I just noticed this today that Vmware Workstation 6.5 was released on Tuesday this week. 

My Vista Media Center is running 24 x 7 recording HD and SD TV shows.  The core 2 duo procs sit at pretty low utilization so earlier this year I installed Vmware Workstation as well as put an extra 2 gigs of RAM and a second SATA drive in the desktop.  This makes for a great SCOM test environment without slowing down my laptop or having a dedicated server.

Some of the more notable new feature in Workstation 6.5 are

Unity mode — Integrate your favorite guest applications with your host. Open the application window, enter Unity mode, and the Workstation window is automatically minimized. The guest application windows look just like host application windows, but with color-coded borders.

More powerful record/replay of VM execution activity — Easily enable this powerful debugging tool, which records full system behavior, including all CPU and device activity. You can now insert markers while creating or playing back a recording and quickly navigate to these markers during replay. You can also browse a recording to replay from any spot.

Folder sharing and dragging, dropping, copying, and pasting text and files — Transferring files between virtual machines or between host and guests using these features is up to 25 percent faster.

Networking performance using NAT — You will see significant improvements in networking performance if a virtual machine is configured to use NAT. Performance is ten times better than in the previous release in some cases.

I/O performance — A new asynchronous I/O manager boosts performance on Windows hosts under heavy I/O loads.

http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/

The new management pack has a bunch of new rules and most importantly doesn’t cause the WMI errors like previous versions.

Download: My Custom Dell MP without SNMP

After importing the new Management Pack I immediately started getting errors on my Root Management Server and Management Server.  Not the good kind of errors you would expect, (like errors telling you there is a hardware issue).  The kind of errors that tell you that your SCOM infrastructure is now hosed!

Here were some the errors I received
*****************************************************************************************************************************
Data Warehouse failed to enumerate database components to be deployed. Failed to enumerate Data Warehouse components for deployment. The operation will be retried.
Exception ‘SqlException’: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
One or more workflows were affected by this.
Workflow name: Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataWarehouse.Deployment.Component
*****************************************************************************************************************************
Data Warehouse managed object type synchronization process failed to write data to the Data Warehouse database. Failed to store data in the Data Warehouse. The operation will be retried.
Exception ‘SqlException’: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
One or more workflows were affected by this.
Workflow name: Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataWarehouse.Synchronization.TypedManagedEntity
*****************************************************************************************************************************
Event ID: 31569

Description:
Report deployment process failed to request management pack list from Data Warehouse. The operation will be retried.
Exception ‘SqlException’: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

Workflow name: Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataWarehouse.Deployment.Report

****************************************************************************************************************************
Health Service Unloaded System Rule(s)
Alert raised by monitor when system rules have been unloaded by the Health Service.
Event ID:      4000
A monitoring host is unresponsive or has crashed.  The status code for the host failure was 2164195371.
*****************************************************************************************************************************

After doing some digging I found there was a fix for the Data Warehouse errors.  Installing KB954643 immediately fixed the Data Warehouse errors.

The only thing left was the Event ID 4000 – A monitoring host is unresponsive or has crashed.  The status code for the host failure was 2164195371.  So how do we fix these errors?  I found KB951526.  Problem was I already installed this fix and was still having the issues.

So now how do we fix the problem?  The old management pack didn’t cause these issues so why is the new one? 
So I decided to export both the old and new management pack using Borris’s powershell script to see what changed is this new version of the Dell MP.

After evaluating the two management packs in the Authoring Console it was apparent that the new management pack contains tons of new SNMP monitors that I don’t need.  Also my experience after talking to people in the community is that the SNMP provider is not very scalable or robust.   So I set all of SNMP related discoveries to disabled and removed all rules related to SNMP.  After doing that and re-importing the management pack the 4000 errors are gone and everything seems to be working much better.  I have posted my customized management pack at the beginning of this post.

Microsoft began a major virtualisation push late yesterday, with the introduction of new virtualisation tools and by making its core hypervisor product free of charge. The new Hyper-V Server 2008 would be available via the web at no charge, Microsoft said in a statement. The download, which will go live in 30 days, supports virtual machines running Windows or Linux. The software comprises Hyper-V itself, plus a cut-down Server Core installation of Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008, and as such is a stand-alone version of the virtualisation solution.

Microsoft had previously said it would charge US$28 for the standalone Hyper-V product. As expected, Microsoft announced its new System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SVCMM) 2008, which will also be released within 30 days.

The software allows companies to centrally manage their virtual infrastructure, whether their virtual networks run on Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Server 2008 Hyper-V or Virtual Server 2005 R2; or on VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. Also yesterday, Microsoft said it had demonstrated that for the first time it could run live migration in a virtualised environment.

Full story: ZDNet News