Archive for March, 2013

I’m going to get this out the way first: Yes, I know SCCM 2012 has been out for a little while (and SP1 got launched too). Yes, I know it supports Windows 7 and 8 and has awesome new features for targeting applications at users.

But here’s the rub, there’s probably lots of companies with SCCM 2007 and XP who just want to get their company done and dusted with the Windows 7 upgrade, before they go and make life a bit more difficult by trying to do a SCCM upgrade, right in the middle of it.

I sure as hell do.

SCCM 2007 R3 was supposed to give us full support for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 so that we can quickly migrate to Windows 7 and reap all the benefits of a new OS (Yes I know Windows 8 is out now, too).

So why in all that is holy was Fast User Switching not supported in SCCM 2007? Yes you heard me it isn’t supported, in fact what you will get is that the second user who logs on to a Windows 7 computer won’t see anything in “Run Advertised Programs” and no user targeted advertisements will run until the first person logs out. The split second that happens the SCCM client kicks in and RAP populates and all those wonderful app-v applications deploy.

You’ll find the support statement on this page on the TechNet site. No hotfix or update is available as far as I can see (if anyone can correct me I will be indebted to you!) and that’s just that. I’m partially placated by the fact that we’ll do a SCCM 2012 upgrade and get this sorted, but when you consider all the hoopla about Windows 7 and all the Teched sessions about deploying it, how did this slip by? (I must have missed the Teched session where someone mentioned FSU, probably the day after Techfest 😉 ).

It seems to be a constant frustration with the System Center suite, where core functionality gets ignored (Just see the twitter verse every time someone wonders allowed why Hyper-V replication can’t be managed by SCVMM)  and sends us back into the wild swing that is the love/hate relationship of SCCM.

 

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I had been repeatedly receiving a vCenter alarm from two of our new hosts for the last 3 or 4 days, both reporting that vmnic0 had lost connectivity. The initial investigation confirmed that the physical NIC was up and passing traffic. A review of the host logs showed no signs of an error and the physical upstream switch had no record of the link going down.

Target: xxxx.xxx.co.nz

Previous Status: Green

New Status: Red

 Alarm Definition:

([Event alarm expression: Lost Network Connectivity; Status = Red] OR [Event alarm expression: Restored network connectivity to portgroups; Status = Green] OR [Event alarm expression: Lost Network Connectivity to DVPorts; Status = Red] OR [Event alarm expression: Restored Network Connectivity to DVPorts; Status = Green])

 Event details:

 Lost network connectivity on virtual switch “vSwitch0″. Physical NIC vmnic0 is down. Affected portgroups:”Vmotion”, “Management Network”.

The alert was reporting that the loss of connectivity was affecting two portgroups which didn’t even have this pNic as its active adapter. The portgroups that were set with this adapter as active were not listed.

It then became apparent that the alerts were being sent exactly 1 hour apart.  Smelling a rat I’ve restarted the vCenter service and so far these alerts have stopped being sent. I have yet to find a root cause for these erroneous alerts or any kb article that fits the problem but it was only occurring with the new IBM HS23E blades with ESXi 5 but not recently built HS22 blades.