The following post is intended to demonstrate how to monitor your Windows Server 2016 — Nano Server, via System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2016.

Also, a quick note, the SCOM team released the Windows Server 2016 Operating System Management Pack today, see HERE for the download/MP. One of the many updates to this MP (version 10.0.8.0) is the added compatibility of the Nano agent! So without further ado, let’s try installing the SCOM 2016 agent on a Nano server!

To begin, I have an out-of-the-box Windows 2016 (No UI) VM. I gave it 1GB of memory, and 2 vCPU’s.

Once the VM is online, first things first, we need to add this machine to our domain, unless you want to go the DMZ/Certificates route…. For simplicity, I am adding the Nano server to my domain, same domain as the SCOM Management Server(s) — The Nano Server and SCOM Management Server MUST be on the same domain. Same network space, etc. etc.

Assuming the above is completed, let’s begin with assigning a static IP address to the server. However, before we do this, we need to get the name of the Network Adapter(s).

Network Adapter Information

Get-NetAdapter
Get-NetIPConfiguration

These cmdlets will give us the network adapter name and current settings. As you can see below, the domain controller/DHCP has already given our server a dynamic IP (10.10.10.50). We want to change this….

Assign Static IP

New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceIndex 2 -IPAddress 10.10.10.37 -PrefixLength 24 -DefaultGateway 10.10.10.1

By default, the -PrefixLength 24, will assign the subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

Next, since this is Active Directory, we want to assign the DNS Server(s) to our Network Adapter.

Assign DNS Server(s)

Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceIndex 2 -ServerAddresses 10.10.10.30, 10.10.10.31

If you only have one DNS/DC server, then remove the second entry.

Now that we have communication with the domain controllers, now we can add our machine to the domain.

First, let’s change the server name from its random default, to something we like. I am going to go with “NANO01“.

Change Server Name

Rename-Computer -NewName "NANO01" -Restart

Next, we can now add the server to the domain.

Add Server to Domain

Add-Computer -DomainName "RaviLocal.com" -Restart

To quickly verify our server has been added to AD, we can take a looking at the AD Users and Computers UI:

Great, there it is! Now we can go ahead and deploy our Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA)/SCOM Agent.

Deploy SCOM 2016 Agent

Since I am taking the lazy approach, I will be deploying the agent via SCOM console. If you want to make use of PowerShell, see Microsoft’s TechNet article HERE.

 

Great, MMA deployed as expected! Quickly verify it is now communicating with SCOM:

All good!

 

Happy SCOM’ing 2016!