System Center 2012 SP1 Service Manager – PLA Addendum
<Partner Name> Datacenter Infrastructure and Management
Published: 5/3/2013
Abstract
The <Partner Name> Datacenter Infrastructure and Management IaaS PLA provides a reference architecture that combines Microsoft software, consolidated guidance, and validated configurations with partner technology such as compute, network, and storage architectures, in addition to value-added software components for private cloud deployments. This addendum extends that guidance on how to design and configure System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) - Service Manager.
Contents
Abstract
Introduction
Service Manager Addendum Overview
Service Manager 2012 Components
Management Server
Service Manager Console
Service Manager Databases
Service Manager Database (CMDB)
Data Warehouse Databases
SQL Server Editions
Portal
Connectors
Active Directory Connector
System Center Configuration Manager Connector
System Center Operations Manager Connector
System Center Orchestrator Connector
Exchange Connector
Security
User Roles
Run As Accounts
Service Manger Design Options for More Than 50,000 users
Introduction
The goal of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Product Line Architecture (PLA) is to help organizations develop and implement private cloud infrastructures quickly while reducing both complexity and risk. Increasingly, organizations are looking to cloud solutions and hybrid scenarios which combine private and public cloud solutions. The IaaS PLA provides a reference architecture that combines Microsoft software, consolidated guidance, and validated configurations with partner technology such as compute, network, and storage architectures, in addition to value-added software components for private cloud deployments. This addendum extends that guidance on how to design and configure System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) - Service Manager.2012 Engagement
Project Vision/Scope Summary
The scope of this document is to provide the necessary guidance to develop solutions for a System Center 2012 SP1 - Service Manager infrastructure, in accordance with the IaaS PLA patterns that are identified for use with Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.
Rule Set Criteria
Rule set requirements are vendor-agnostic and are categorized as one of the following:
/ Mandatory: / > Mandatory best practice; vendor-agnostic solution. These requirements are necessary for alignment with the PLA./ Recommended: / > Recommended best practice. These requirements describe industry-standard best practices that are strongly recommended. However, implementation of these requirements is at the discretion of each customer. These requirements are not required for alignment with the PLA.
/ Optional: / > Optional best practice. These requirements are voluntary considerations that can be implemented in the solution at the discretion of each partner.
Service Manager Addendum Overview
This document is focused on scenarios and best practices when designing a System Center 2012 SP1 - Service Manager Infrastructure. The document will contain series of recommendations and best practices to ensure an installation that will perform and function as it was intended.
Service Manager 2012 Components
Management Server
Contains the main software part of a Service Manager installation. You can use the Service Manager Management Server to manage incidents, changes, users, and tasks. The section below lists the best practices for the Management Server design:
/ Mandatory: / If designing a solution to support 20.000+ users, consider to implement a dedicated workflow server. This will always be the first server in the management group by default. For more info see here:/ Mandatory: / Operations Manager and Service Manager cannot share the same management group name. Because it is not possible to rename a management group, you will either have to completely reinstall Service Manager or Operations Manager with a different management group name or choose not to monitor your Service Manager installation with Operations Manager.
/ Recommended: / Depending on the number of concurrent SCSM consoles, your design shouldconsider adding secondary Management servers and place these in a load balancer. For more info see here:
Service Manager Console
The user interface component that is used by both administrator and the service desk analyst to perform Service Manager Functions such as administering system, manage work and configuration items. This component is automatically installed when you deploy a Service Manager Management Server. Additionally, you can manually install the Service Manager console as a stand-alone component on a computer.
This section lists the best practices on using and designing views in the Service Manager console.
/ Mandatory: / > Never maximize the SCSM Console as it slows the usability due to a WPF bug. Minimize the console and extend as needed, just don’t use the maximize button./ Recommended: / > When designing views for the analysts, following these guidelines:
- Minimize Quantity of Views, Delete views not needed and use user roles to scope visibility of views.
- Consider using the Global Operators group when assigning tickets as this will limit the number of users to load (drastic performance improvement)
- Combine classes to bring back information that includes relationships, use the smallest projection possible. See more info here:
- Do not use the (Advanced) class in views. Use a type projection.
Service Manager Databases
Service Manager supports a wide range of SQL collations based on the required console language (See: The section below lists the best practices when deciding on the SQL collations to be used:
/ Recommended: / > It is recommended to use the same collation for the CMDB and the Data Warehouse and Analysis SQL servers. Mixing collations within the environment is generally not a good idea. The Product Group do not test combinations of collations and some problems are known to arise from mixing collations.Service Manager Database (CMDB)
The Configuration Management Database is the centralized, model based repository for all service-management information managed by Service Manager Server. The database contains three types of information:
- Configuration items (CI) such as Knowledge articles and from the IT Enterprise retrieved through product connectors
- Work items (WI), such as incidents; change requests
- Configuration for the product itself.
This is the Service Manager implementation of a Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
During the deployment, the following database are created:
Service Manager Parts / DB Name / ContentsService Manager database / ServiceManager / Configuration Items, Work Items
The section below lists the best practices on designing the Service Manager database and SQL server hosting the database:
/ Mandatory: / The Service Manager database is very IO intensive and there are some guidelines to follow:- Place the Log, TempDB and the Service Manager database on separate high performance LUNs, to optimize IO
- Configure the SQL Service to use 1-2 GB less than the total RAM in the server.
/ Recommended: / > If the environment is considered critical for the customer and requires 24*7 operations, the SQL server hosting the Service Manager Database should be located on a SQL Cluster. With the release of SP1, SQL 2012 AlwaysOn is supported and recommended.
/ Recommended: / > For information on how to size the databases, download and use the SM_Sizer tool, which can be found here: .
/ Recommended: / The TempDB performance is critical to Service Manager performance and some guidelines to follow:
- Use High performance LUN
- Use Multiple TempDBs (1 per 2 cores), not necessary for the other DBs
/ Optional: / > Retention of Work Items, in the CMDB, is default 90 days for Incidents and 365 for the others (Change, Release, Service and Problem). These settings could be decreased, while still complying with the customer requirements. By decreasing the retention, the CMDB is kept to a minimum. Remember the data is not deleted, just moved to the Data Warehouse.
Data Warehouse Databases
The Data Warehouse acts as the long-term repository for the service management information collected by Service Manager, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager.
Reports can be generated using SQL reporting functionality or using Excel, Excel services or SharePoint dashboard functionality.
This allows you to view reports that show service management effectiveness and identify opportunities for improvement. You can view the reports provided in Service Manager (such as the incident and change management reports), or you can create your own reports.
During the deployment the following databases are created with their names:
Service Manager Parts / DB Name / ContentsService Manager data warehouse / DWStagingAndConfig
DWRepository
DWDataMart / These databases comprise the data warehouse. The extract process populates the DWStagingAndConfig database, which is transformed into a proper format in the DWRepository database, which, through the load process, becomes the content for the DWDataMart database.
Service Manager data warehouse OLAP cubes / DWASDataBase
OMDWDataMart
CMDWDataMart / The DWASDatabase is used by SQL Server Analysis Services and stores Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes.
The OMDWDataMart and CMDWDataMart databases are for collecting data from Operations Manager and Configuration Manager respectively.
The section below lists the best practices on designing the Service Manager Data Warehouse and SQL server hosting the databases:
/ Recommended: / > For information on how to size the databases, download and use the SM_Sizer tool, which can be found here: .Additional guidance is provided at
/ Optional: / > It is recommended to verify with the customer what cubes will be required after the Data Warehouse and Analysis Cubes are installed, as unused cubes should be disabled to avoid unnecessary performance loss when the cubes are recalculated.
E.g. if the customer isn’t interested in pulling analysis based reports on e.g. configuration items, it’s recommended to disable the cube related to this, to avoid unnecessary performance loss.
/ Optional: / > The SQL Server Analysis Server instance should ideally be placed on a separate SQL instance from the Data Warehouse databases. This will ensure that cube processing does not affect the extract, transform, and load jobs or the execution of reports
/ Optional: / > By default the cubes are processed once nightly at 3 AM. If necessary, you can change this schedule so that it runs during a period of time which is not as impactful to users of the cubes.
SQL Server Editions
SQL Server is available in both Standard and Enterprise editions. Service Manager will function with both editions; however there are additional features available in SQL Server Enterprise that can enhance your experience with the Service Manager Data Warehouse.
These differences are as follows and should carefully be considered when determining what version of SQL Server will be used for the deployment:
Item / Standard Edition / Enterprise EditionAnalysis Services Files / The Analysis Services database files will be placed in the default location. / You can decide where Analysis Services database files will be placed.
Cube Processing / The entire cube is processed each night and therefore, the amount of processing time required will increase as more data is accumulated. Cubes can still be queried when being processed however, reporting performance will be reduced. / Tubes are processed incrementally each night and therefore, the amount of processing time required will be reduced.
Measure Group Partitions / Measure groups are partitioned into a single partition thereby increasing the time it takes to process the partition. / Measure groups are partitioned on a monthly basis thereby decreasing the time it takes to process the partition.
PowerPivot / You can’t use Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint. / You can use Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint.
Table 12: SQL Server Editions
Portal
The portal is used for end-user self-service and activity management. The portal which is based SharePoint Server is where the end-users can view the published Service catalog, create service and incident requests, search for knowledge articles and view, update and approve review activities.
By introducing the portal to the end-users, it will reduce the amount of calls to the Service Desk which will make them available for other tasks such as incident and service request management.
This section lists the best practices on designing the Service Manager Portal.
/ Mandatory: / The Self-Service Portal from Service Manager 2012 is currently only supported on SharePoint 2010, which is not supported to run on Windows Server 2012. This is the only component in the Service Manager 2012 SP1 infrastructure that cannot run on Windows Server 2012./ Mandatory: / In order to use Microsoft SQL Server 2012 for the portal, you need to install SharePoint Foundation 2010 SP1 or a later. Configuration of SharePoint should occur after the installation of SP1 or the use of SQL Server 2012 will generate errors.
/ Mandatory: / When the Web Content Server and SharePoint are installed, make sure to verify that Application Pool Recycling is disabled for both. Default is nightly recycling which causes slow initial performance for the first users accessing the portal.
Note: Make sure not to set recycling to high memory usage
/ Recommended: / > When designing the environment and supporting >20.000 users, you should consider adding more Web Content servers are place these in a NLB. See more details here:
/ Recommended: / > When designing the request offerings, aim to limit the custom icons as these might imply longer portal load time.
/ Recommended: / > Use the SCSM User roles to scope the Service and Request Offerings available to the users. The more service offerings and request offerings, the longer the load of the portal.
/ Recommended: / > In Service request offerings, do not increase the size of the query results as this will affect performance and can take >30 seconds to complete.
Instead, use pre-search filters to allow searching of hundreds of thousands of CIs in seconds. For more info see here:
Connectors
Connectors allow Service Manager to communicate with other products and technologies, such as Active Directory and other System Center products. Connectors allow Service Manager to create and maintain the Configuration Management Database. The following connectors are included:
- Active Directory Connector
- Configuration Manager Connector
- Operations Manager Connector
- Virtual Machine Manager Connector
- Orchestrator Connector
- Exchange Connector (Supported with the release of SP1 – Update release R2)
Active Directory Connector
The Active Directory connector is used to synchronize data from Active Directory into the Service Manager CMDB. Service Manager can synchronize the following AD objects:
- Users
- Computers
- Printers
- Groups
This section lists the best practices on designing the Active Directory connector.
/ Mandatory: / For the Active Directory Connector, start by deciding which objects that needs to be part of the CMDB and setup one or more connectors that only imports the relevant data. On numerous occasions, an unmanaged AD can contain thousands of stale objects that aren’t needed in the CMDB./ Mandatory: / Due to a bug in the AD Connector, for the User to Manager relationship to be established in the CMDB, both objects needs to be imported by the same connector.
/ Mandatory: / Unless needed for a purpose, always select the option ‘Do not write null values for properties not set in Active Directory’. Using this setting ensures the connectors do not update the same attributes, despite being null.
/ Recommended: / > When designing the AD Connector, consider to use LDAP filters to only import relevant types of objects. For more information on LDAP filters see here:
/ Recommended: / > If your design also includes the SCCM connector, where all clients and/or servers are inventoried, consider not to import computers via the AD Connector to minimize the relationships to maintain in the CMDB.
/ Recommended: / > If your design includes several AD connectors that imports large amount of changes on a daily basis, you should consider changing the schedule so they don’t all run at the same time. For more information see here:
/ Recommended: / > When designing the AD Connector, consider to use LDAP filters to only import relevant types of objects. For more information on LDAP filters see here:
System Center Configuration Manager Connector
The System Center Configuration Manager connector is used to synchronize data from the Configuration Manager database into the Service Manager CMDB. Service Manager synchronizes hardware and software Inventory as well as Asset Intelligence inventory attributes.
In addition, Service Manager provides a workflow for creating incidents when managed machines are reported as non-compliant by using the Desired Configuration Management (DCM) feature in Configuration Manager
This section lists the best practices on designing the Configuration Manager connector.
/ Mandatory: / Unless using the DCM in your customers organization and really want to have DCM alerts created as incidents, you should disable the DCM rule in SCSM. For more information see here: blogs.technet.com/b/mihai/archive/2012/11/30/configuration-manager-connector-s-dcm-rule-can-cause-massive-performance-issues-in-service-manager.aspx/ Mandatory: / Unless needed for a purpose, always select the option ‘Do not write null values for properties not set in Configuration Manager. Using this setting ensures the connectors don’t update the same attributes, despite being null.
/ Recommended: / > Always consider which collections in SCCM to import, as importing ‘All Systems’ might import data from systems that aren’t relevant.
System Center Operations Manager Connector