Tivoli Monitoring, WMI and Server Buffers Full

If you run Tivoli Monitoring 6.2 to monitor Windows Server systems and use other applications to query WMI, e.g. PowerShell and Get-WmiObject, then you may receive the error ‘Server buffers are full and data cannot be accepted’.

Restarting the WMI service will temporaily clear it, but the issue is liable to come back again. This can occur because of a file handle leak in the ITM Windows OS agent when collecting “Processor Information” attribute group.

There is a fix for this issue available from the below website.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=2292&context=SSRM2J&dc=DB550&uid=swg1IZ51505&loc=en_US&cs=UTF-8&lang=en&rss=ct2292tivoli

PowerShell ISE on Windows Server 2008 – what version of .NET is required?

After installing the Windows Management Framework, a.k.a PowerShell 2.0, on my test Windows 2008 64 bit Server I fired up the new PowerShell ISE tool and was prompted with this error:

I already knew that PowerShell ISE had a higher dependency on .NET than PowerShell itself which only requires .NET 2.0, however I was curious about the statement in the above message which states:

“If you are running Windows Server 2008, you must use Server Manager to install or configure “.NET Framework 3.5.1″

I knew on my test Windows Server 2008 box that in Server Manager I only had the option to install .NET Framework 3.0, not 3.5.1.

Anyway, I duly installed .NET 3.0 through Server Manager to see what the effect would be on PowerShell ISE.

After the successful installation of .NET 3.0 I fired up the very useful tool ASoft .NET Version Detector 2007 to confirm what versions of of .NET where installed on the machine. (I had already checked in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET , but ran this tool just to make doubly sure I wasn’t missing something.)

So I had .NET 2.0 SP2 and 3.0, but not 3.5.1. I fired up PowerShell ISE and low and behold it opened.

So my question is does PowerShell ISE require .NET 3.5.1 or only .NET 3.0? Answers on a postcard or comments on the blog please!

Update:

Thanks to Aleksandar who pointed out that the answer is in PowerShell help itself and that only .NET 3.0 is required.

Get-Help about_Windows_PowerShell_ISE

So it would appear that the error message in Windows Server 2008 at the top of this post is slightly misleading………

Extending the System Disk in Windows Server 2008

As a system administrator it is often not the latest and greatest big new features of a new operating system which you end up finding the most useful, sometimes its the small improvements which really make your life easier. I’ve been spending a lot more time with Windows Server 2008 recently (OK, I know R2 is out, but it takes time for large organisations to move away from older OS’s and applications.)

Obviously there are great new headline features with things like Server Core and Read-Only Domain Controllers, but I have found a new feature I love which is the abilty to extend a system disk without having to go through some kind of convoluted process. It is particularly easy if it is a VM and you have enough space on the existing datastore to extend the VM’s disk without requesting more storage from your SAN team.

In VSphere 4.0 it even lets me extend the size of the vmdk with the server powered on, I don’t remember that being possible in 3.5, but I might be wrong. The big advantage for this for me is the fact that you do not need downtime to carry out this whole process, either extending the vmdk or the system volume!

Update: I just read in Mastering vSphere by Scott Lowe that the above is a new feature in vSphere 4.0 and the VM is required to be hardware version 7.

Take the following steps to carry it out:

1) Edit the settings of the 2008 VM and increase the size of the disk.

2) Within the Disk Management MMC, kick off a ‘Rescan Disks’

3) You will now see the additional space available at the end of the current disk.

4) Right-click the C: drive and choose ‘Extend Volume’

5) Follow the wizard through to add the additonal space. On completion your system disk will now have the additional space added – all with no downtime!

For completeness there are a number of ways you could do this in Window Server 2003, the way I have typically used is the following. (Make sure you have a good backup of this VM before going ahead)

1) Power down the VM. Edit the settings of the VM to grow the VMDK. Do not power on the VM!

2) Find another Windows Server 2003 VM which is Powered On and has access to the same datastores. Edit the settings of the VM, add an additional hard disk, select the option to use an existing virtual disk, browse to the initial VM’s vmdk and select it.

3) In Disk Management Rescan the disks and you will see an additional drive with unallocated space available other than your current drives.

4) Use the command line utility diskpart to extend this drive.

• Enter diskpart to start
• List Volume will show available volumes on the machine
• Check the additional volume has not been listed as a System partition
• Select that volume with Select Volume volumenumber
• Enter Extend to increase the size of the drive with all available space
• List Volume will let you check it was successful
• Exit to finish

Go back into Disk Management and you should be able to see a larger drive.

5) Edit the settings of the VM and remove the additional disk – make sure you do not select the option to delete the files from disk!

6) Power the initial VM back on. After logging back in the first time you will most likely be prompted to restart the server. Once logged back in, check Disk Management to see the larger system disk.