Category Archives: Operations Management Suite

Everything you need to know about OMS Log Analytics workspaces

In order to use Log Analytics you must have a OMS workspace, which is the dedicated environment of Log Analytics within which we find the data repository and the different solutions. I this article will be considered the different aspects that you should evaluate about the Log Analytics workspaces.

What is a workspace?

A workspace of Log Analytics is nothing more than a container in Azure environment within which are collected, aggregated and analyzed data from different sources and collected by Log Analytics.

To create a workspace, you must have an Azure subscription. Starting from 26 September 2016 In fact, all the workspace must necessarily be connected to an Azure subscription at the time of creation. During the process of creating the workspace you will also give it a name, that is not currently possible to change post creation, and associate it with an existing Resource Group or create a specific one. Finally you are asked in what location create it and what licensing model adopt. In this regard, it is recalled that Log Analytics can be licensed according to the different modes that you can refer to this link.

Figure 1 – Creating a Log Analytics workspace

Figure 2 – Location currently available for creating a workspace

How many workspaces should be created?

Within each Azure subscription you can be created more workspaces. When you need to determine the appropriate number of workspaces to create you should consider the following factors:

Geographical data location. Geographically distributed companies may need to store data in specific regions to contemplate policies of sovereignty and for compliance reasons. Another aspect to consider may be the presence of other resources in the Azure environment that must report data in Log Analytics. In these scenarios, to avoid charges caused by outbound data transfer, it is good to keep, whenever possible, the resources and the OMS workspace in the same region.
Data Isolation. If you need to manage data in Log Analytics from different customers (for example Service Provider) or separate organizational units that must be kept isolated for several reasons you may want to create separate workspaces.
Billing flexibility. You are billed for the workspace so it can be useful, to keep distinct the billing costs and have greater visibility, create separate workspaces for different departments or for different business units.

When considering the number of Log Analytics workspaces that you must create you should keep in mind that if in your environment you have enabled theintegration between System Center Operations Manager and OMS Log Analytics you can connect each Operations Manager management group with only one workspace. The Microsoft Monitoring Agent may instead be configured directly to return the data that both towards Operations Manager towards different workspaces of Log Analytics.

Figure 3 – Configuration of the Microsoft Monitoring Agent to return data to multiple workspaces

How to perform queries across multiple Log Analytics workspaces

Thanks to the new language introduced in recent months in Log Analycts you can now perform queries across multiple Log Analytics workspaces to analyze and aggregate data included in separate workspaces. This type of query you can run it by logging in to the new Advanced Analytics Portal.

When creating queries, to refer to another workspace, you must use the expression workspace(). More details about you can consult them in Microsoft's official documentation.

Figure 4 – Sample query cross workspaces

How to migrate workspaces

The migration of an existing Log Analytics workspace to another Azure subscription can take place directly from Azure portal or by using the cmdlet powershell Move-AzureRmResource. There isn't the ability to migrate the data contained in a workspace to another Log Analytics workspace or change the region where the data resides.

Figure 5 – Select the change of the subscription

Figure 6 – Migrating a workspace to another Azure subscription

Depending on installed solutions might be necessary to repeat the installation of the same solutions post-migration.

Conclusions

When you decide to adopt Log Analytics is appropriate to conduct a detailed assessment to establish the more appropriate deployment design, passing first by the aspects addressed concerning workspaces. Certain choices made at the time of creation of the workspace can not be easily changed later and for this reason it is appropriate to carry them out in a targeted manner, following the deployment best practices, to perform a successful deployment of Log Analytics.

Using Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner in VMware environments

When you have the need to implement Disaster Recovery scenarios towards Azure particularly in complex environments, through the solution Azure Site Recovery (ASR), you can use the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner, recently released by Microsoft, to make a detailed assessment of the on-premises environment. The tool is designed to cover both Hyper-V and VMware environments . In this article, we will detail the use of the tool when you are trying to activate a Disaster Recovery plan with replication of VMware virtual machines to Azure.

What is the use of this tool?

ASR Deployment Planner performs a detailed assessment of the on-premises environment, aimed at using the solution Azure Site Recovery (ASR), and provides elements to consider in order to contemplate the various operations needed to effectively implement the plan of DR: replica, virtual machine failover and DR-Drill. The tool also performs an estimate of Azure resources required for the protection of on-premises virtual machines, reporting information about costs for the use of ASR.

In the presence of VMware environments if you have the need to address real migration scenarios towards Azure, the most appropriate tool to use to carry out the assessment of the environment is Azure Migrate.

How to use the tool?

The use of ASR Deployment Planner involves two main stages. The first of profiling, during which the necessary information is collected from the environment VMware, and the second of report generation to perform the analysis.

ASR Deployment Planner can be downloaded at this link. This is a compressed folder whose contents should be copied on the system on which you intend to run the tool. ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe is the command line tool that must be executed with the appropriate parameters, there is no required installation.

Profiling and measurement of throughput

The machine on which you intend to make the profiling or calculating the throughput must meet the following requirements:

Operating System: Windows Server 2016 or Windows Server 2012 R2.
Hardware requirements: 8 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM and 300 GB HDD.
Software Requirements: .Net Framework 4.5, VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.0 R3, Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012.
Internet access to Azure.

In addition the following conditions are required:

Presence of an Azure storage account (only if you want to calculate the throughput).
VMware vCenter statistics level set at level 2 or higher.
Ability to connect to vCenter server/ESXi host on port 443.
User with at least Read-only permission to access the VMware vCenter server/VMware vSphere ESXi.

In general it is a good idea to perform the profiling and the calculation of throughput on the Configuration Server you intend to use, or on a system with similar characteristics.

The tool is able to perform the profiling only for virtual machines with RDM and VMDK disks. There is no collection of information of VMs with iSCSI or NFS disks; in this regard it should be noted that Azure Site Recovery does not support virtual machines with these types of disks in a VMware environment.

During the profiling activity the tool connects to the vCenter Server or vSphere ESXi host to collect performance data for virtual machines. This implies that the data collection activities has no impact on the performance of virtual machines because there is no direct connection. The profiling is done once every 15 minutes as not to impact on VMware systems, but the query that is performed, however, collects performance data for all the time interval.

The profiling activity requires the presence of a text file containing the list of virtual machines (a name or an IP address for each row) you intend to examine. This file you can create it manually or, with the following commands, performed from the VMware vSphere PowerCLI console, you can extrapolate the list of all virtual machines on the vCenter or on vSphere ESXi host.

Figure 1 - Extrapolation of VMs from the vCenter

Figure 2 – Example of the file containing the list of VMs

At this point you can begin the profiling process. For production environments it is recommended to run it for at least a week, so you have a sufficiently long period of observation to achieve accurate profiling. To get the complete list of required and optional parameters, you can run the following command: ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe-Operation StartProfiling /?.

Among the optional parameters you can also specify an Azure Storage Account with its key to calculate the throughput that Site Recovery can reach during the replication process to Azure.

Figure 3 -Example of running the profiling

If the server, on which profiling process starts, be rebooted or goes in crash, the data collected would remain and you can simply restart the tool.

The tool can also be used for throughput calculation.

Figure 4 - Example of throughput measurement

The process of measuring the throughput will upload files with extension .VHD on the storage account specified. Upon completion of the upload these files are removed automatically from the storage account.

Report Generation

The machine on which you want to generate the report must have installed Excel 2013 or a higher version.

After the profiling process you can generate the report containing the output of the assessment. When you create the report, you must run the tool in report-generation mode. In this case to consult all the possible parameters you should run the command ASRDeploymentPlanner.exe -Operation GenerateReport /?.

Figure 5 - Example of the command for the report generation

The report generated is called DeploymentPlannerReport_xxx.xlsm within which you can see different information, including:

An estimate of the network bandwidth required for the initial replication process (initial replication) and for delta replication.
The type of Storage (standard or premium) required for each VM.
The total number of storage accounts (standard and premium) required.
The number of Configuration Server and Process Server you need to implement on-premises.
The number of VMs that can be protected in parallel to complete the initial replication at any given time.
Estimating the throughput attainable by ASR (on-premises to Azure).
An assessment of the supported virtual machines, providing details about the disks (number, its size and IOPS) and the type of the OS.
Estimation of DR costs, for use it in a specific region of Azure.

Figure 6 - Home page of the generated report

To obtain detailed information concerning the analysis of the report please visit the Microsoft's official documentation.

In addition to being present in the home page of the report a summary of the estimated costs, there is also a specific tab containing the details of the cost analysis.

Figure 7 – Section on cost estimates in the report generated

For more details on the information and its interpretation, you can check the official documentation.

Conclusions

Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner is a very useful tool that, making a detailed assessment of the on-premises environment, allows not to omit any aspect to achieve in the best way a Disaster Recovery plan towards Azure, using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). This tool also allows you to have with great precision an estimate of the costs that you need support for the disaster recovery plan, so you can make the necessary evaluations.

Azure Backup: the protection of Linux on Azure

Azure Backup is a Microsoft cloud-based data protection solution that, making available several components, allows you to back up your data, regardless of their geographical location (on-premises or in the cloud) toward a Recovery Service vault in Azure. This article will examine the main aspects concerning the protection of Linux virtual machines present in Microsoft Azure, using Azure Backup.

In the security scenario of Azure Iaas virtual machines (Infrastructure as a Service) do not need any backup server, but the solution is completely integrated into the Azure fabric and are supported all Linux distributions approved to run in Azure environment, with the exception of Core OS. The protection of other Linux distributions is also allowed provided that there is the possibility to install the virtual machine VM agent and there is support for Python.

How Azure back up Linux VM

On Linux systems are installed, during the execution of the first backup job, a specific extension called VMSnapshotLinux, through which Azure Backup, during job execution, pilot taking snapshots that are transferred to the Recovery Service vault.

Figure 1 – Principles of backing up Azure IaaS VM with Azure Backup

To have an effective data protection you should be able to make consistent backups at the application layer. Azure Backup by default for Linux virtual machines creates consistent backups at file system level but can also be configured to create application-consistent backup. On Windows systems this is done using the VSS component, while for Linux VM it is made available one scripting framework through which you can run the pre-scripts and post-scripts to control the backup execution.

Figure 2 – Application-consistent backups in Linux VM on Azure

Azure Backup before starting the virtual machine snapshot creation process invokes the pre-script, if this is completed successfully the snaspshot is created, at the end of which runs the post-script. The scripts are fully customizable by the user and they need to be created according to specific characteristics of the application present on the virtual machine. For more details please visit the Microsoft's official documentation.

How to enable the backup of Linux virtual machines running on Azure

Recently it has been introduced the possibility to enable from the Azure portal the protection of virtual machines already from the moment of creation:

Figure 3 - Enabling backup when creating the VM

Alternatively you can enable the protection after creating the virtual machine by selecting it from the Recovery Service vault or by accessing the blade of the VM in the section Operations – Backup. From the same panel, you can view the status of backups.

File Recovery of Linux virtual machine on Azure

Azure Backup, besides the possibility to restore the entire virtual machine, also allows for Linux systems to restore individual files using the File Recovery feature. To do this you can follow these steps below.

From the Azure portal, you select the virtual machine for which you need to restore the files and in the Backup section you start the task of File Recovery:

Figure 4 - Starting the process of File Recovery

At this point will appear the panel where you must select the recovery point that you want to use for the restore operation. Then press the button Download Script which generates a script with extension .sh, and password, that is used to mount the recovery point as system's local disk.

Figure 5 – Recovery Point selection and script download

The script must be copied on the Linux machine and to do that you can use WinSCP:

Figure 6 – Copy of the script on the Linux machine

By accessing the Linux system in terminal mode, you must assign execution permission to the copied script , using the command chmod +x and then you can run the script:

Figure 7 – Script for File Recovery

At the time of the execution the script requires the password which is shown in the Azure portal and then proceed with steps for making your recovery point connection via iSCSI channel and mount it as file system.

Now you can access the mount point path which exposes the selected recovery point and restore or consult the necessary files:

Figure 8 – Access to the path of the mount point

After completing the restore operation is appropriate to make an unmount of the discs through the appropriate button from the Azure portal (in any case the connection to the mountpoint is closed forcefully after 12 hours) and you need to run the script with the parameter -clean to remove the path of the recovery point from the machine.

Figure 9 – Unmount disks and removing mount points from the machine

If in the VM for which you want to restore the files are present LVM partitions, or RAID arrays you must perform the same procedure, but on a different Linux machine to avoid conflicts in the discs.

Conclusions

Azure Backup is a fully integrated solution in the Azure fabric that allows you to protect easily and with extreme effectiveness even Linux virtual machines present on Azure. All this happens without the need to implement complex infrastructure for the data protection. Azure Backup also helps to protect many large-scale systems and to maintain a centralized control of the data protection architecture.

OMS and System Center: What's New in January 2018

The new year has begun with different ads from Microsoft regarding what's new in Operations Management Suite (OMS) and System Center. This article summarizes briefly with the necessary references in order to learn more about.

Operations Management Suite (OMS)

Log Analytics

The release of theIT Service Management Connector (ITSMC) for Azure provides a bi-directional integration between Azure monitoring tools and ITSMC solutions such as: ServiceNow, Provance, Cherwell, and System Center Service Manager. With this integration you can:

Create or update work-items (event, alert, incident) in ITSM solutions on the basis of alerts present in Azure (Activity Log Alerts, Near real-time metric alerts and Log Analytics alerts).
Consolidate in Azure Log Analytics data related to Incident and Change Request.

To configure this integration you can consult the Microsoft's official documentation.

Figure 1 – ITSM Connector dashboard of the Log Analytics solution

Agent

This month the new version ofOMS agent for Linux systems fixes important bugs also introducing an updated version of the components SCX and OMI. Given the large number of bug fixes included in this release the advice is to consider the adoption of this upgrade. To obtain the updated version of the OMS agent you can access to the official GitHub page OMS Agent for Linux Patch v 1.4.3-174.

Figure 2 – Bug fixes and what's new for the OMS agent for Linux

Azure Backup

During the process of creating virtual machines from Azure portal now there is the ability to enable the protection via Azure Backup:

Figure 3 – Enabling backup while creating a VM

This ability improves in a considerable way the experience of creation of the virtual machine from the Azure Portal.

Azure Site Recovery

Azure Site Recovery allows you to handle different scenarios to implement Disaster Recovery plans, including replication of VMware virtual machines to Azure. In this context the following important changes have been introduced:

Release of a template in the format Open Virtualization Format (OVF) to deploy the Configuration Server. This allows you to deploy the template in your virtualization infrastructure and have a system with all the necessary software already preinstalled, with the exception of MySQL Server 5.7.20 and VMware PowerCLI 6.0, to speed up the deployment and the registration to Recovery Service Vault of the Configuration Server.
Introduced in Configuration Server a web portal to drive the main configuration actions necessary such as proxy server settings, details and credentials to access the vCenter server and the management of the credentials to install or update the Mobility Service on virtual machines involved in the replication process.
Improved the experience for deploying the Mobility Service on virtual machines. Since the 9.13.xxxx.x version of the Configuration Server would be used VMware tools to install and update the Mobility Service on all VMware virtual machines protected. This means that you no longer need to open firewall ports for WMI and for File and Printer Sharing services on Windows systems, previously used to perform the push installation of the Mobility Service.

The monitoring features included natively in Azure Site Recovery have been greatly enriched for having a complete and immediate visibility. The Panel Overview of Recovery Service Vault is now structured, for the section Site Recovery, as follows:

Figure 4 – Azure Site Recovery dashboard

These the various sections, which are updated automatically every 10 minutes:

Switch between Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery dashboards
Replicated Items
Failover test success
Configuration issues
Error Summary
Infrastructure view
Recovery Plans
Jobs

For more details on the various sections you can see the official documentation or view this short video.

Known Issues

Please note the following possible problem in the execution of backup of Linux VMs on Azure. The error code returned is UserErrorGuestAgentStatusUnavailable and you can follow this workaround to resolve the error condition.

System Center

System Center Configuration Manager

Released the version 1801 for the branch Technical Preview of System Center Configuration Manager: Update 1801 for Configuration Manager Technical Preview Branch.

Among the new features in this release there are:

Ability to import and run signed scripts and monitor the execution result.
The distribution point can be moved between different primary sites and from a secondary site to a primary site.
Improvement in the client settings for the Software Center, with the ability to view a preview before the deployment.
New settings for Windows Defender Application Guard (starting with Windows 10 version 1709).
Ability to view a dashboard with information about the co-management.
Phased Deployments.
Support for hardware inventory string longer than 255 characters.
Improvements in the scheduling of Automatic Deployment Rule.

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.

In addition to System Center Configuration Manager current branch, version 1710 was issued an update rollup that contains a large number of bug fixes.

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 test the various components of System Center 2016 you can access to the’Evaluation Center and after the registration you can start the trial period.

Integration between Service Map and System Center Operations Manager

Service Map is a solution that you can enable in Operations Management Suite (OMS) able to automatically carry out the discovery of application components, on both Windows and Linux systems, and to create a map that shows almost real-time communications between the various services. All this allows you to view the servers as interconnected systems that deliver services.

In System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) there is the possibility to define Distributed Application to provide an overall view of the health status of an application consists of different objects. The Distributed Application does not provide additional monitor functionality, but merely to relate the state of the objects in the system monitor, to provide the overall health status of the application.

Through integration between Service Map and System Center Operations Manager, you can automatically create in SCOM diagrams that represent the Distributed Application based on the detected dependencies from the Service Map solution.

This article will examine the procedure to be followed to activate this integration bringing back the main features.

Prerequisites

This kind of integration is possible if the following requirements are verified:

Environment System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 or later.
Workspace OMS with Service Map solution enabled.
The presence of a Service Principal with access to the Azure subscription that contains the OMS workspace.
Operations Manager-managed servers and that send data to Service Map.

Supports both Windows and Linux systems, but with one important distinction.

For Windows systems you can evaluate the use of the scenario of integration between SCOM and OMS, as described in the article Integration between System Center Operations Manager and OMS Log Analytics and simply add the Dependencing Agent of Service Map on the various servers.

For Linux systems you cannot collect directly data of agents managed by Operations Manager in Log Analytics. It will therefore always required the presence of both the SCOM agent and the OMS agent. At the moment, in a Linux environment, the two agents share some binaries, but these are distinct agents that can coexist on the same machine as long as the SCOM agent is at least version 2012 R2. OMS agent installation on a Linux system managed by Operations Manager updates the OMI and the SCX SCX. We recommend that you always install the SCOM agent first and then the OMS agent, otherwise you need to edit the configuration file of OMI (/etc/opt/omi/conf/omiserver.conf) by adding the parameter httpsport=1270. After the editing you must restart the OMI Server component using the following command: sudo /opt/omi/bin/service_control restart.

The process for activating the integration

The first step required is the import, using the System Center Operations Manager console, of the following management packs (now in Public Preview), contained within the bundle that you can download to this link:

Microsoft Service Map Application Views.
Microsoft System Center Service Map Internal.
Microsoft System Center Service Map Override.
Microsoft System Center Service Map.

Figure 1 – Start importing the Management Pack

Figure 2 – Install the Management Pack for the integration with Service Map

After completing the installation of the management pack you will display the new node Service Map, in the workspace Administration, within the section Operations Management Suite. From this node you can start the integration configuration wizard:

Figure 3 – Configuration of the OMS workspace where there is the Service Map solution

At the moment you can configure the integration with a single OMS workspace.

The wizard prompts you to specify a Service Principal for read access to the Azure subscription that contains the OMS workspace, with the Service Map solution enabled. To create the Service Principal you can follow the procedure in Microsoft's official documentation.

Figure 4 – OMS workspace connection parameters

Based on the permissions assigned to the Service Principal the wizard shows the Azure subscriptions and its associated OMS workspaces:

Figure 5 - Selection of the Azure subscription, OMS Resource Group and OMS workspace

At this point you are prompted to select which groups of machines in Service Map you want to synchronize in Operations Manager:

Figure 6 – Selection of the Service Map Machine Group to synchronize in SCOM

On the next screen you are prompted to select which servers in SCOM synchronize with information retrieved from Service Map.

Figure 7 – Selection of items of SCOM

In this regard, in order to make sure that this integration is able to create the diagram of the Distributed Application for a server, this must be managed by SCOM, by Service Map and must be present within the Service Map group previously selected .

Then you are prompted to select an optional Management Server Resource Pool for communication with OMS and if necessary a proxy server:

Figure 8 - Optional configuration of a Management Server Resource Pool and a proxy server

Registration takes few seconds after which the following screen appears and Operations Manager performs the first synchronization of Service Map, by taking the data from the OMS workspace.

Figure 9 – Addition of the OMS workspace successfully completed

The synchronization of Service Map data occurs by default every 60 minutes, but you can change this frequency going to act with an override on a rule named Microsoft.SystemCenter.ServiceMapImport.Rule.

Result of the integration between Service Map and SCOM

The result of this integration is visible from the Operations Manager console in the dashboard Monitoring. It is in fact created a new Service Map folder that contains :

Active Alerts: any active alert regarding communication between SCOM and Service Map.
Servers: list of servers under the monitor for which the information is synchronized from Service Map.

Figure 10 - Servers with synchronized information from Service Map

Machine Group Dependency Views: Displays a Distributed Application for each Service Map group selected for the synchronization.

Figure 11 – Machine Group Dependency View

Server Dependency Views: shows a Distributed Application for each server that synchronizes information from Service Map.

Figure 12 – Server Dependency View

Conclusions

Many reality that they are going to use, or have already implemented the Service Map solution also have on-premises an environment with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). This integration will enrich the information in SCOM allowing you to have full visibility of applications and dependencies of the various systems. This is an example of how you can use the power provided by OMS actually even with SCOM, without renouncing to investments made on the instrument, such as the possible integration with IT service management solutions (ITSM).

Service Map in Operations Management Suite: introduction to the solution

In an IT world that is increasingly heterogeneous and ever changing, with hybrid and distributed architectures with systems on-premises and in public cloud providers, is crucial to adopt solutions that manage operations, effectively monitor the entire environment and facilitate any troubleshooting tasks. Operations Management Suite (OMS) is IT management tool from Microsoft, designed in the era of cloud, that includes different solutions designed just for these purposes.

This article describes the main features of the solution Service Map present in Operations Management Suite (OMS) and it will indicate the procedure to be followed to configure Service Map and make the onboarding of the agents.

What is Service Map ?

Service Map is a solution that can be activated in OMS and it is able to automatically carry out the discovery of application components, on both Windows and Linux systems, and to create a map that shows almost real-time communications between the various services. All this allows you to view the servers as interconnected systems that deliver services. Service Map shows in detail the TCP connections that exist between the various systems, with the references of the processes involved in communications and related ports used. This allows you to determine and isolate any problems and to verify communication attempts that are attempted by various systems to detect any unwanted connections or problems in establishing communications needed. This solution is also useful when you must approach to cloud systems migration scenarios to consider all the connections needed for the proper functioning of the application, without neglecting any aspect.

Figure 1 -Example of schema generated by Service Map

Solution activation

By accessing the OMS portal you can easily add the solution Service Map, present in the gallery, by following the steps documented in the following article: Add Azure Log Analytics management solutions to your workspace (OMS).

Figure 2 - Addition of the solution Service Map

Enabling Service Map does not require specific configurations but you need to install on each system a specific agent called Microsoft Dependency Agent, which retrieves information required by the solution. The Microsoft Dependency Agent can only be installed on 64 bit platforms 64 and requires as a prerequisite the presence of the OMS agent . The Service Map Agent does not transmit any information directly into the OMS workspace and therefore is not required to open specific ports to the outside. Data to Service Map are always sent by the OMS agent, directly or through an OMS gateway:

Figure 3 – Data Communication of Service Map

When you activate Service Map in a OMS workspace, the management pack Microsoft. IntelligencePacks. ApplicationDependencyMonitor is sent to all Windows system present in the workspace.

Installation of the Microsoft Dependency Agent on Windows systems

The installation of the Microsoft Dependency Agent on Windows systems is done by invoking, with administrative privileges, the executable InstallDependencyAgent-Windows.exe which can be downloaded at this link. This executable provides the interactive installation using a Wizard or you can use the parameter /S to install the agent of Service Map in a completely silent way, useful if you want to activate it on multiple systems via scripts.

Installation of the Microsoft Dependency Agent on Linux systems

On Linux systems the installation of the Microsoft Dependency Agent takes place through the execution, with root permissions, of a shell script that is contained in the binary InstallDependencyAgent-Linux64.bin, which can be obtained by accessing this link. Also in this case there is the silent installation without user interaction, using parameter -s.

For systems on Azure, you can deploy the Microsoft Dependency Agent even through a specific Azure VM Extension. The extension is available for both Windows and Linux systems and the deploy can be done either via PowerShell scripts or via a JSON template in Azure Resource Manager mode (ARM).

To verify that the installation of the Service Map agent is completed successfully you can check that they are present and running the following components:

Service “Microsoft Dependency Agent” on Windows systems.
Daemon “microsoft-dependency-agent” on Linux machines.

The Microsoft Dependency Agent sends data through the OMS agent every 15 seconds and depending on the complexity of the environment each agent can transmit approximately 25 MB per day of information related to the Service Map solution. For the Service Map agent can be estimated a use of resources equal to 0,1 % of the system memory and the 0,1 % of the CPU of the system.

Notes and resources related to Service Map solution

How to use operationally Service Map is illustrated very well and in detail in this official Microsoft document. In addition to entering into the specifics of the Service Map functioning consult this article that shows the main features via a practice demo.

Service Map is currently only available in the following regions of Azure: East US, West Europe, West Central US and Southeast Asia.

Costs of the solution

Service Map is included in the package Insight & Analytics and the licensing may be covered in the free plan (up to a maximum of 5 Service Map systems) or takes place per node. For more information, please visit the page of the OMS pricing.

Conclusions

Service Map is a useful solution that can be used to improve the visibility of application flows, evaluate the impact of maintenance on individual systems and improve troubleshooting against fault. The Service Map activation is technically very simple and the added value provided by this solution is considerable, being able to consult at any time a completed and updated map of interconnection of systems, regardless of their geographical location.

Please note that you can test and evaluate for free Operations Management Suite (OMS) by accessing this page and selecting the mode you find most suitable for your needs.

OMS and System Center: What's New in December 2017

Compared to what we were used to seeing in recent months, during the month of December, also because of the holiday period, have been announced by Microsoft a few news about Operations Management Suite (OMS) and System Center. This article will be made a summary accompanied by references required for further study.

Operations Management Suite (OMS)

Log Analytics

In Azure Monitor was including the ability to view and define alert of Log Analytics. This is a feature in preview that allows you to use Azure Monitor as a centralized point of management and visualization of alerts.

Figure 1- Defining a Log Analytics alert in Azure Monitor (preview)

This month the new version of the’OMS agent for Linux systems fixes in particular a major bug concerning the DSC package (omsconfig) that due to a possible hang prevents sending data to the OMS workspace. In this release, there are not new features. To obtain the updated version you can access to the official GitHub page OMS Agent for Linux Patch v 1.4.2-125.

Figure 2 – Bug Fix list for the new OMS agent for Linux

Azure Automation

In Azure Monitor, within Action Groups was introduced the possibility to define a Azure Automation Runbook as action type. It is a further integration that enables you to have an effective alerting platform to take action not only for workloads running on Azure, but independently from their location.

Figure 3 – Defining an action based on Automation Runbook

Protection and Disaster Recovery

Azure Backup introduced support for the protection of Azure virtual machines with discs, managed or unmanaged, encrypted using Bitlocker Encryption Key (BEK). This feature extends the possibilities of protection of encrypted virtual machines, already supported previously in the Bitlocker Encryption Key scenario (BEK) and Key Encryption Key (KEK), allowing to obtain with ease a high level of security in these protection scenarios. For further information you can consult theofficial announcement.

Figure 4 – Protection of VM encrypted using Bitlocker Encryption Key (BEK)

Microsoft has released Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner a very useful tool that can be used when you plan to implement a disaster recovery plan through to Azure Azure Site Recovery (ASR). ASR Deployment Planner is able to make a detailed assessment of the on-premises environment, targeted use of ASR, and provides the necessary elements to be taken into consideration in order to contemplate effectively the various operations required by the DR plan (replica, virtual machine failover and DR-Drill). The tool works in VMware and Hyper-V also includes a cost estimate for the use of ASR and resources necessary for the protection of Azure virtual machines on-premises. This tool currently can also be useful to make the necessary assessments when you have the need to address real migration scenarios from Hyper-V to Azure. This is because the instrument Azure Migrate, designed specifically to assess migration scenarios, allows you to present to the assessment only of VMware environments. The support for Hyper-V in Azure Migrate will be introduced in the coming months. ASR Deployment Planner can be downloaded at this link and includes the following features:

Estimates of the network bandwidth required for the initial replication process (initial replication) and for delta replication.
Indicates the type of Storage (standard or premium) required for each VM.
Indicates the total number of storage accounts (standard and premium) required.
For VMware environments, indicates the number of Configuration Server and Process Server you need to implement on-premises.
For Hyper-V environments, provides guidance on additional storage needed on-premises.
For Hyper-V environments, indicates the number of VMs that can be protected in parallel (through batch) and the order to be followed in order to successfully activate the initial replication.
For VMware environments, specifies the number of VMs that can be protected in parallel to complete the initial replication at any given time.
Estimate the throughput attainable by ASR (on-premises to Azure).
Perform an assessment, of the supported virtual machines, providing details about the disks (number, its size and IOPS) and the type of the OS.
Estimate the costs of DR, for use it in a specific region of Azure.

For detailed information about using the tool you can consult the official documentation relating to the specific scenario:

Figure 5 – Sample reports generated by ASR Deployment Planner

System Center

System Center Configuration Manager

Released the version 1712 for the branch Technical Preview of System Center Configuration Manager. The new features in this update are:

Improvements on the Surface Device dashboard, that allows you to view the firmware version of Surface devices, as well as the version of the operating system.
Dashboard improvements in Office 365 client management.
Multiple installation of applications by accessing the Software Center.
Client can be configured to respond to PXE requests without adding a distribution point role (Client-based PXE).

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.

Microsoft allows you to test and evaluate for free Operations Management Suite (OMS) by accessing this page and selecting the mode you find most suitable for your needs.

Integration between System Center Operations Manager and OMS Log Analytics

For those who are using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) there is the possibility to extend the functionality of the product, enabling integration with Log Analytics. This allows you to benefit the potential of OMS to get a more efficient and complete strategy for monitoring your infrastructure . In this article we will analyze the steps that you must follow to enable this integration and we will parse the function of the architecture.

Before you enable this kind of integration you must ensure that you have one of the following supported versions of SCOM :

Operations Manager 2016.
Operations Manager 2012 R2 UR2 or higher.
Operations Manager 2012 SP1 UR6 or higher.

Also you should allow outgoing traffic, to the OMS cloud services, coming from monitor agents, from the Management Servers and from the SCOM console, directly or via an OMS Gateway.

The integration process is done by using the Operations Manager console according to few simple steps later reported:

Figure 1 – Start the registration process

Figure 2 — Select the OMS environment

Figure 3 – Start the authentication process

Figure 4 – Selection of the OMS workspace you plan to incorporate in SCOM

Figure 5 - Confirmation Screen Settings

Figure 6 -Final Confirmation

At the end of this configuration the connection is established towards the OMS workspace, but no data of SCOM agents connected to the SCOM management group is sent to Log Analytics. In order to collect the data from managed Operations Manager agents in Log Analytics is selectively required going to specify individual computer objects or a group that contains your Windows computer objects. The whole can be carried out directly from the branch Connection in the section Operations Management Suite:

Figure 7 – Selection of computer objects that you want to enable

At the end of this operation in the OMS portal it is possible to check the connection status of its Management Group and the number of connected servers:

Figure 8 - Information reported in the OMS portal after the integration

From the SCOM console you can check the status of the OMS connection browsing the section Operations Management Suite – Health State of the workspace Monitoring:

Figure 9 - Property Authentication service URI in the Health State of the Management Server

After establishing the connection between the SCOM infrastructure and the OMS workspace, the Management Server will start to receive configuration updates by OMS web services in the form of Management Packs, that include both the base MPs that those relating to solutions that have been enabled. Operations Manager carries out checks at regular intervals to check for updates for these Management Packs. This behavior is governed by these SCOM rules:

SystemCenter.Advisor.MPUpdate: handles updating of base MPs of OMS and by default runs every 12 hours.
SystemCenter.Advisor.Core.GetIntelligencePacksRule: handle upgrade of MPs related to enabled OMS solutions in the connected workspace and by default it is performed every five minutes.

Such behavior can be managed by changing the frequency or completely disabling updates (parameter Enabled) by configuring overrides of the above rules.

By accessing the workspace Administration and filtering the Management Pack for Advisor or Intelligence list the MPs downloaded and installed according to the solutions enabled in your OMS workspace:

Figure 10 – Management Packs list with name containing "Advisor"

Figure 11 – Management Packs list with name containing "Intelligence"

Figure 12 – List of Solutions installed on the OMS Workspace

As you can see for each installed OMS solution there is a corresponding Management Pack imported into the Operations Manager infrastructure.

At the end of this configuration also the communication-enabled monitor agents can send the required data from the solution directly to the OMS web service or the solution's data can be sent directly from the SCOM Management Server to the connected OMS workspace. Everything depends on the solution enabled and in no case this information are saved within the Operations Manager databasea (OperationsManager and OperationsManagerDW). If the Management Server lost the connectivity to the OMS web service data are maintained cached locally until the restart of the communication. In case the Management Server remain offline for an extended period the communication with OMS can be picked up by other Management servers in the same Management Group.

Figure 13 – Chart with communications between SCOM and OMS infrastructure components

In order to control and regulate the internet connections of monitored systems and of Management Servers to the public OMS URL you can implement a OMS Gateway:

Figure 14 – Communications between SCOM and OMS infrastructure components in the presence of an OMS Gateway

In this way the only system that must be enabled to access to the Public URL of Operations Management Suite is the OMS Gateway and all others systems will point to this machine. To apply this type of configuration is necessary, after implementing the system with this role, specify the IP address of the OMS Gateway in the proxy server with the prefix http://.

Figure 15 - Proxy Server configuration used to access the OMS cloud services

Figure 16 – IP address of the OMS Gateway with http prefix://

If you need to enable only certain systems using the OMS Gateway going to act on the rule Advisor Proxy Setting Rule and create an Override for the health service object going to populate the parameter WebProxyAddress with the URL of the OMS Gateway.

Conclusions

Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) is a solution based entirely on the cloud, in constant evolution and with new features being added and extended in rapid frequency. Through this integration you can then combine the speed and efficiency inherent in OMS in collecting, hold and analyze data, with the potential of Operations Manager. This allows you to continue using the existing SCOM infrastructure to monitor your environment, keeping any integration with IT Service Management solutions (ITSM) and benefit at the same time also the potential offered by Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS).

Azure Site Recovery: disaster recovery of VMware virtual machines

The solution Azure Site Recovery (ASR) protects virtual or physical systems, hosted both Hyper-V environment that VMware, automating the replication process to a secondary data center or to Microsoft Azure. With a single solution you can implement Disaster Recovery plans for heterogeneous environments orchestrating the replication process and actions needed for the successful recovery. Thanks to this solution, the DR plan will be easily available in any eventuality, even the most remote, to ensure business continuity. Recently, the solution has been expanded while also providing the ability to implement a disaster recovery strategy for Azure virtual machines, allowing you to enable replication between different regions.

In this article I'll show you how ASR can be used to replicate virtual machines in VMware environment to Azure (scenario 6 in the following figure), examining the characteristics and technical procedure to be followed. The following illustration shows all the scenarios currently covered by ASR solution:

Figure 1 – Scenarios covered by Azure Site Recovery

The replication scenario of VMware virtual machines to Azure requires the presence of the following architecture:

Figure 2 - Architecture in the replication scenario VMware to Azure

In order to activate the replication process is required the presence of at least one on-premises server on which you install the following roles:

Configuration Server: coordinates communications between the on-premises world and Azure, and manages the data replication.
Process Server: This role is installed by default with the Configuration Server, but may be provided more Process Server based on the volume of data to be replicated. It acts as a replication gateway, then receives replication data, performs an optimization through caching and compression mechanisms, provides encryption and sends them to the storage in the Azure environment. This role is also responsible to make the discovery of virtual machines on VMware systems.
Master target server: even this role is installed by default with the Configuration Server, but for deployment with a large number of systems can be more servers with this role. Take action during the failback process of resources from Azure by managing replication data.

On all virtual machines subject to the replication process is required the presence of Mobility Service, that is installed by Process Server. It is a special agent in charge of replicating the data in the virtual machine.

Following describes the process to follow to make the deployment of on-premises and Azure components required to enable replication of VMware virtual machines to Microsoft's public cloud.

The core component required on Azure side is the Recovery Service Vault within which, in the section Site Recovery, you can start the configuration process controlled by the chosen scenario.

Figure 3 – Choice of replication scenario of VMware virtual machines within the Recovery Service Vault

Then you must install on the on-premises machine the Configuration Server by following the steps listed:

Figure 4 – Steps to follow to add the Configuration Server

In this section of the Azure portal it is possible to download the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Unified Setup and the key required for the registration of the server to the vault. Before starting the installation make sure that the machine on which you intend to install the Configuration Server be able to access the public URLs of the Azure service and that is enabled during the setup the web traffic on port 80 needed to download the MySQL component used by the solution.

The setup prompts you for the following information:

Figure 5 – Choice of roles to install

Select the first option for installing the roles Configuration Server and Process Server. The second option is useful if you need to install additional Process Server to enable a scale out deployment.

Figure 6 - Accept the license agreement by MySQL Community Server

Figure 7 - Key selection required for the registration to the Site Recovery Vault

Figure 8 - Choice of the methodology to access the Azure Services (direct or via proxy)

Figure 9 – Check to verify prerequisites

Figure 10 – Setting passwords for MySQL

Figure 11 – Further check on the presence of the required components to protect VMware VMs

Figure 12 – Choice of the installation path

Installation requires approximately 5 GB of available space, but are recommend at least 600 GB for the cache.

Figure 13 — Select the network interface and the port to use for replication traffic

Figure 14 – Summary of installation choices

Figure 15 - Setup of the different roles and components successfully completed

At the end, the setup shows the connection passphrase which is used by the Configuration Server, that is good to save with care.

Then you must configure the credentials that will be used by Azure Site Recovery to discover virtual machines in the VMware environment and for the installation of the Mobility Service on virtual machines.

Figure 16 - Definition of the credentials used by the service

After complete these steps you can select the Configuration Server from the Azure portal and then define VMware system data (vcenter or vSphere) with which to interface.

Figure 17 - Select the Configuration Server and add vCenter / vSphere host

On completion of this configuration it is necessary to wait few minutes to allow the Process Server to perform the discovery of VMware virtual machine on the specified environment.

Then you need to define the settings for the target of the replica:

On which subscription and what recovery model (ASM or ARM).
Which storage account use to host the replicated data.
vNet on which attest the replicated systems.

Figure 18 – Target replication settings

The next step involves defining the replication policy in terms of RPO (in minutes), retention of the recovery points (expressed in hours) and how often make consistent snapshot at the application level.

Figure 19 – Creation of the replication policy

Upon completion of this task is proposed to carry out the analysis of your environment using the tool Deployment Planner (available directly through the link in the Azure Portal) in order to ensure that the requirements, network resources and storage resources are sufficient to ensure the proper operation of the solution.

Figure 20 - Steps of infrastructure preparation completed successfully

After completing the infrastructure preparation steps you can activate the replication process:

Figure 21 - Source and Replica Target

Figure 22 - Selection of the virtual machines and of the related discs to be replicated

This section also specifies which account the Process Server will use to install the Mobility Service on each VMware virtual machine (account configured previously as documented in Figure 16).

Figure 23 - Replication policies selection and optionally enable Multi-VM consistency

If the "Multi-VM consistency" option will be selected it will create a Replication Group within which will be included the VMs that you want to replicate together for using shared recovery point. This option is recommended only when you need a consistency during the fail over to multiple virtual machines that deliver the same workload. Furthermore, by activating this option you should keep in mind that to activate the system failover process is necessary to set up a specific Recovery Plan and you can not enable failover for a single virtual machine.

At the end of these configurations you can activate the replication process

Figure 24 – Activation of the replication process and its result

Figure 25 - State of the replica for the VMware virtual machine

One of the biggest challenges when implementing a Disaster Recovery scenario is to have a chance to test its functionality without impacting production systems and its replication process. Equally true is that do not test properly the DR process is almost equivalent to not having it. Azure Site Recovery allow you to tests in a very simple way the Disaster Recovery procedure to assess the effectiveness:

Figure 26 – Testing the Failover procedure

Figure 27 - Outcome of the Test Failover process

Conclusions

Being able to rely on a single solution as Azure Site Recovery that lets you enable and test procedures for business continuity in heterogeneous infrastructures, contemplating even virtual machines in VMware environment, certainly has many advantages in terms of flexibility and effectiveness. ASR makes it possible to deal with the typical obstacles encountered during the implementation of Disaster Recovery plans reducing the cost and complexity and increasing the levels of compliance. The same solution can also be used to deal with the actual migration to Azure with minimal impact on end users thanks to nearly zero application downtime.

OMS and System Center: What's New in November 2017

In November there have been several announcements from Microsoft concerning Operations Management Suite (OMS) and System Center. This article will summarize briefly with the necessary references to be able to conduct further studies.

Operations Management Suite (OMS)

Log Analytics

As already announced since 30 October 2017 Microsoft has launched the upgrade process of the OMS workspaces not yet updated manually. In this regard has been released this useful document that shows the differences between a legacy OMS workspace and a updated OMS workspace, with references for further details.

Solutions

Those that use circuit ExpressRoute will be glad to know that Microsoft announced the ability to monitor it through Network Performance Monitor (NPM). This is a feature currently in preview that allows you to monitor connectivity and performance between the on-premises environment and vNet in Azure in the presence of ExpressRoute circuit. For more details about the features announced you can consult theofficial article.

Figure 1 – Network map showing details of ExpressRoute connectivity

Agent

As usual it was released a new version of the OMS Agent for Linux systems that now takes place on a monthly basis. This release fixes bugs related diagnostics during agents onboarding. Are not being introduced new features. To obtain the updated version please visit the official GitHub page OMS Agent for Linux Patch v 1.4.2-124.

Protection and Disaster Recovery

Azure Backup always protected backups from on-premises world toward Azure using encryption that takes place using the passphrase defined during the configuration of the solution. To protect VMs in Azure the recommendation for greater security in the backup was to use VMs with disk-encrypted. Now Azure Backup uses Storage Service Encryption (SSE) to do the encryption of backups of virtual machines on Azure, allowing to obtain in an integrated manner in the solution a mechanism for the implementation of the backup security. This also will happen to existing backup automatically and through a background task.

Microsoft, in order to bring more clarity with regard to pricing and licensing of Azure Site Recovery, updated the FAQ which you can see in the official page of pricing of the solution.

System Center

As is already the case for the operating system and System Center Configuration Manager, the other System Center products, in particular, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, and Data Protection Manager will follow a release of updated versions every 6 months (semi-annual channel). The goal is to rapidly deliver new capabilities and to ensure a speedy integration with the cloud world, which is essential given the speed with which it evolves. In November was announced the System Center preview version 1711 which you can download at this link.

Figure 2 – Summary of what's new in System Center preview version 1711

To know the details of the new features in this release, please consult theofficial announcement.

System Center Configuration Manager

For System Center Configuration Manager current branch version 1706 was issued an important update rollup you should apply as it solves a lot of problems.

Released the version 1710 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 definitely emerge the possibilities offered by the Co-management that expand the possibilities for device management using either System Center Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune.

Figure 3 – Features and benefits of Co-management

For a complete list of new features introduced in this version of Configuration Manager, you can consult theofficial announcement.

Released the version 1711 for the Technical Preview branch of System Center Configuration Manager. The new features in this update are:

Improvements in the new Run Task Sequence step.
User interaction when installing applications in the System context even when running a task sequence.
New options, in the scenario of using Configuration Manager associated with Microsoft Intune, to manage compliance policy for devices Windows 10 related to Firewall, User Account Control, Windows Defender Antivirus, and OS build versioning.

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.

Released an updated version of the Configuration Manager Client Messaging SDK.

System Center Operations Manager

Released the new wave of the SQL Server Management Packs (version 7.0.0.0):

The Management Packs for SQL Server 2017 can be used for the monitor of SQL Server 2017 and subsequent releases (version agnostic), this allows you to avoid having to manage different MPs for each version of SQL Server. The controls for versions of SQL Server earlier than 2014 are included in the generic MP "Microsoft System Center Management Pack for SQL Server".

System Center Service Manager

Microsoft has published a series of tips and best practices to be followed during Authoring Management Pack of System Center Service Manager (SCSM).

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.