In December have been announced, by Microsoft, a significant number of news regarding Azure management services 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.
Azure Monitor
The service Azure Monitor for containers is now available to monitor the health and performance of Kubernetes cluster hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Azure Monitor for containers gives you complete visibility on the performance, collecting metrics on memory and processor of controllers, of the nodes and containers. Also collects the logs of containers. After you enable the monitor for Kubernetes clusters, metrics and logs are automatically collected by a Log Analytics agent version for containers for Linux and stored in a workspace of Log Analytics.
Over the past few months solutions of monitoring, management and security, available from the Operations Management Suite (OMS), have been incorporated into the Azure Portal. Starting from 15 January 2019 the OMS portal will be permanently withdrawn and you will need to use the Azure portal. Before this date you should complete the following steps:
- Migrating special permits in the Azure Portal, if in use.
- If you use the solution of Update Management you must migrate it by following the specific procedure.
- Make the necessary changes to any scripts that refer to the OMS Portal.
For more details you can refer to this Microsoft's document.
Azure Log Analytics, now part of Azure Monitor, is now available in the Azure region of West US 2.
In January by selecting views and Log Analytics solutions, you will use the new Azure Monitor Logs UX, that provides a query editor more functional and improvements in views.
Azure Site Recovery
For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 31 introducing new versions of the following components:
- Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Unified Setup (version: 9.20.5051.1): used for replication scenarios from VMware to Azure.
- Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Provider (version 5.1.3700.0): used for replication scenarios from Hyper-V to Azure or to a secondary site.
- Microsoft Azure Recovery Services Agent (version 2.0.9144.0): used for replication scenarios from Hyper-V to Azure.
The installation of this update rollup is possible on all systems running Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Service providers, by including:
- Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Provider for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (3.3.x. x).
- Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Hyper-V Provider (4.6.x. x).
- Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Provider (5.1.3300.0) and later.
The Update Rollup 31 for Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Unified Setup applies to all systems that have installed the version 9.16.4860.1 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 4478871.
In Azure Site Recovery is also introduced the ability to update the Mobility Agent installed aboard Azure virtual machines, in the replication scenario of VMs in Azure. Whereas Azure Site Recovery releases an update that introduces new features and enhancements every month, the ability to maintain automatically updated infrastructure is especially convenient. These updates do not require restarting the virtual machines and have no impact on the systems replication. By enabling automatic update, the process takes place via a runbook, within an automation account, created in the same subscription of the vault. By dafult the runbook runs at 12:00 AM, but the schedule can be changed at will.
Figure 1 - Enablng automatic update in the activation phase
Figure 2 – Enabling automatic update in the Revovery Service vault
Another important feature introduced in Azure Site Recovery is the ability to replicate and fail over to other regions of virtual machines that belong to Availability Zones. Such functionality has been made available for all Azure regions that support Availability Zones.
Azure Backup
In Azure backup was simplifies the procedure to perform the restore of virtual machines, introducing the feature In-Place restore of disks, which allows to restore the disks of a virtual machine, without the need to create a new system. To do this simply select the following option at restore time:
Figure 3 – In-Place restore from the Azure Portal
Currently this feature is supported only for VMs managed unencrypted. There isn't currently support for generalized VMs and for VMs created using custom images, but this feature is definitely going to increase functionality.
In Azure Backup there is the possibility to activate the protection of SQL Server installed on a virtual machine Azure. In this area of functionality has been added Auto-protection and, if activated, lets make the discovery and protection of all the databases that will be added on that instance of SQL Server, standalone or in an Always On availability group.
Figure 4 – Auto-protect SQL databases with Azure Backup
System Center
System Center Virtual machine Manager
The installation of the following updates 'KB4467684', 'KB4478877', 'KB4471321' or 'KB4483229' on a host Windows Server 2016 managed by SCVMM, may mean that SCVMM is no longer able to enumerate or manage Logical Switch configured on the host. The problem is the fact that the above updates remove the registration of WMI classes used by SCVMM agent to enumerate and manage Logical Switch on the host. The solution is to record the classes in the WMI repository, as reported by this article.
System Center Configuration Manager
Released the version 1811 for the branch Technical Preview of System Center Configuration Manager.
Through the major new features in this release are the ability to insert code PowerShell as a Task Sequence step, thus eliminating the need to create and distribute the package to run PowerShell commands.
Figure 5 – PoerShell code injection in a Task Sequence
In this release are covered further innovations that can be found in this document.
Please note that the Technical Preview Branch releases help you to evaluate new features of SCCM and it is recommended to apply these updates only in test environments.
For the branch Technical Preview System Center Configuration Manager has been released version 1812. All that's new in this release can be found in this Microsoft's document. Please note that the Technical Preview releases Branch help you evaluate the new features of SCCM, so that you can investigate and provide feedback to the product team. These updates is recommended only apply them in test environments.
System Center Operations Manager
Following, are reported the news about the SCOM Management Packs:
- Active Directory Federation Services version 10.0.3.0
- Windows Server Cluster version 10.0.6.6
- Operations Management Suite version 7.3.13285.0
- ADDS version 10.0.2.2
Evaluation of Azure and System Center
To test and evaluate free of charge the services offered by Azure you can access this page, while to try the various System Center components you must access theEvaluation Center and, after registering, you can start the trial period.
