SCOM 2007 R2 Installation

In this article i am going to cover the installation of SCOM 2007 R2. For the installation i am installing it on Windows Server 2003 R2. I have already gone ahead and installed SQL 2005 SP3 onto the server since I am installing everything onto one server. In a real deployment scenario if you monitoring more than 10 servers it is highly advisable to have the SCOM Database sitting on a separate server to improve performance.

OK so first step is to pick which type of installation you require.

This screen gives you the option to install different components that you require:

Operations Manager 2007 R2 – Select this option if you need to install a management server
Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent – The agent is the component which sits on the monitored devices in your infrastructure. Alternatively this can be deployed via the SCOM Console
Operating Manager 2007 Reporting – The reporting server component is the component which gives you the ability to run reports about your environment. You can create your own reports or use existing built in reports.
Audit Collection Server – The Audit collection server is the component which can collect information from the event logs onto a separate server. You can for example collect all the security event logs from a domain controller for a specified amount of time
Gateway server – A gateway server allows you to monitor devices that do not sit in your active directory environment or any domains or forest that you not have a trust with.

For this installation I am going to install a management server which will be the first one in the environment. The first thing you need to do is to see if you have the correct prerequisites installed onto your server. If you have all the roles installed these are below. Obviously if you select individual components these requirements change.

Windows Server 2003 SP1

MS SQL Server
MS SQL Server Reporting Services
Firewall configured or turned off
ASP.NET 2.0
AS.NET Ajax Extensions 1.0
WS-Management v1.1
MDAC v2.80.1022.0
.Net Framework v2.0
.Net Framework v3.0 components
Windows Powershell

If you click on the more button it will show you information on what needs installing and where to download and install it from, very helpful!!

When you have installed everything press the check button and this should check all the components again and if you have been successful in installing everything you should get a nice big green tick Smile

OK now we can proceed with the installation

On the next screen we can select which individual components we need to install. For example if you were just installing the databases on a SQL Server you should run this and have only this selected and the same for management server and web console. For this installation I am having everything installed on the same server.

Next we need to select the Management group name. Be very careful with this name because once you have selected and used it you CANNOT rename it. If you do need to rename it then it will be a complete re-install of SCOM with i am sure you do NOT want to do!! Here you can also select a group of SCOM administrators if required.

Now we select the SQL Instance to use for the management server. As i mentioned earlier if you are monitoring less than 10 servers in your environment then you can stick SQL on the same server as long as it has enough resources. SCOM writes lots of data to SQL so be careful and make sure that you have a server that is capable of doing the job.

Next select a name for the SQL Database, database size and also data and log file location. If possible place the data and log location on separate spindles for best performance. The drive that the database goes on will need LOTS of free space. The minimum requirement is 50GB but that will fill up quickly depending on your environment.

Next up is to select the Management Server Action Account. This is the account which is going to be performing actions on the monitored servers. Examples of the type of activities will include:

Monitoring and collecting Windows event log data

Monitoring and collecting Windows performance counter data

Monitoring and collecting Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) data

Running actions such as scripts or batches

This account does not need to be a local administrator but it is the account which is used by the discovery process by default to install SCOM agents. You can either make it a local admin on the servers or alternatively specify a separate account which has privileges when running the discovery and agent install process.

Next step is to configure the SDK and Config Service account. This account is used by the System Center Data Access service and System Center Management Configuration service to update and read information in the Operations Manager Database.

The best option for the next screen is to select Windows Authentication. Using this method those with authorised access will not need to re-enter their credentials.