We are currently deploying Virtual Servers on the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V technology. So far we are experiencing a big improvement from the previous Microsoft Virtualization products. As a longtime user of MOM 2005 and Ops Mgr 2007 we finally should have use of the Virtual Candidates Reports often showed at keynotes on Microsoft events like MMS. So I tried to find some candidates amongst our 400 physical servers but no one was selected by the report. I changed the values in the report to a maximum and still no servers. As a good Ops Mgr Admin I dived in to the MP world of Ops Mgr 2007. There must be something wrong with the Virtual Machine Manager MP (This is the MP that deliver the reports. The VMM MP runs a vb script that makes a separate performance collection for the Virtual Candidates reports. This report is kicked with 4 parameters and if one of those is missing the scripts just ends. After some testing with the parameters i found that the script is aimed at servers discovered by the Ops Mgr Internal MP as Virtual Machine = "False". The Ops Mgr Internal MP is discovering Virtual Machines with the WMI query to Win32_Baseboard and asking for "Manufacturer". If the answer is "Microsoft Corporation" then the server is discovered as Virtual Machine = "True" and you can see this in the Ops Mgr Console. But if the answer is "Intel Corporation" ,as it is if you run a virtual server inside of VMware workstation, the server is discovered as Virtual Machine "False". This was not my problem. We are running all HP Proliant Servers(Rather standard..) and they don´t respond to the WMI query Win32_BaseBoard (Manufacturer). The answer is "blank" and the discovery is therefore "" instead of "True" or "False".
When the VMM MP kicks the script to collect the performance for Virtual Candidates one of the 4 parameters is "" (blank, as the Virtual machine discovery is blank) and the script ends and no information is collected and my reports are empty. I don’t know if this is the result if you run servers of other brands like Dell. Right now I’m considering writing my own discovery to set the Virtual Machine to "False" to finally get my reports. After some research I found that Config Manager 2007 uses another WMI query to discover HP as Manufacturer and this query works with my HP Proliant Servers....
Friday, February 15, 2008
Why the Virtual Candidates Reports is empty
Posted by
Pontus Blomqvist
at
6:27 AM
