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My colleague and OpsMgr MVP Andy Dominey has released a whitepaper entitled “Deploying OpsMgr in Highly Available and Distributed Enterprise Environments”. Andy has extensive experience in this area and has documented his thoughts and recommendations on the subject.

You can find out more about the whitepaper and get a copy for yourself at Andy’s blog.

Well, I finally got around to sitting my OpsMgr exam today, and passed with a score of 980. I must admit that I was expecting to pass but even I was surprised with my score. Unfortunately they couldn’t tell me which question (or questions) I got wrong.

I would like to point out that those preparing to sit this exam, I would strongly recommend you head over to the System Center User Group website and check out their excellent Exam Study Notes for exam 70-400. Whilst not complete, they have some excellent information and advice.

However nothing can replace direct product experience. You can download a free 120 day trial from the Microsoft OpsMgr website. Also, I would suggest reading through the product documentation and also the MP guides that come with every MP.

There is a known issue with version 6.0.6441.0 of the SQL Server Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager which has been resolved by the release of an updated MP (build 6.0.6460.0).

Read more about this issue on the Product Team blog.

Just a quick post to mention that Savision released LiveMaps v3 into private beta yesterday (Oct 23). I haven’t as yet checked the supporting doco to see if I can blog more details. If I can, I will in a later post.

Whilst browsing through my local Borders on the weekend, I spotted this little gem that I was planning on buying from Amazon anyway. As far as OpsMgr resources go, this is the bees-knees. A collaborative effort by Kerrie Meyler, Cameron Fuller, John Joyner and Andy Dominey (the same people that bought you ops-mgr.spaces.live.com), this book covers everything you need to know about OpsMgr and then some.

The average rating on Amazon is 5 stars and deservedly so. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you are an OpsMgr admin or you want to know more about the product, this is the definitive book on the subject.

Buy this book from the LazyIndustries aStore

I recently had the need to uninstall a ManagementPack from OpsMgr without using the Operators Console (kept getting a exception error every time I opened the console after importing the eXcSoftware Management Pack). Here’s how I did it:

Here’s how I did it:
• On the RMS, open Command Shell.

 
• You’ll need to know the name of the MP, so at the powershell prompt type Get-ManagementPack. If [like me] you have a large number of MP’s installed, you’ll probably want to pipe this into a text file, or expand the Screen Buffer Size to something like 3000, run the command and then [right click and select find to] search.

• Once you have the name we can now uninstall the MP. Start by typing the following:

  $MP = Get-ManagementPack :where-opject {$_.Name -eq ‘eXcSoftware.nonWindows’

  We’ve now set the variable $MP to contain the values for the MP. Now type in:

  uninstall-managementpack -managementpack $mp

• Sadly, there is no confirmation that the MP has been uninstalled. You’ll have to go into the console to confirm.

Thankfully [for me] this did fix my issue. I really must get around to setting up my test OpsMgr environment rather than working live with production.