Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Discovery and the Dell Windows Server MP for SCOM

Yesterday, I imported the Dell Server MP for SCOM (v4.1).  My best practice is to first test the MP in a development environment.  Once I have some run time on the MP and feel comfortable importing the MP into production, I create an override to disable the MP’s object discovery and I store the override in an overrides MP specific to the parent MP (ex. “Dell Windows Server (Scalable Edition)_OVERRIDES”).  This ensures that when I import the Dell MP and the overrides MP into our production environment discovery will not automatically be run on all of our production Windows servers.  This method allows me to more casually deploy the MP into our production environment, by creating additional overrides targets at a group of Windows servers or specific Windows servers.  Much safer than the spray and pray approach. 

If you want to do the same, you need to create an override to disable the object discovery named “Dell Server Discovery”.  This object discovery is targeted at Windows Computer.  Make sure you import the Dell MP and the MP containing your overrides into your production environment at the same time.  Ifyou don’t, you may not get the override created quickly enough to prevent the discovery from running on all of your Windows servers.

Example:
image

Once I am confident the Dell MP is not generating numerous false positives, script errors, etc., I will remove the override above to enable the discovery to run against all of our Windows servers.

I’ll follow-up at a later date with my impressions of the Dell MP (v4.1).