Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007

Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM) is an enterprise class operations management system that provides event management, proactive monitoring and alerting, reporting and trend analysis, system and application specific knowledge, and configurable task responses to proactively respond to negative trends and alerts. Management Packs are pre-configured collections of these capabilities focused on managing a specific application or hardware type, which can be easily exported and imported into other SCOM environments.

The Double-Take Management Pack was created to help you monitor Double-Take operations and provides the following features.

Installing the Double-Take Management Pack

Microsoft Management Pack for Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 is required for the Double-Take Management Pack. To improve the operation of the Double-Take Management Pack, you should have the OpsMgr 2007 MOM 2005 Backward Compatibility MP Update installed. This Management Pack can be found on the Microsoft download site at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=655cdd06-861e-4342-99b2-8a81e09f6546&DisplayLang=en.

The Management Pack is distributed as an .xml file that is imported via the SCOM console.

Locate the Double-Take Management Pack using one of the following methods.
- Start the Double-Take installation, and when the Autorun appears, select the Get the SCOM Management Pack link. Copy the .xml file to your SCOM machine.
- On the Double-Take installation DVD, browse to the SCMgmt\SCOM directory and copy the .xml file to your SCOM machine.
- Download the Management Pack from the Vision Solutions support web site to your SCOM machine.
From the SCOM console, click Administration or select Go, Administration.
Right-click on the Management Packs line item in the left pane and select Import Management Pack.
Navigate to the location of the Doubletake.xml file, and follow the steps in the Management Pack Import Wizard.

See the Microsoft SCOM documentation for complete installation details.

Customizing the Management Pack

After the installation, you will have the following Double-Take Management Pack assets.

Double-Take Product Version Attribute—This attribute checks the Double-Take product version and is used by the Double-Take Servers computer group.
Double-Take Servers Group and Installation Type—This asset uses a formula and regular expression match on the Double-Take Product Version attribute to determine which servers have Double-Take installed.
Double-Take Rules—Rules can be found under the Management Pack Objects section, and contains all of the rules that comprise the Management Pack. Performance Rules, Alert Rules and Event Rules are grouped together under the Rules category. (To see only Double-Take rules, change the scope of the Rules group and filter by Double-Take Servers Installation.)
Double-Take views—Various views are available as previously described in Double-TakeSpecific Views.

Except for vendor produced product knowledge, all aspects of the Management Pack can be modified by the SCOM administrator. Use the following notes as suggestions for customization, and see your SCOM documentation for complete instructions.

Threshold configuration—Because each server environment is different, the thresholds at which alerts should be generated will be different. To enable one of the pre-existing (but disabled) performance rules, right-click a performance rule and select Properties. On the General tab, enable Performance Rule. If you want to customize the threshold trigger, modify the threshold value on the Overrides tab.
Multi-tier alerting—Although only one performance rule is provided for each performance counter, by copying that rule and changing the alert severity and threshold values, multi-tiered alerting is possible. For example, it is possible to generate a warning alert when 1024 MB memory is used for queuing and generate an error when 512 MB is consumed. Threshold values can be modified on the Overrides tab. Alert severities can be modified on the Configuration tab, by highlighting the GenerateAlert entry and editing the XML data behind the rule. For more details, see your SCOM documentation.
Enable additional event rules—By default, only a pre-selected group of events will generate alerts. If additional alerts are desired, enable additional Event Rules and verify the alert severity.
Notifications—For each Double-Take Alert Rule, a notification response is pre-selected and will send the applicable message to the defined Recipients and notification Subscriptions. Notification and Subscription options in SCOM do not allow for pre-defined Double-Take notification groups. Therefore, it is required that the SCOM administrator create custom notification Recipients and Subscriptions. (Notification Groups previously used in MOM 2005 can be re-created in SCOM using the Subscriptions feature. For more information on Recipients and Subscriptions, refer to Operations Manager Help using the keyword Notifications.)