In August have been announced, by Microsoft, a considerable number of news about Operations Management Suite (OMS) and System Center. Our community releases this monthly summary that gives you a comprehensive overview of the main news of the month, in order to stay up to date on these news and have the necessary references to conduct further study.
Operations Management Suite (OMS)
Azure Log Analytics
As already announced in the article The management of Log Analytics from the Azure portal Microsoft has chosen to abandon the OMS portal, in favour of the Azure Portal. The date announced for the final withdrawal of the OMS portal is the 15 January 2019. As a result of this choice also creation of new workspace of Azure Log Analytics can be performed only from the Azure Portal. Trying to create a new workspace from the old OMS portal you will be redirected to the Azure portal to complete the task. Have not made any changes to REST API and PowerShell to create workspaces.
Even the Advanced Analytics Portal is incorporated into the Azure Portal. At the moment you can access this portal by logging on to Logs (preview) available in the workspace of Log Analytics.
Figure 1 - Advanced Analytics available in the Logs (preview) from the Azure Portal
Azure Automation
Managing updates through Azure Automation Update Management sees the addition of a new option for the deployment of the updates. When creating or editing an update deployment is now an option the Reboot, that allows you to control whether and when reboot systems. For more information please visit the official technical documentation.
Figure 2 – Reboot option available in the update deployment
In the functionality of Change Tracking the following changes have been made:
- To track changes and make the inventory of the files in the Windows environment now you can use: recursion, wildcards, and environment variables. In Linux there is already the support for recursion and wildcards.
- As for the changes that are processed in files, both Windows and Linux, introduced the ability to display the content of the changes.
- Introduced the possibility to reduce the frequency with which Windows services are collected (frequency is expressed in seconds and runs from a minimum of 10 seconds to a maximum of 30 minutes).
Agent
This month the new version ofOMS agent for Linux systems fixes some bugs and introduces an updated version for several core components, that increase the stability, the safety and improve the installation process. Among the various news is introduced the support for Ubuntu 18.04. To obtain the updated version of the OMS agent you can access to the official GitHub page OMS Agent for Linux Patch v 1.6.0-163. In the case the OMS agent for Linux systems has been installed using the Azure Extension and if its automatic update is active, this update will be installed independently.
Figure 3 – Bug fixes and what's new for the OMS agent for Linux
Azure Site Recovery
For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 27 introducing new versions of the following components:
- Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Unified Setup/Mobility agent (version 9.18.4946.1): used for replication scenarios from VMware to Azure.
- Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Provider (version 5.1.3550.0): used for replication scenarios from Hyper-V to Azure or to a secondary site.
- Microsoft Azure Recovery Services agent (version 2.0.9125.0): used for replication scenarios from Hyper-V to Azure.
The installation of this update rollup is recommended in deployments where there are components and their respective versions below reported:
- Unified Setup/Mobility agent version 9.14.0000.0 or later.
- Site Recovery Provider (with System Center VMM): version 3.3. x. x or later.
- Site Recovery Provider (for replication without VMM): version 5.1.3100.0 or later.
- Site Recovery Hyper-V Provider: version 4.6. x. x or later.
For more information on the issues resolved, on improvements from this Update Rollup and to get the procedure for its installation is possible to consult the specific KB 4055712.
In Azure Site Recovery was introduced support for enabling disaster recovery scenarios Cross-subscription, for IaaS virtual machines, as long as belonging to the same Azure Active Directory tenant. This feature is very useful because often you have environments that use different Azure subscriptions, created primarily to have greater control of costs. Thanks to this new support you can more easily reach business continuity requirements creating disaster recovery plans without altering the topology of the Azure subscriptions in your environment.
Figure 4 - VM replica configuration to a different subscription target
Azure Site Recovery now can integrate with Veritas Backup Exec Instant Cloud Recovery (ICR) with the release of Backup Exec 20.2. Using ICR, Backup Exec users are able to configure replication of VMs on-premises to Azure and easily operate the DR plan if necessary, reducing the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Instant Cloud Recovery requires a subscription Azure and supports Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. For more details and references you can see thespecific announcement.
Azure Backup
In this interesting article there is the procedure to monitor all workloads protected by Azure Backup using Log Analytics.
System Center
System Center Configuration Manager
Released the version 1806 for the Current Branch (CB) of System Center Configuration Manager that introduces new features and major improvements in the product.
Among the main innovations of this update there is a new feature called CMPivot. It is a new utility available in the Configuration Manager console that can provide information in real time about connected devices in your environment. On this information you can apply filters and groupings, then perform certain actions.
Figure 5 – Features and benefits of CMPivot functionality
For a complete list of new features introduced in this version of Configuration Manager, you can consult theofficial announcement.
Released the version 1808 for the branch Technical Preview of System Center Configuration Manager. This update introduces the ability to perform a gradual release of software updates automatically. The button that allows you to configure this operation is shown in figure below and can be found in the console nodes All Software Updates, All Windows 10 Updates, and Office 365 Updates.
Figure 6 – Phased Deployment creation button
For more information about configuring Phased Deployments in Configuration Manager, you can refer to the Microsoft technical documentation .
I remind you that the releases in the Technical Preview Branch allows you to evaluate in preview new SCCM functionality and is recommended to apply these updates only in test environments.
System Center Operations Manager
Released the updated version of Microsoft System Center 2016 Management Pack for Microsoft Azure (version 1.5.20.18).
There are also the following news:
- New community version of the Azure Management Pack, issued by Daniele Grandini.
- Released SCOM Dashboard Report Template in PowerBI.
Evaluation of OMS and System Center
Please remember that in order to test and evaluate for free Operations Management Suite (OMS) you can access this page and select the mode that is most appropriate for your needs.
To try out the various components of System Center you must access theEvaluation Center and after the registration you can start the trial period.
