Microsoft Management Summit 2012 was a major success for Savision! With dozens of our customers present, our team had the opportunity to learn first hand how our customers are using our products and how they intend to use them in SCOM 2012. Major Announcements from the Summit Included: Live Maps – Dashboards and Maps for System Center • Full support for System Center 2012 • Integration with System Center Service Manager o Automatically populate and maintain CMDB o Business services automatically correlated to incidents • Integration with Bing® Maps o View the health of your IT organization on interactive maps …

Hyper-V Management: Addressing the Top Nine Challenges A Hyper-V dependent fabric is complex and takes specialized teams working together in order for it to keep running at its best. Manually diagnosing, troubleshooting and resolving Hyper-V Server performance problems is not only  time-consuming, but also requires storage, server, and network IT teams to work flawlessly together. Without a common, real-time view into Hyper-V host’s health, storage sub-systems and underlying networks, IT Pros are left frustrated when trying to resolve Hyper-V problems. Virtualized infrastructure outages are costly because of complexity. Consider these facts: It takes two (2) hours per incident to recover …

We have a two-fold motivation for today’s blog post. First, it lets us close a small gap we have noticed in the monitoring of clusters and cluster shared volumes. Second, it lets us demonstrate some interesting tricks in creating relationships within Operations Manager. First, a bit of context. Microsoft provides the “Server Failover Cluster Management Pack” to monitor most aspects of clusters. However, the support for cluster shared volumes (CSVs) within the cluster is a little weak. You can find some monitoring of CSVs under the nodes in the cluster where they seem to be treated identically to local storage, …

Where Did My Disk Space Go? – Troubleshooting Virtual Machine Storage Issues in Hyper-V With Hyper-V, it is very easy to over commit your storage space by creating dynamic VHD files. It is also easy to consume all of your available storage by creating multiple, parallel snapshots, creating large fixed VHD files, and letting your dynamic VHD files expand as the guest operating systems demand more space. What happens when you hit the limit on your storage devices? Your virtual machines are placed into the dreaded “Paused Critical” or “Major Failure” states. According to Virtual PC Guy : If we …

Savision works with IT environments that are looking for faster ways to solve their problems. And while we are not bound by one industry or vertical, Savision is collaborating with more and more Hospital and Healthcare customers. It makes sense. Hospitals are becoming increasingly more reliant on technology, and if their machines or applications are down — the results could be devastating. I recently got the chance to chat with Errol Small, Technical Services Manager at Healthcare Partners and Rogee Fe de Leon, Technical Services Manager at Maimonides Medical Center about the unique challenges they face, and how Live Maps …

As management tools for virtualization mature, the time and effort required to spin up a new virtual machine has decreased. And with Microsoft’s recent changes to their licensing model – eliminating the OS license fee for virtual machines – the monetary expense has decreased as well. From the perspective of application administrators, the cost of a virtual machine has become effectively zero. By now, everyone is likely familiar with the term “virtual machine sprawl”. Unfortunately, the problem is likely to worsen as investment in virtualization increases. Over time, virtual machines that are no longer used remain in the environment, and …

When System Center Operations Manager alerts you to issues in your IT environment, Vital Signs is the perfect tool to quickly pinpoint and resolve the root cause of the problem. Vital Signs will automatically pull in the most current alerts from Operations Manager and display them in the context of the ever-evolving, real-time monitoring data. Further, historical data retrieved from Operations Manager will show you how your applications and servers should be performing. In this post, we will show a tiny feature that will enable you to get quickly from alert to cause to resolution. Once you have received an …

The number one question we get asked about Live Maps is, “How are other companies using your product?” Last week, we got the chance to chat with both Ryan Durbin, Network Admin at Woodforest National Bank, and Seth Steward, System Center Deployment Engineer at Tribune Company, and asked how their companies use Savision’s solutions. Here’s what they had to say: Nick Hebert (Savision, head of Americas sales): What is the greatest value you see in the Live Maps product? Seth Steward: “Bringing a visual component to a very data-driven side of technology.” Ryan Durbin: “The largest value I see in …

If you’ve ever tried to find out if your virtual machines are being constrained by a resource-starved Hyper-V host, you’ll know that this isn’t as straightforward as you might think.  Let’s use CPU usage as an example.  CPU usage is shown in: Task Manager on the Hyper-V host Task Manager on each virtual machine (assuming they are running Windows) Hyper-V Manager Performance Monitor through the Processor, Hyper-V Hypervisor Logical Processor, Hyper-V Hypervisor Root Virtual Processor, and Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor object   It can be difficult to grasp what each of these mean, and ultimately determine if the processors on …

In this blog article I like to share some technical information about the way Vital Signs is getting its data from Exchange 2007 and 2010. PowerShell Microsoft did a good job by making the data accessible through PowerShell. Vital Signs doesn’t use agents on the target machines to collect data. So we need to run the PowerShell commands remotely. For Exchange Server 2010 they made this easy, but for Exchange Server 2007 this is not possible by default. PowerShell remoting for Exchange Server 2007 The reason why running the Exchange cmdlets from a remote machine doesn’t work is because Microsoft …