Management Pack Released - Maintenance Mode

Last week on https://www.opsmanjam.com my Maintenance Mode management pack was published. However, shortly after releasing it I discovered a couple of bugs, one of which prevents maintenance mode from starting against your targetted set of systems (pretty bad bug) intermitently. I have addressed those bugs, refined the PowerShell script used, and even added a couple of features, most notably the ability to schedule maintenance mode for a Windows Cluster. I just submitted that updated version of the MP to the team and also requested the 'buggy' version be removed from the site in the meantime.

Here is a summary of what the new version offers:

This management pack provides an automated method to schedule maintenance mode for a given set of Windows computers that are in a pre-defined set of groups and the associated rules to target against those groups. In addition, this version supports scheduling maintenance mode for Windows Cluster services. It serves as an example and foundation to build from in order to develop your own custom schedule to automate within Operations Manager 2007 R2 accordingly.

Hopefully this week that new version will be released to web. I am now starting to work on another management pack for managing agent failover as an alertnative for those customers who do not wish to implement Active Directory integration. This will also be PowerShell driven and hopefully be flexible enough to meet your implementation scenarios. If you would like to send me your ideas or suggestions, please feel free to e-mail me at - mgoedtel@microsoft.com.