Recently I had time to install System Center 2012 R2.
As a reference, I have upgraded my physical Hyper-V host to Windows Server 2012 R2. I have re-created my lab environment, using the Distributed Deployment model. My main reason for doing this, is to provide some more advanced articles/posts on SCOM.
Here is a screenshot of my Hyper-V Virtual Machines. All Virtual Machines are running Windows Server 2012 R2. You will also notice that in addition to Active Directory (which is also running my Lab’s DHCP server, and Remote Access for Internet access) I have a 2 node SQL cluster, a single Management Server, a single Reporting Server, a 2 node Web Server cluster, a dedicated Audit Collection Services Management Server, etc.
I will not detail the installation step-by-step since it is similar to the SCOM 2012 SP1 installation. However, I wanted to share this interesting change in the install process.
Although in past versions of the product (though I can’t recall which one) you were prompted to choose either installing an Evaluation version or a licensed version, with SCOM 2012 R2, you are not prompted.
Instead, once the installation is complete on the first Management Server, you will notice (during the actual install progress, which can be a little alarming until the install is done, in which it tells you), a Warning for the Management Server.
If you launch the SCOM console and go to Help > About, you will see the “(Eval)” with the Product Version.
Interesting for sure. But when you look at the details provided, you will notice that the installation defaults to an Evaluation version of the product, and to switch to a licensed version you will need to use the PowerShell command-let “Set-SCOMLicense”. So let’s take a quick look at the cmdlet. I won’t go through the actual activation, because I tend to run Evaluation-only copies of software in my Lab, since I’m always re-building.
This is as far as I have gotten, and will be working on getting the Web Servers and the ACS up and running. Stay tuned.
MiCloud 