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System Center Advisor - Deep Dive

Paul Mestemaker

Sr. Program Manager

Microsoft System Center Advisor

@PaulMest / #SCAdvisor

Experiment: download these slides!

http://bit.ly/SCAatSQLBITSX

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Session Objectives and Takeaways

  • Session Objective(s):
    • Learn about the benefits of Advisor
    • Understand Advisor’s high-level architecture to understand data security, privacy, and control
    • Learn how to diagnose and troubleshoot Advisor deployments
  • Key Takeaways:
    • System Center Advisor is a new online manageability service that just became commercially available (Jan 2012)
    • System Center Advisor is available at no additional charge if you have SA for Windows Servers and Server Workloads (e.g. SQL, Exchange, SharePoint)

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The Wisdom of the Cloud

SERVER CONFIGURATIONS

Microsoft Customer Service and Support

Knowledge Base

RECOMMENDED CHANGES

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System Center Advisor Benefits and Features

Available as Software Assurance benefit

Proactively avoid problems

    • Alerts for unpatched, misconfigured, or unsupported configurations
    • Regular assessment of server configuration
    • Remote access to portal

​

Reduce downtime

    • SQL Server and Windows Server knowledge
    • Compare with best practices
    • Access centralized configuration data

Resolve issues faster

    • Access current and historical configuration data
    • Share configuration data with internal or Microsoft support staff
    • Get instant access to guidance

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demo

A Brief Look at System Center Advisor

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Watch this demo on-demand

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System Center Advisor: How It Works

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announcing

Commercial Availability

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Advisor and Software Assurance

  • Advisor is offered as a new SA benefit
    • Ongoing value to the SA program
  • Licensing
    • You must have an active SA license for the workload being monitored by Advisor (SA for Windows Server or SQL Server)
    • As additional workloads are added, SA licenses for those workloads will be honored
  • 60 Day free trial for simple barrier free onboarding
  • There is no requirement to enter your Microsoft agreement number

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announcing

Global availability

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Global Availability

  • Commercial availability in the following geographies
  • English only at launch
  • Localized versions and list of languages is still TBD

Geographies

  • Australia
  • Austria
  • Belgium
  • Brazil
  • Canada
  • Denmark
  • Finland
  • France
  • Germany
  • Hong Kong
  • Iceland
  • India
  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Japan
  • Luxembourg
  • Netherlands
  • New Zealand
  • Norway
  • Portugal
  • Singapore
  • Spain
  • Sweden
  • Switzerland
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

Details

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announcing

New workloads:

  • Exchange 2010
  • SharePoint 2010
  • SQL Server 2012

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Advisor Workloads

Exchange

  • Support for Exchange 2010 SP1+

SharePoint

  • Support for SharePoint 2010

SQL Server

  • Support for SQL 2008 & 2008 R2
  • Support for SQL Server 2012

Windows

  • Support for WinSvr 2008 & 2008 R2
  • Note: Focus on AD, Hyper-V, and Core OS

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demo

Setting up Advisor for the First Time

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Preparing Your Environment

  • Setting up your environment takes 5 minutes of work, but can take a day in elapsed time with default settings
    • TIP: Upload now commands available here…

http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/advisor/gg697803.aspx

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Choose your path

  • More demos?
    • Collaboration
    • Workload opt-out
    • Persistent filters
    • Troubleshooting the agent/gateway
    • Providing feedback
    • Closing account
    • …
  • More slides?
    • Top problems with Advisor
    • Deployment recommendations
    • Advisor & SCOM
    • …

​

​

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demo

Tour of the not so well-known features of Advisor

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Lessons Learned

Learn from the mistakes of others :-)

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Usage Statistics

Popularity and Reach

  • 6000+ customers registered

Deployments

  • Largest: 200+ servers
  • Most of our customers have SQL Server

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Top Supportability Issues

  • Clock Skew
    • Recommendation: Make sure server’s clocks are synced with internet time
  • Cannot download registration certificate due to secure IE on Windows Server
    • Recommendation: Download setup and certificate on a client OS
    • Work-around: Uncheck “do not save encrypted pages to disk” in Internet Explorer Properties
  • Agent cannot talk to gateway in workgroups
    • Recommendation: have a gateway on each non-domain joined server

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Topology Recommendations

  • Domain-joined servers
    • Recommendation: 1 agent/server
    • Recommendation: 1 gateway/N servers
  • Non-domain joined servers
    • Recommendation: 1 agent/server
    • Recommendation: 1 gateway/server
    • Problem: Agents/Gateways on separate servers could not communicate over machine boundaries through WCF

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Topology Example #1 – Domain Environment

Agent

Gateway

Agent & Gateway

Legend

S1

S2

…

SN

SN + 1

Advisor

Service

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Topology Example #2 – Workgroup Environment

Agent

Gateway

Agent & Gateway

Legend

S1

S2

…

SN

SN + 1

Advisor

Service

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Top Question

How is this different than Operations Manager?

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Advisor and Your Management Solution

  • Advisor is not a real-time monitoring solution
  • Advisor leverages SCOM 2007 R2 Agent and Management Pack technology
    • Note: Advisor does not require SCOM, but can work side-by-side with SCOM via multi-homing
    • Note: Advisor does not work side-by-side with SCOM 2012 … yet!
  • Reusing SCOM technology will enable…
    • Future better-together scenarios with Microsoft’s management platform investments (e.g. Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Service Manager)
    • Minimize duplication of data collection

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Top Question

Wouldn’t having both be too much overhead for my server?

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Advisor Data Collection Details

  • Low overhead
    • Agent CPU: < 1% average, occasional spikes
    • Agent Memory: < 75 MB
    • Gateway Upload: ~100KB/server/day
  • Server management data only
    • Diagnostic data (configuration settings, error logs)
    • Utilization (CPU, IO, Available Memory, etc.) [*]
    • Workload throughput (transactions/day, GB served/day) [*]
    • No customer data or custom workload data

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Top Question

Isn’t sending data outside of my environment bad?

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Data Privacy & Handling Sensitive Data

  • Complete Privacy Statement available
  • Advisor only has visibility into servers with Agents deployed on them (+ data queried from Active Directory about objects associated with that server)
  • Uploads are archived on-premise (5 days by default) for audit trail and to enable you to inspect the data
  • Upload time is configurable; you can stop uploading at any time
  • You can close your account and request to remove data from Advisor servers (account cleanup happens within 30 days)
  • Your organization will be the only non-Microsoft party who will have access to your individual organization’s data
  • Microsoft will not use this data for sales/licensing validation

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Why Try Advisor?

  • You can prevent problems in your environment that customers similar to you have already experienced
  • It only takes 5 minutes to try it out
  • If you have SA, you can get this at no additional cost
  • You can easily provision others to see information about your environment without giving them access to your servers (e.g. consultants/TAMs)

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In review: Session Objectives and Takeaways

  • Session Objective(s):
    • Learn about the benefits of Advisor
    • Understand Advisor’s high-level architecture to understand data security, privacy, and control
    • Learn how to diagnose and troubleshoot Advisor deployments
  • Key Takeaways:
    • System Center Advisor is a new online manageability service that just became commercially available (Jan 2012)
    • System Center Advisor is available at no additional cost if you have SA for Windows Servers and Server Workloads (e.g. SQL, Exchange, SharePoint)

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Related Content

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Questions?

Feel free to tweet:

@PaulMest

#SCAdvisor

Reminder: download these slides…

http://bit.ly/SCAatSQLBITSX