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This article identifies changes seen in Operations Manager 2012 R2 preview release and details the steps required to install Operations Manager 2012 R2 preview release running on Windows Server 2012 R2 preview release. For the to be an all-in-one System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 environment, it will need to be domain controller, SQL server and Operations Manager server.
The following were the steps taken to install the all-in-one environment (documented in this blog post):
- Install the server on Windows Server 2012 R2 (Discussed in https://www.catapultsystems.com/cfuller/archive/2013/06/25/installing-the-windows-server-2012-r2-preview-release.aspx)
- Extracted the for Operations Manager 2012 R2 preview release which had been download from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/dn205295?WT.mc_id=OO_Technet_Home_General_EN_US
- Installing the server as a domain controller
- Installation of pre-requisites
- Installation of System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 Preview release
- Investigating changes in the System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 Preview release version of the Operations Manager console
Installing the server as a domain controller
The process was not noticeably different than promoting a domain controller in Windows Server 2012.
I rebooted after the domain controller promotion process had completed.
Pre-requisites for Operations Manager 2012 R2 all-in-one environment:
Report viewer controls:
I downloaded and installed report viewer per the link in the Operations Manager prerequisite checker.
IIS requirements: I added roles requested by the OpsMgr 2012 R2 setup:
Windows Identify Foundation
I added Windows Identify Foundation as a warning was raised indicating that this was required for System center Advisor during the Operations Manager prerequisite checker..
Installed the WIF feature:
Installation of SQL Server 2012:
This was a standard SQL server 2012 installation, with no notable configuration changes required for Windows Server 2012 R2.
Operations Manager 2012 R2 Preview release installation:
There were a few minor changes during the Operations Manager 2012 R2 prerelease installation steps.
(Note the checkbox to download the latest updates to the setup program – does this remind anyone else of the configuration manager installer?)
Since we’re installing this as an all-in-one, all features were chosen. For the remainder of the setup process defaults were chosen.
For my lab environment, I ended up running it on four processors and four gigabytes of memory to have a successful install unlike the warning condition shown below.
Addition of the advisor management pack during the installation is shown below:
On my first attempt installation failed on the data warehouse configuration step.
After the failure I rebooted and re-tried the installation after moving the VM’s configuration up to four processors and four gigabytes of memory resulted in a successful installation.
What are the changes in the Operations Manager 2012 R2?
Based upon Microsoft’s statement at: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/system-center-2012-r2.aspx, this section appears to map to the System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager enhancements:
“System Center 2012 R2 provides deep insight into your applications and workloads, enabling you to deliver a predictable application SLA to your business. It provides application performance monitoring for Java applications, including line-of-code traceability. In addition, the System Center Advisor connector allows you to consume workload configuration best practices in your familiar Operations Manager console.”
We expect that there are changes to the Java monitoring capabilities as well as the System Center Advisor connector. Some of these were apparent after installation of the 2012 R2 preview release.
During my touring of the new Operations Manager 2012 R2 preview release what did I find which was different when compared with Operations Manager 2012 SP1?
Updated launch screen:
New version screen showing the 2012 R2 update:
Monitoring pane changes:
New Advisor views:
And the Windows client management pack is added by default:
Administration pane:
New Advisor settings in the Administration pane:
And new version number for the Operations Manager management server:
Authoring pane:
And in the Authoring pane there is a pre-built “Application Health SLA” defined within Service Level Tracking:
Summary: The System Center 2012 R2 preview release installed on Windows Server 2012 R2 preview release in an all-in-one configuration with no notable issues and several changes in this version are easy to identify in the Operations Manager console.
Bonus screenshot!
Check out this good screenshot taken of the “Windows Reboot Fish” during a reboot of my Windows Server 2012 R2 preview release 🙂
