ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES for Change Manager

 
  

1.0             Change Manager: Provides a single point of contact and is responsible for coordinating all change functions within that organisation

1.       Receive, log and allocate a priority, in collaboration with the initiator, to all RFCs Reject any RFCs that are totally impractical

2.       Reviews all changes after the assessment and planning phase and forwards them the right Change Approver.

3.      Organizes Change Advisory Board meeting if necessary.

4.      Updates the change after approval is given.

5.      Periodically reviews changes in a Post Implementation Review and determines and executes follow-up actions.

6.      Coordinates all activities in case the Emergency Change Handling process is triggered.

7.      Circulate all RFCs to CAB members in advance of meetings to allow prior consideration

8.      Decide which people will come to which meetings, who get specific RFCs depending on the nature of the RFC, what is to be changed, and people's areas of expertise

9.      Convene urgent CAB or CAB/EC meetings for all urgent RFCs

10.   Represent organisation at all CAB and CAB/EC meetings

11.    After consideration of the advice given by the CAB or CAB/EC, authorize acceptable Changes

12.    Performs Stakeholder Management activities to identify Stakeholder concerns and issues with solutions being developed.

13.   Monitors stakeholder acceptance/rejection of solutions being developed.

14.   Crafts and controls key communications and messages about the implementation effort.

15.   Identifies opportunities to win acceptance of solutions being developed by those who are impacted.

16.   Identifies channels for communications and builds the overall communications plan.

17.   Develops a Resistance Management Plan to provide strategies for dealing with rejection or resistance to solutions being developed.

18.   Ensures appropriate levels of the organization are involved and demonstrating active commitment and leadership to the solutions being developed.

19.   Coaching senior management and other key personnel to help them “walk the talk” and demonstrate commitment to the ITSM solution.

20.  Identify the Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC) for changes

21.    Coordinate with all necessary parties to perform Change building, testing and implementation, in accordance with schedules

22.   Update the Change log with all progress that occurs, including any actions to correct problems and/or to take opportunities to improve service quality

23.   Review all implemented Changes to ensure that they have met their objectives. Refer back any that have been backed out or have failed

24.  Review all outstanding ABC RFCs awaiting consideration or awaiting action

2              25. Analyses change records to determine any trends

26.  Close RFCs

27.   Produce regular and accurate management reports on changes

2.0        Change Management Process Flowchart For Reference

Considerations for moving or migrating ADRMS

Moving ADRMS is a challenging task which needs proper planning and understanding of the environment. You need to consider keeping back up of the environment i.e. ADRMS database has to be backed up before going for ADRMS upgrade or movement.

Hence first decide whether to upgrade the existing environment or migrate the set up

Upgrading involves the risk of upgrading the server from windows server 2008 to windows server 2008 R2 with the download package available from Microsoft.But migrating the set-up to new windows server 2008R2 would be more safe and feasible option which involves considerably more steps but it’s a reliable option.

Some of the points given on Microsoft TechNet article need to be considered carefully

•            If you are upgrading from any version of Rights Management Services (RMS) to AD RMS, do the following: Back up the RMS databases and store in a secure location.
•            If you are using centrally managed keys, you should have the password prior to beginning the upgrade.
•             AD RMS requires that the service account be a domain user account. If RMS has been using the local SYSTEM account for the service account, you will need to specify a domain user account during the upgrade to AD RMS.
•            If you used the offline enrolment option to provision RMS, ensure that the enrolment is complete before upgrading to AD RMS.
•           Flush the RMS Message Queuing queue to ensure that all messages are written to the RMS logging database.
•           If RMS was provisioned using a hardware security module (HSM), you must reinstall the HSM drivers after the upgrade to Windows Server 2008 is complete, but before you start the upgrade to AD RMS.
•           If you are using a port other than 80 to host your RMS cluster, the AD RMS Upgrade Wizard will bind two ports to this Web site during the upgrade. You must remove the incorrect binding and restart Internet Information Services before the AD RMS cluster can service requests.
•            Custom access control lists (ACLs) that are applied to the Administrator and Group Expansion virtual directories are not migrated during the upgrade. If you have a custom ACL on either of these directories, you must set it up manually after the upgrade.
•            After completing the upgrade to AD RMS, you may receive the following error message when opening the AD RMS console
•             A connection with the specified AD RMS cluster could not be established. Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions.
•            You must restart Internet Information Services (IIS) to correct this error.
•            If RMS is installed but not provisioned and you upgrade to Windows Server® 2008 R2 the upgrade link still appears in Server Manager. If you click this link and RMS was not provisioned, the upgrade fails.

Other things like exporting server licensor certificate and its key is also required to be saved and exported to new server, Update the CNAME records for new ADRMS cluster , check the ADRMS console and see if everything works fine.

licencing requirements for ADRMS?

Which type of licencing do we need for ADRMS?

Rights management service role in windows server gives you functionality to protect your files or emails with RMS templates and avoid unauthorised access of the documents. Many times I have been asked about the prerequisites for licencing as its vital thing while going for planning and budgeting for the same. We definitely need a licensed version of windows server to demonstrate the same feature in demo set up environment. In addition to it we also need something called ad CALs (Client Access Licenses) which are of two types for RMS server as well as for clients.

Hence you need following licence schemas

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Server License
• Windows Server 2008 Client Access Licenses (Windows Server CALs)
• Windows Rights Management Services 2008 Client Access Licenses (RMS CALs)

This means along windows server 2008, which provides you the ADRMS feature you additionally need server CALs for every machine serving as ADRMS servers and the entire user machines which use or create RMS templates to have client CALs.

There is another option called RMS 2008 External Connector (EC) which gives any organization an option to provide unlimited access to external users to ADRMS server hence no need of acquiring additional CALs for external users. The Windows Server 2008 EC license may be used as an alternative to Windows Server 2008 CALs.

For further information please go through the following links

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd772659%28v=ws.10%29.aspxhttp://microsoftplatform.blogspot.in/2012/07/windows-server-2012-licensing-faq-and.htmlhttp://mctexpert.blogspot.in/2010/08/do-you-need-extra-license-for-ad-rms.html 

Extending the Evaluation Period of Windows OS

Most of us working in IT Infrastructure management and service management industry would have worked upon evaluation versions of operating systems for test purposes most of them come  with expiry period of 60 days and after that they might behave differently ; like it may forcely boot or screen might go black etc.

In such situations we can go for extending the OS evaluation period for around 240 days wiht rearm command .But don’t use the rearm command until and unless your evaluation period is finished else it might waste the remaining evaluation period. Hence it is advisable to check the remaining evaluation period before we go for rearm command.

In order to check how much of evaluation period is remaining please perform following steps on your system (Here I was using Windows Server 2008 R2)

1.   1.   Go to START type CMD right click on CMD and select Run as administrator for elevated privileges 

h  2.   A prompt would appear shown as below click on yes

   3.  Now type slmgr.vbs  –dli (software licence manager command; -dli Display license information)in command prompt which would return message from windows script host something like this which tells how many days are left with evaluation period

   4.  If it shows very less time left with evaluation period then you can reset the evaluation period to additional 60 days as a grace period with rearm (rearm: Reset activation timer and initialization) command as follows

      You are done and good to go additionally if you want to check the grace period expiration details for that system you can type slmgr.vbs –xpr which will  provide you the expiry details of the grace period.

 

Troubleshooting ADRMS issues ...!!!!

This is an attempt to answer some of the basic questions someone would have administering the ADRMS set up 

1. How do I add cluster in ADRMS ?

        You can lunch the RMS server console the first screen it will open with would have add cluster option on the right hand side top corner which will take you to the process of adding RMS cluster server which is shown as below.

 

   2.  How do I change service account?

        Launch the RMS server console , select the RMS server where you need to change the service account Select the option from the top corner of the right hand hand side to change the service account (But you have to have a Enterprise admin account of that domain) , Options shown below in steps 

3. How do I change the path of the templates location?

   To change Templates store location , right click on rights policy template and click enable export and provide the path (the path provided folder should be shared with everyone so that policies could be written and accessed) which is shown as below

4. How do I change the Service Connection Point?

      To change Service connection point 

•       Right click on your RMS server 
•       Go to Properties 
•       Click SCP where you can change SCP location 
•       NOTE: To change SCP the enterprise admin account has to be used which was used to install the ADRMS server.

Hope this helps someone using ADRMS server and exploring its features.

   

 

 

Eucalyptus Private Cloud: an introduction

Eucalyptus provides software platform for on-premise (private) clouds which can be used as a Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), It’s an open source cloud product supporting private and hybrid cloud environments using existing available infrastructure providing capability to provide scalable, secure web services layer which utilizes compute, network and storage.

It supports Amazon Web Services API’s and uses infrastructure virtualization software to cater to elastic service pools. Main benefits being efficient scalability and increased resource utilization and greater control over on-premise IT.Eucalyptus being compatible with Amazon APIs helping users to manage amazon or Eucalyptus images through eucalyptus commands, It also makes it easier to move instances between amazon public clod and eucalyptus private cloud enabling you to create hybrid cloud. Capability of achieving operating system virtualization helping us to provide isolation among applications and various stacks.

Basic Architecture:

Above figure illustrates the basic architecture of any Eucalyptus private cloud set up consisting of components like Cluster Controller, Storage controller, Node Controller, Cloud Controller and Walrus etc.

Cloud Controller (CLC): It plays as an entry point for all; be it be administrators or users It keeps the information about resources and makes requests to cluster controller. Being a management platform interface it can be accessed through command lines tools or through dashboard.

Cluster Controller (CC): It helps in collecting information about the Node Controllers (NC) and scheduling the execution of virtual machines on specific NCs.It has to be in a same subnet as CC if it’s a single CC environment, Generally its executes on machines having network connectivity to NC and CLC.

Node Controller (NC): It can be executed on a machine hosting VM instances; it controls all VM activities like execution, termination of VM instances. The Node Controller (NC) executes on any machine that hosts VM instances. It also fetches and maintains a local cache of instance images, and it queries and controls the system software (host OS and the hypervisor) in response to queries and control requests from the CC. The NC is also responsible for the management of the virtual network endpoint.

Walrus: Walrus works as a repository to store data can be organised as buckets and objects, you can use Walrus to create, delete, and list buckets, or to put, get, and delete objects, or to set access control policies. It can access vvirtual machine images and user data. Walrus can be accessed by end user.

Storage Controller (SC): It has the ability to provide interface to various storage systems (NFS, iSCSI, SAN devices, etc.). Users can create snapshots from EBS volumes. Snapshots are stored in Walrus and made available across availability zones

Features:

•  Eucalyptus is one of the popular private cloud platforms built through open source; it supports self service automation, User and group management for providing security features.
•   Eucalyptus can be configured in a High Availability (HA) mode which maximizes the reliability supporting hot failover and repair mechanisms
•  Supports most of the operating system formats hence managing the images of multiple versions becomes flexible
•  It can be integrated with SANs so that storage elasticity is achieved
•  It can also be integrated for chargeback and quota management applications
•  Resource administration through Eucalyptus dashboard
•  VMware Hypervisor support and Amazon web services API compatibility

        The idea is to have an exposure to private cloud technology platform and embracing it to optimize usage of the available resources; having built and tested this type of set up at labs gives you that clear understanding on Eucalyptus.

Moving Mobile phone data over cloud

An overview

As this generation poised to be smarter with the usage of smart phones and keeping themselves connected to the world all the time with  access to internet from anywhere anytime at their fingertips; its essential for them to have backup of their crucial data in case of mobile being stolen or lost. These smart devices help them keep their social profile up to date and informed about current events. Almost every single college graduate or school pass out would have Hotmail or Gmail accounts and hence giving them access to freely available space on internet through cloud services like SkyDrive or Google docs with capacity of around 5 GB.Hence this idea of moving such important data like mobile contacts, photos, messages, songs etc. over the cloud platforms like SkyDrive would create a redundant copy of it for your back up.

Formulating the concept from this idea

I have gone through the web before putting down this on the paper; there are few applications available in the market which talks about the same idea you may also find one organisation specifically into this segment but they concentrate more on mobile data security and I guess they would all be paid application.

My idea is to have a software or application developed with a smaller size and compact in nature to make it available over the internet for any user basically enabling them to have their data backup being done semi-automatically if not automatically. And which can also be made available with mobile manufacturers optionally if they want to have it.

 Here I am trying to formulate the concept with a block diagram depicting the necessary work to be done at each step.

As shown above the user downloads the app from internet and installs it over his mobile device it should be compatible with at least the top mobile operating systems which also should be very compact and small package to download or install, once installed it will capture the basic information of the user and then it will check if the user is logged into any of cloud app and then prompt user to select the files he wants to backup or give an option what type of files he want to move to that space over SkyDrive or goggle doc.

Once this is done it would interact with the application over internet and establish a connection with it. Then it will create some default folders like contacts, photos, songs etc. and save the data accordingly.

It would also look for the new updates or changes in the files and track them with new files movement over the app space over regular duration or it should overwrite the contents.

Security to the files saved over these apps can be provided with passwords to the folders or using any other software but this should at least enable a normal user to have back up of his important files of size lesser than 5 GB hence he can have data which can be used anytime from anywhere.

Scope

Application of this type will have appeal to every mobile user who uses cloud specific apps and would help them to save their important data as a backup. By making it freely available over internet it would be a possession one would want to have.

Challenges

•     Creating an API i.e. an interface to Synch with mobile OS and cloud appSecurity of the files
•           Automating the process of keeping files updated at regular intervals
•          Some of the cloud apps need desktop agent to save more than 2GB data

Advantages

•    Anybody would want to have backup of their contacts or some files kept over safe place from where it can be retrieved anytime from anywhere with just access to internet
•       No need of having those files saved in a physical media which has chances of losing or being stolen
•       If being made available free of cost people would definitely show an interest
•       It can be used as a Temporary back up for important files
•       If provided with additional features like file security; would add value to it
•   Can be helpful to mobile application stack developers where this can bundled with other apps as a value addition
•    It can add value to users if this can be integrated with more features like keeping track of un used apps or the apps never used .(helping users to delete unused apps when notified or have a track of applications installed on mobile device)

    Conclusion

          It would help us to reach to the larger audience in the mobile computing or mobility field showing our interests in this domain and being ready to help society applying technology in simplest of the things. It will help them solve their problems; creating value to ourselves.