Tricks on setting up System Center Service Manager 2010 SP1

Although System Center Service Manager (SCSM) has been released for around 1 year till now, most people is still new to it.

Nothing better than playing around a platform and experiencing it by yourself for learning.

However, installation of SCSM, though not as complex as other family member like Configurations Manager (SCCM) 2007, there are still minor tricks.  I would like to talk about them here.

1. SCSM 2010 SP1 – SP1 is actually a full install package.  You don’t need to install RTM version before installing SP1.
2. SQL Server locale – not all SQL Server locales are supported by SCSM.  A common trap is Latin1-General-CI-AS locale, which is a very commonly used locale, is not compatible with SCSM!  For US English, you should use Latin1-General-100-CI-AS instead.  If you want to make your database 100% compatible to SCSM, please check out here.  Make sure the SQL server is properly setup before starting SCSM installation, else you might need to go over the whole process once again.
3. Authorization Manager hotfix check – this is for responding a friend’s question: if your underlying OS is Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, you don’t need to install the hotfix.  However the checker is so stupid that a warning is still prompted to scare you out even you don’t need it:

One of the checks that the prerequisite checker performs is to look for the presence of the Authorization Manager hotfix (975332). If the hotfix is not found, a warning is displayed as shown in the following image.

The Authorization Manager Hotfix is included with Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1. If you are using Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1, you can safely ignore this warning.

After getting through these show stoppers and apparent show stoppers, you should be able to install SCSM 2010 SP1 and try it out by yourself.

PS: you might want to know that Service Manager 2012 is coming out as the 2nd version in CY2011Q4 

Links:

• SCSM supported locales: click here.
• TechNet article about SCSM Prerequisite Checker: click here.

ESG Performance Report on Hyper-V R2 SP1

Although VMware is still considered as the market leader of x86 server virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V is slowly eating up its market leadership.  This is also reflected from Gartner’s magic quadrant report on virtualization report released in June 2011: Microsoft has been promoted to “leader” quadrant of x86 server virtualization, together with VMware, the previous “sole leader”, and Citrix as well.

In fact, Hyper-V is being misunderstood by most of the early adopter of virtualization: they consider Hyper-V is just a toy, slow, unstable, etc.

After 2 years of working in Hyper-V R2, I am personally considering Hyper-V R2 is not bad in enterprise readiness as publicly misinterpreted.  In fact, that’s very sad that most of the posts in the web is pretty biased to VMware.  However, this is not difficult to understand:

1. VMware has good marketing and public image.
2. VMware is not free, and everyone in the industry can resell it with price mark up, including both of us; while not everyone can resell Windows Server (except for Open license and full box set).
3. VMware has an open API for 3rd party ISV to develop software solution to extend its capability.

I am not going say which hypervisor is better, this is no definite answer and will definitely end up with big thread mess here.  I am just focusing on the benefit that Hyper-V R2 can bring to you.

As an end-user, you might be interested in the cost (Hyper-V R2 is free!  Everyone can download it from here), familiarity (Windows style UI), and ease on provisioning.  More importantly, as a free hypervisor, it is delivering a high degree of functionality that paid version of VMware is delivering, including failover cluster and Live Migration (vMotion of VMware)!

Need to take a note here: I am talking about Hyper-V R2, not Hyper-V (R1).  I am considering Hyper-V (R1) a premature product, while Hyper-V R2 delivers a huge improvement over the previous release, in terms of design, stability and performance that a bare metal hypervisor should deliver.

To clear up rumors about Hyper-V R2’s (particularly in performance area this time), Microsoft has recently posted a link from Enterprise Strategy Group about performance benchmark on famous Microsoft platform workloads like Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2.  ESG delivers a clear, parametric and reproducible series of tests.  Potential virtualization user might find this document informative and good for reference.

You can find the performance report here.

Why not giving Hyper-V R2 a try?  It’s free (Hyper-V R2 Server is free, while Windows Server is not, of course), and it behaves well.  And more importantly: Hyper-V R2 is a key for further Microsoft infrastructure architecture!  I am predicting next generation Microsoft infrastructure cannot be disconnected from Hyper-V… do you believe it?  I am believing it already 🙂

Links:

• Gartner’s magic quadrant report on virtualization report: click here.
• Hyper-V R2 Server free download from MS Download: click here.
• ESG Hyper-V R2 SP1 Application Workload Performance Report: click here.

Adding Facebook chat to your Windows Phone “Mango”

Windows Phone “Mango” includes tons of exciting features, one of them is “Facebook chat”. However, if this feature is turned on, most likely you will just be redirected to your Facebook home instead of having the feature properly set up.

The reason behind is: you need to associate your Windows Live account with Facebook application. You can do this by logging into Windows Live profile page.

1: Windows Live profile page

2: Connecting Facebook

By means of adding the application, as well as making sure you are logging in your Facebook account using Windows Live email address, then you’re ready to rock 😉

Welcome to infratalk

Hi there.  Welcome to infratalk.  I hope this blog can be a garden for you as an infrastructure lover to find your necessary survival information.  Enjoy blogging 🙂