MMA properties, you can add multiple OMS Workspace IDs. This is great if you want the Computer reporting to multiple OMS Workspaces and/or Azure Subscriptions, as was the case for me today.
Simply launch the MMA agent, and within the Azure Log Analytics (OMS), add your OMS Workspace ID here.
Note, this works for the MMA version, 8.0.11030.0 — Windows. Has not been tested against the Linux Agent.
The following is a guide on how to install SQL 2016 for your System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2016 environment. I will be installing SQL 2016 on a brand-new server with Windows Server 2016 installed.
To begin, I am going to set the following accounts as a Local Administrator on the server. Also, I am going to be creating two SQL instances, one for the Operations database, and the other for the Data Warehouse. Since this is for my personal lab, I am not dedicated storage/drives for the databases.
| Domain\Account | Description |
| domain\SCOM_AA | SCOM Action Account |
| domain\SCOM_DA | SCOM Data Access/SDK Account |
| domain\SCOM_SQL_READ | SCOM SQL Reader |
| domain\SCOM_SQL_WRITE | SCOM SQL Writer |
| domain\SQL_SA | SQL Service Account |
Next, let’s run the setup wizard as the SQL_SA account to make life easier down the road…
First thing I noticed, between SQL 2012/2014 and SQL 2016, a few changes/features have been removed/added. One that stands out is, the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) console is no longer here. Hmm.. I guess we can always connect to the databases from a console on another server/PC.
As mentioned, I am dedicated an instance for the Operations DB, and one for the Date Warehouse DB.
Setting the SQL Server Agent to Automatic, and specifying the service accounts for the two services.
Keeping the database engine collation as default, “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS“.
Here, I am adding all the SCOM/SQL service accounts and SQL service accounts as SQL server administrators.
Nice! This is new for SQL 2016 — being able to create TempDB‘s. Since my VM has 8 vCPU’s, looks like SQL 2016 picked up on that, and has decided to create a one-to-one relationship. Great, let’s get started within the installation…
Perfect! No errors. Keep in mind, we will need to repeat these steps to create the Data Warehouse instance.
Great! Now we can go ahead with the SCOM 2016 installation! See HERE, for that post.
If you need to install the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), continue reading…
